Sounds like a poem.
Sounds like a brag.
Nobody fucking cares.
That is America. If you are not in it, you are not anywhere, as far as America is concerned.
Oh, me? No complaints here.
Hell, I may or may not be traveling with an illegal primate, who may or may not be a legitimate Moroccan baby thanks to the documents that were possibly purchased from a desperate Moroccan family.
Hypothetical customs questioning about my Moroccan baby are dealt with saying,
I know I ain’t no celebrity, sir. I’m a single father doin’ my part, trying to get babies away from Africa just like the next guy.
The willowy customs guy waves me through, cringing at my redneck brand of altruism. As I pass, he turns to his colleague, a tubby old Central New Zealander with the sunken eyes of a habitual masturbator, and says:
Babies. Always squeezing out sub-lingual noise in a horrid mockery of agonized defecation.
Tubby responds with a guttural snort, and I continue past, tucking away the papers for the Moroccan infant, Hassim al Demm.
Madrid:
A sense of homecoming after two months in Morocco. People still leer at me, but less in malice, more in suspicion. I still wear a giant blue and white wool djellaba, and that gets stares, but sometimes smiles and winks from short-haired, blonde Spaniard women walking with their boyfriends.
Into the Madrid night:
There in the apartment, they serve the high-grade, authentic and original Spanish food. I can not name the dishes. The food may or may not be complex in taste. The food is remembered as shapes only. There may have been a dish of black bands, another of crusted orbs, a dish of browned and crenellated half-Frisbees.
Maybe you are only a true artist if you write out the actual names of foreign foods, not the shapes.
We meet the others.
Then, into the night.
Then into an apartment.
Then into the other apartment.
Someone holds a palm frond in one hand and a red-colored beer can in the other.
Then into the Daliesque apartment building.
Down the winding wooden stairs.
Down into the courtyard.
Down into the place where the metal tower rises.
A morning in Madrid:
I walk back up the five floors.
I walk out into the courtyard and press the door with no handle.
The massive octagonal steel tower rises into the overcast sky. This time the door yields when I press into the space that should hold the handle.
I am out into the streets of Madrid. There is Pacha- the famous disco. There is the pizzeria. There are the women in dark furs.
The effect of the fur is disturbing and powerful;
it is death and sexuality and sensuality and cruelty.
It is alluring like the smoke-grey sleekness of the
shark fin or the thick and bristly legs of the tarantula.
And there is the subway station I need, Tribunal.
There is a chance that I was the one holding the shiny crimson beer can and
the bright green palm frond last night.
Before entering the metro, I slink into a convenience-type store,
and leave with a Snickers tucked in my jacket, 'Tex-Mex' Doritos,
and a large, perspiring water:
disgusting/pertinent/familiar/apt.
Then in the night, we will see the wastebaskets on the floor of the local Spanish bar, one beside each stool. A grimy television captivates much of the bar crowd with a futbol game.
We will see the thick shards of the broken Mahou glass that is elbowed into the counter.
My friend will claim to have habitually broken a glass every day that week.
Lisbon is so soon after Madrid, but
awareness is sometimes heightened when traveling quickly-
it is like driving too fast next to the mountain guard rail.
This city begins in thick, fingernail-wide raindrops and wet,
white tiles, and my Moroccan shoes have no tread,
so I walk in the truncated stride of the geisha.
We are greeted with offers of
‘hashish, coca, opium.’
I respond in Moroccan Arabic:
(no, no, thanks, I‘m okay);
La-La, Shukran, Waheb
I proclaim that the Portuguese have brought Berbers to Lisbon to sell drugs.
We laugh and say, Portuguese joke.
