In Cavafy's Alexandria

 

the same moments keep finding

             and then abandoning the same

                        tormented old bastards hunched

over newspapers in cafes.

The stories just confirm the flattulent

            sigh that life is; the same money

                        stolen from the same fools

by the same bastards, over and over,

the old man wipes coffee

            from his lips, moves his ass

                        in the chair. It's his soul that's pissing

him off, that bag of gas where

the unerupted erections of his youth

            collapse in wards, drool on drop

                        cloths for the desires that created them,

abandoned them for some Olympian

ice palace in the cloud

 

 

 

Sultanahmet

Come and go,

            walkers come up from

the crawl and run

awhile, until walk again they must,

creaking to the corner chair

to sip tea at a shop off the Hippodrome

            where Greens battled Blues,

            and the emperors, those grand

                        drag queens, broke on the scene

                                    in waves of Holy glamour.

The brutal beauty of that glow,

comes and goes, a constant relay

            run by the dying, handing off

                        the baton's golden moment

                        in the golden light.

The muezzin mounts his minaret

            to scrawl his grand calligraphy

                        on Noon's great coin

and on the clatter and cackle of day he says

god is great, he says on the blue

morning's parchment

Allah Akbah.