- What's the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo?
- Antwerp

In this city that is nourished on diamonds
barbed wire grows in poets' verses
appointments die on the calendar
my hands stop touching your lips
policemen no longer laugh
a taxi stops when its driver is killed by a bullet from a sniper in Damascus
in front of Antwerp Central Station
terror stops on PlayStation
and I take myself under my arm and stop stopping
I think of the distance between my lips and your skin
as if I wasn't born in Yarmouk camp for Palestinian refugees in Damascus in 1979
as if you weren't born in the Milky Way

In this city where they clean blood off diamonds with the same care as
doctors cleaning blood from the wound of an injured man whose life they've saved
I pass lightly as a tank over asphalt
carrying my verses like a street vendor
every time I go towards the sea I am eaten up by the desert emerging from the suitcases of emigrants
and from my passport recognised by nobody but you
I am the writer of poems that talk of death as if they're talking of hope
and of war as if God exists
since my friends died I've become a lone wolf
cornering joy and trampling on it as if it were a harmful insect
my friends who were tortured to death sit next to me in their most elegant clothes as if we were at a reception
and my mother searches for me down the phone lines
to make sure that I'm still pissing on this planet

I've cleaned my room of any trace of death
so you don't feel when I invite you for a glass of wine
that despite the fact I'm in Stockholm
I'm still in Damascus

In this city nourished on blood diamonds
I remember a blood wedding
I remember oblivion
I stand in the middle of a black and black group photo of poets
who have gone from here
the notes you have left in the margins of my poems make me sad
my heart becomes a wooden scarecrow to chase away Hitchcock's birds
my innocent heart that cannot bear it
becomes as harsh as honest words
and the street becomes a notebook
you are the only one who can change the street into a notebook
innocently you take my hands so we can cut off the head of the year
then the World Bank collapses
the middle class stands against the emigrants
a security man armed with history stands to mark out a barrier between the suburbs and happiness
skin colour stands like a checkpoint between us
between the harbour that imports freedom
and the street extending from the graveyard to the bedroom
the war has not wearied me
rather the poems that talk of the war
the cold cities have not wearied me
but these poems that talk of cold cities have eaten my fingers
and I cannot dance without my fingers
I cannot orient to the Orient without them
a heart attack kills the wall clock
and my friends bear false witness and say that life is wonderful
this city is collapsing in on itself like a black hole
I mean a green hole
and the street runs scared
this is the first time I've seen a street running in the street
this is the last time I've seen a house leaning on a sad woman's laughter left behind in the kitchen
in order to stay upright
and on the smell of spices scattered by the shell in order to stay alive
the neighbours fled without shutting the windows open on the massacre
without shutting the cookery book open on page 73
the birds on the nearby tree moved into the house
they lived in the half-open kitchen cupboard
a 120mm mortar shell manufactured in the Soviet Union in the year 1987
to fight imperialism
would kill them
the canary died of starvation in the cage
that's war
canaries die of starvation in their cages when their jailers vanish
their jailers who left home and never came back
the home that collapsed on the poems of poets whose country betrayed them
their country used to make them weep and now they weep for their country
see how they recount their grief in front of strangers
with their poems they kill time
with their hands they ring bells
but nobody has time to hear the echo except a few of those killed in the war
and the barmaid starts a discussion with me about how Syrians have the right to die properly with the body whole
in one piece
and about loneliness
about how people have the right to find somebody to sleep next to them in the evening
and to leave them asleep when they go to work in the morning
without asking them to move on
fine
let's take this sack of stones off our back
and shout gently via the keyboard
we the undersigned on the asphalt
announce that we are tired
and that regardless of our different backgrounds
we suffer from the same shit
I too like you live alone in a flat with three windows
two look out onto Antwerp
but the third is my computer screen looking out onto Damascus
- have you visited Damascus?
- no
- ok I'll try to describe it to you: the temperature in summer is 37°
it's the city where the summer temperature corresponds to a person's body temperature
- have you visited Antwerp?
- no
- ok I'll try to describe it to you: it's the blood diamond sparkling in the white light of shop windows
its shine reflecting a black man who found it in Kinshasa then was himself found murdered
by a bullet from his friend's gun
in order that a woman from Montreal could wear a ring with a stone polished in Tel Aviv
given to her by her husband born in Buenos Aires
when they were on a trip to the Arizona desert
so that she would forgive him for cheating on her with her South African friend
when he was laundering his money in Dubai
- do you know how the desert and money laundering differ and how they are similar?
- no
- the difference is that the desert needs water and money laundering doesn't
- and the similarity?
- the similarity is that money laundering is dry, dry as the desert in Arizona
ok there's no denying that I float in you like a butterfly in magma
and feed you my words so you grow slowly like the area of destruction that came into being
when your sorrow collided with my life
your presence in my life had a negative effect on postmodern poetry in the northern half of the globe
and I have to confess to you that the shelf life of many of my poems expired with the sudden appearance in them of your metaphors
and that you had a share in making holes in the tank where they store the Arabic language
through your systematic campaigns to add marginal notes to my texts
and that with premeditation and close observation you undertook to revive me
and this is an offence punishable under the poets' constitution
and that your details scattered around my house provoke a desire in me to throw the television set out of the window
and to sit watching you instead when you are killing time
I confess too that there are many dubious things that have begun to happen since I smelt the smell of your breasts
for example:
I've broken several wine glasses in the period since you moved in with me
most of them committed suicide by jumping out of my hand as I tried to wash away the traces of your lipstick
I stole some time in order to make my day last 25 hours
I assumed a false expression to make myself look happy
I loved you
I said in a press interview after I met you that I had only lied twice in my life
and that was the third time I'd lied
in spite of the whole happy tragedy that my life has been
you refused to fire the mercy bullet when I begged you to
and granted me a new life
you accuse me of a lack of objectivity in my poems, fine, I've never been objective in my life
I've always been biased and I have double standards
I have been biased in favour of blacks against racism, in favour of the resistance against the occupiers, of militias against armies. I have taken the side of the Red Indians against the white men, the Jews against the Nazis, the Palestinians against the Israelis, the immigrants against the neo-Nazis, gipsies against borders, original inhabitants against colonialists, science against religion, the present against the past, feminism against patriarchy, women against men, your side against other women, Kafka's side against routine, poetry's side against physics
physics
God damn physics
why do the immigrants drown then after they've breathed their last they float on the surface of the water?
why doesn't the opposite happen?
why don't people float when they're alive and drown when they're dead?

fine
let's call things by their names
books are the graveyards of poems
houses are concrete tents
dogs are wolves that have accepted humiliation
prayer rugs remind me of flying carpets
my room has fallen in love with your green shoes
I drown in you as Syrians drown in the sea
oh God
look where the war has taken us
even in my worst nightmares it never occurred to me
that one day
I would say in a poem
I drown in you as Syrians drown in the sea

****

every shell that falls on Damascus is just a page torn out of Descartes' book
when we were born
life was coloured
and photos were black and white
now photos are coloured
and life is black and white

Translation: Catherine Cobham