Canvas To Delirium
An Account of the First Three Years
of the Lebanese Civil War
A Boyhood Remembrance
in Fourteen Passages
(May 2023)
1 /
The origin story of this canvas,
painted in an onyx haze.
Filmed shadow velvet
at the peak of sun’s death.
The peak lowest point
of a setting province.
Late day seeping twilight,
when human chameleons
are at their weakest.
Sandy aura umber tones
give way to charcoal black sap.
A lull between the next war
and the last.
2 /
Echoes of boyhood's
national calamities.
Farmhouse family room
hushed for naps.
Mandarin-olive-ochre
psychedelic swirled sofas
under missile blast.
Womb cushions endure
dry mud ceiling collapse.
Exposing poor sponge
and metal-spring entrails.
3 /
In the year nineteen handir
and sequøndüry tuwree.
In the year mille nϟf cent
and sôixante-seized.
For three years time stopped.
The fluff of '70 to '75
eclipsed by the '73 to '78 blast.
4 /
Disco bridegrooms escaped
with their last breath.
Long polyester lapel spreads
cramp-wrinkled
under Kalashnikov sling straps.
Makeshift rifles suddenly
for immediate defense,
stacked and grabbed.
The coming delirium of war’s
most popular front fictions.
Factions for liberation
spawned legends.
5 /
Brandishing claws through
southbound shadow fleeings.
Refuge runnings for a week,
pleading dialed-up
shelter borrowings.
Three dozen squat-huddled under
tenement stairs, trapped.
Children squeezed,
mothers whimpering,
or voiceless gasps.
Fathers peek out,
scampering for food
or passageways.
Two lost and three remaining.
6 /
Three springs in three villages,
and a girl’s wildflower
hill delights.
Three missed school years,
and a boy’s maximalist
euphoric frights.
Surrogate village classroom
discipline teachings,
slap-dashed and patched.
Farm boys riding plows
and farm men raising flags.
7 /
Great aunts you reckon
you must’ve met.
Genteel white chiffon mandeels,
laid casually on
genteel black chiffon
slender-bone shoulders.
Patent black leather
reflective snapped purses,
like pliant pyramids,
sitting prudently in laps.
Sparkling black eyes
bundled in earthy cheekbones,
wondering silently
what hell will next pass.
8 /
Mid-century's postcolonial
newly middle-classed
hopefuls, dashed.
Sudanese theorists
and Palestinian poets.
Egyptian architects
and Syrian machinists.
Yemeni engineers
and Algerian ceramists.
Lebanese teachers
and Iraqi chemists.
Tunisian journalists
and Libyan nurses.
Disintegrated altogether
into the cauldron bog of
Kissinger’s remix simmerings.
9 /
All the while families in fright
flee from the last clash.
To the nearest village still with roofs
to shelter their desperate backs.
Encountering new strangers,
some familiar to the eyes,
and unfamiliar.
Eyes look into eyes,
uneasy soft speech
to crack fearful masks.
Negotiating rice rations, rumors,
pots, sleeping rooms, doors,
and outdoor water taps.
Obliged houses,
repurposed for multitudes
and for cherished, torn maps.
10 /
No thoughts of tomorrow,
the world shrunken to now
and trapped.
Village duck ponds,
tucked between shadow trees,
cooling breeze.
Lush leafy hideaways
for migrant children's
bashful meetups.
Rhymed jump games
on dusty sprinkled pebble paths.
مَنديـلـِك ِ مْنَـيَّل مَنديلـي بلا نيلـي
11 /
Atlantis wind direction
iron oxen onslaught.
Newly-spirited sea-myth hordes
and venomous asps.
Lightning blitz
terrible pterodactyl trespass.
War-room boar-droom
multi-pronged catapults.
Red hands
on desks hard-slapped.
Murmurings, salivations,
lustful declarations,
lip-smacked.
12 /
Beirut to Detroit flash-voyage
would turn the page
away from all that.
Mothers and fathers in airport lines,
panicked and dragged.
Counted desperations,
hastily tied and packed.
Airport policeman
shouting hysterics
unaware of his own
torn or lost visor strap.
Conducting trails of people,
evacuated from exploded lands.
13 /
A child freely playing
between adult legs
and aluminum airport
barricade racks.
Gaps just wide enough
for a small boy to swing under
and vanish in a flash.
Sneak and run back
to a grandmother's
white rosebush
and sage garden.
But no such courage
for a tiny subordinate boy,
complying with his distressed
shell-shocked dad.
14 /
Global supernovel
posited us
into a shaft of hurt delirium.
Dropped from the sky,
into an orange leafy
Michigan sidewalk evening rain.
Begin again,
in a refuge cedar basement
with eight beds.
Uncles and aunts
and cousins and found kin.
One large kettle
to feed a village tribe,
transplanted to drift.
To this day undying,
searching
for our unspoken breath.
Hovering in sunbeams,
destined to refract.