H.D. Palimpsest (These Walls Don’t Fall)

On April 6, 2016, an Iraqi college student flying from L.A. to Oakland was removed from a Southwest Airlines flight after another passenger heard him speaking in Arabic on his cell phone.

An ‘inshallah’ here and there,

some threats sent (and retweeted)

through your (and my) feed:

terror of Muslims — no offense–

causing the wheels to halt, the passengers

to disembark from the plane

in hijabs, thawbs, prayerbeads

clicking, the prophecy scrawled

on a paper napkin:

there, as here, bombs resound

in the market, temple, mosque; then

as now, an ambiguous sin:

sudden death from below or

falling from the sky, here,

there, puffs of sand

mark an absence, an open room

where a wall was, or

a stump for a hand:

so in the devastation

a drone strikes, collateral damage haunts us

in the gloom:

unaware, the satellites zoom

in on the craft, ‘Reaper’

or ‘Predator’ we know not:

we type furiously on our devices;

fighting, arguing

in comment streams — we’ve got

too much to say, we post to our walls

where ‘likes’ proliferate,

hieroglyphs of modern affect;

Iraq has nothing to teach us,

we see ourselves in a funhouse mirror,

slow faces melting in hate,

letting the pressure build until

bile bursts from our fingers

(what people will say online!):

inside, mediated pathos,

outside, the whirl of a virtual floor

throws off our footing

and we scroll down, drunk,

searching for a door

that is not there:

the body was made for

no such long sitting without moving,

yet the eyeballs cling to the screen:

the ass? it has grown numb,

the heart sinks down, dead weight,

joints, muscles atrophied, skin gone sallow,

yet the dream holds:

we share the meme: we wonder

who made it? what for?

*

This poem originally appeared in Dispatches From the Poetry Wars.