FOUR POEMS. Michael Berton. May 14 3(2) Four Poems Michael Berton. Citation: Berton, Michael. Four Poems. Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 3.2 (2014):

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1 FOUR POEMS Michael Berton Citation: Berton, Michael. Four Poems. Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 3.2 (2014): Copyright: Four Poems (by Michael Berton) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at 29

2 FOUR POEMS Michael Berton PROPHETS OF THE RED CITY a sun baked desert oasis cool blue turban herbal medicine shaman head cracking eggs a blood orange on the walls of old Marrakesh aerial symphony acrobats soar a cacophony of clangors & droning drums while a human tea kettle spouts Moroccan hospitality farsighted fortune teller winking rheumy eye gurgles mumbles in snake dialect after puffing from the kif pipe 30

3 a white bearded ginbe player lotus body on the meditation rug sweat bubbles on his bald head speaking on eternity in the Square of the Dead 31

4 TANGIERS a mindscape of a body language in the intellect pimping the soul while beat poet puppets on pilgrimage hashish smoked petrified through a waterpipe taste of mint tea the sharing of saliva drumming with Berbers is like a spell spun webbing your satellite to the earth circling the belly s girth on the periphery of comparative suffering solitude wandering among hustlers Paul Bowles in djellaba mocking tourists off ferries backpackers hunched preyed by young guides shifty eyed scoping out to analyze for majoun assimilation into Burroughs interzone. 32

5 BORGES ON LA RAMBLA, BARCELONA One morning moving from one boarding room to a cheaper I walked out about the public to expire the last of the morning as I ventured past the newspaper kiosks up ahead was some commotion around the bird cages. An elderly man in dark glasses setting in motion his mischievous cane upset the birds by wiggling his fingers in between the wires when one pecked his finger commencing him to yell in an anglicized Spanish on Latin America s Boom. Then whirling arms as in a trance our distraught Sufi in a locomotion flash brought out his bravado cane jabbing at people randomly in a duel to foolish the imagination or be pulled away to publish the memory of it. 33

6 I could not bring myself to leave the curiosity he sketched for me in mapping a foreign city so I followed the pensively a few blocks down in Barrio Chino where anarchy facades architecture Jean Genet thieved flagrant sexuality where muses come to flee their poets mastery over them and curse this dark labyrinth. In the alley of graffiti his calloused hands comb over the braille manuscripts ruptured by living inspiration until his cane thrust into my back staying there until he finished saying poetry does not lie however it moves the predicament of the soul I acknowledged and the lips his wife gave told where I could kiss the night words to obscene absinthe. 34

7 BORGES IN CONSTANTINOPLE I thought I saw Borges inside the Hagia Sophia café with a Jewish American princess. Yes it was him reading from the Kama Sutra drinking Turkish coffee smoking on a waterpipe. He was domained by calligraphy about facing Mecca with the intellect spinning the sweat of the soul through a lotus body smooth as labyrinthine marble. I too would like to travel for a thousand and one nights seeking the multicultural gaze like a dance in a foreign tongue staccato for the spoken orgasm bartering for the secret of alchemy. 35