By Fadi Abu Deeb

Between the walls that Hermes has built
And been adorned by the lust of the merchants,
She wanders searching for a room to sleep
Under the lights of the city.

Then I invited her to my many homes
Distributed along all of the lanes.
But she rejected me with her eyes,
Because my lanes were buried behind the realm of light.

From the planets she heard wonderful news about me
Which she did not believe,
Because I slept outside the fences of the market,
Wore the clouds and cloaked with the rain.

***

She always asked me with her eyelids
Why I waited for her every morning
And why did I write her name
With my cold finger
On the Professors’ boards and the students’ drawing tables?

But I knew no mornings or evenings
I awaited the sun to rise from between her cheeks
To warm up my members and eliminate the nausea.

I, who was facing the nothingness without a victory.
I used to rush out to race with the streets throughout the muddy city
To search for clusters of meanings.

I ground my feet
Hoping that they would become/
The aspiration of the nebula that wandered through our planet
So it might abduct me in a storm of certainty,
To watch from between its branches
The farthest horizon of existence.