Thursday, July 26, 2007

Back. Bleary eyed and broke

in the Cairo haze. Our Nation a shambles. The boat adrift, gone; our People scattered to the hot dry wind. This city is as hot as a dragon’s armpit, and as fragrant. Rank with crowding and sloth. Exhaling its cancer patient breath. This cancer ward archipelago of corruption sweat bath of the unbathed ooze puddled self pity touching ever hopeful at the ankles of passing tourists. Puppy eyed thieves on broken furniture.

The Aeichas are well. Sturdy girls, they held up fine under four months of cockroach camp in Benha. Lesbian fun camp for those still possessed of their pleasure center, the lap of luxury to quote the wisdom of the bearded. The Caddy, flat tired and roof dented, hauled in from who knows what egret shit coated peasant crack of a Delta sinkhole now their home in the cool recesses of Imbaba. The trunk become the hatching ground for a poultry business that threatens to make them millionaires, the back seat a squeaking fornication couch for passing Arabs. The latter, they say, is their hobby but it is hard not to imagine that from this pastime their purses are not becoming at least as engorged as the members of their clientele.

The office, once the headquarters of this proud new world, gone with the boats. Shambled and listing, waterlogged. Broken glass and sodden papers, inkblot tests in the damp fingers of fat men in knock-off sunglasses. Their eyes glisten red late into the night now, hunched amongst the tea glasses and the dust of Lazoughly, bent to these ephemeral traces of our passage.

An epitaph: Here lie the smudges of a Nation proud, gone now to a different cloud. Gone the men, the boys and my nature-favored buffalo girls, Rest in Peices my Nation, my Pearls.