The Calamity of the I

Who am I?
I am a number on a screen in banks and the Mukhabarat system.
I am a customer of life’s dealers.
I am the nothingness that occupies space in a chair.
I am a stranger wherever I may be.
I am a thirst that boils with springs.
I am the ambiguous, known to everyone.
A marathoner who continues to run from predators. 
A survivor of the massacre of my homeland,
and a lay witness to the assassination of my own life.
I am an echo of the dead wandering in the emptiness,
their hearts bleeding nostalgia.
I am a companion for whispering ghosts
as they scratch with their nails
the rays of light on the walls of graves—
graves they call “homes.”
I am a nobody.
No trace of me but on the sand.
My footsteps erased with every step I walk.
I am the one accused of all sorts of crimes.
Mind you, I have not killed someone, yet . . .
My body is prey to herds of memories.
I am a man with a beard that has not been shaven in twenty years for fear of losing balance and falling backwards.
I am the one falling from above,
endlessly falling every time I land.
I am like an old accordion, wrinkled,
and in need of a light hand’s touch so that I can make music.
I am a back that continues to be stabbed by the daggers of siblings.
I am the Semitic migrations to the Mesopotamia between my beloved’s thighs.
I am he who travels into the depths of saps and emerges bloodthirsty.
I am the one blamed for everything,
who’s said to have hurt dozens without a heart’s flutter.
I am the one always in doubt.
Yet I never doubt a dream and I believe in the unseen,
commanded by a spiritual revelation to distribute every prophecy over my body.
I am the explorer of topographies—
of my beloved’s navel
and the mysterious triangle under her armpit.
I am a digger of graves
who disturbs poets in their rest,
unearths their corpses,
and takes advantage of their deaths to draw meanings for life. 
I am the burning red bricks on the rooftops of homes,
watching over the city and tourists,
lurking to catch any sign or indication from the Unseen.
Only to discover that life is good elsewhere
and that it is we who are not good.
I am the friend who watches his friends’ innocence slaughtered each passing day
in alleys of loneliness, fear, and flight.
I am the one rebuked because of my honesty,
accused of lies and laziness by those close to me.
I am delusional, yet also the most realistic.
Like a child who has not yet turned four,
I sing a Christmas prayer
for a woman’s body.
I am a Syrian
who had to flee his homeland
to countries that wish to flee from him.
I am the refugee who does not understand,
providing endless documents and proof,
only to be granted the right of refuge.
I am the avid reader who does not know the alphabet of etiquettes.
I am the one condemned to hell
for the crime of stealing ten liras from his father’s pocket
and for desiring his best friends’ wives—
and lying about those desires.
I am the lover who does not know how to love
and that evil person who does not know how to hate.
Mind you, I’ve spat in the teacups of those who bothered me.
And I’ve read the book of black magic with utter seriousness
to learn how to avenge myself from those who have stolen from me.
I am the Arab who is inflicted with the sweetest poetry.
I knead the language of Arabs with gold water
yet I stand wordless.
I am as when God first created me:
Naked,
screaming for care,
in need of a breast.
I am in love with this life and I crave its sensuous sins.
I can hear its reservoirs of pain.
I pay heed to the sound of snowflakes falling on the soil
and to the sight of sun rays seeping over a lake.
Seduced by a woman flooded with seduction and experience,
a woman who carries enough magma to destroy forty Pompeiis.
I am a scandal in luxurious clothes,
but I do not know how to take care of my clothes,
splotches of ink somehow always appearing in my pockets.
I am a miracle that no one has paid heed to.
Mind you, miracles are everywhere around us,
discovered by sharp-witted shepherds of imagination locked up in palaces of mirage,
but I know that someone clever is bound to discover me one day.
I am the one who loves women considered less beautiful
for they are more whole in bed.
I love simplicity in everything
except when it comes to bodies, wine, and words.
I am still in love with a homeland that has exhausted me,
that has stolen my youth,
handed me over to other cities in the world,
so that I continue to search for it.