laundry, chair, garden, 

the air smells like a mother was just here

in the garden

by the street

her garden

his street

in the smallest void between the buildings

a crack where noise disappears

the ground moves under your feet

a loose tile 

what it conceals and reveals

take it out and put it back in

do it, undo it, redo it

repeat after me

stairs leading down to the highway

on the way, a tree uproots a house

a mattress, shoes, bottles, burnt wood

who was here 

first

a locked rusted metal door

rust, mould, time was here

sleep was here

sweat and urine and tears

the windows are blown shattered 

the house is a tunnel you can see through

were dreams recorded we could have met 

as if it were a ghost

we buy apartments

beirut international platform of dance

fouf i'm sorry

i love you

you love my mom

i fucked your mom

the way to hell

whose traces

whose names

abou saoud

chadi

fouf

souad elias kerbaj

mikhael antar

how wide the sidewalk

our colliding shoulders

and our indifference

the narrow city grows larger

shop with mezzanine for rent 4x4m saint louis street near geitawi hospital

water delivery service, 24/7 telephone 

semaan challita plumbing home services

dear neighbors, to stand against the injustice you are facing, join the demonstration monday 14.04.2014

for sale : commercial spaces

the shop is surveilled by cameras

papers plasterers on the wall

a second skin

impossible to remove

history 

layers 

palimpsest 

whose traces survive

the sidewalk enters 

the building leaks

the threshold 

the entrance 

you must remain unfocused 

displaced

uncertain yet immobile

do not make eye contact

the door is open, please stay outside

roasted eggplants

sundays

laundry 

saturdays

showers

evenings

jasmine

blood

and old age

tiles undone

whose ground deconstructed

under this ground 

a camp of white

protrusions remain

escape from the earth

what only strange tongues

can reveal

behind what i see 

there is something buried

nothing disappears, 

things withdraw

between occultation and epiphany

the future erupts into the present as much as the past

how do you read the missing image

what is beneath the earth i see

erase your traces

time is an archeology of the present

deserted landscapes

what is buried underneath my feet

you're constipated in your fucking soul

the gate is locked, please come in

we are here with the ghosts of past and future

eat the meat that's there

don't stint yourself

go into any house when it rains

and sit on any chair that is in it

but don't sit long and don't forget your hat

i tell you, cover your tracks

on wednesday mornings, a man stands in one of the abandoned run-down houses lining these stairs. silent and gray with his back towards me, he is taken with the same meticulous activity each time. he does not move, he does not speak. he does not see me or notice my presence. he labors at the window, looking out onto the city, producing the muffled sound of something small being cracked open and over the years, covering the floor of the room with cracked pine nut shells

i could tell you how many steps make up the streets rising like stairways and the degree of the arcades' curves and what kind of clay scales over the roofs but i already know this would be the same as telling you nothing. the city does not consist of this but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past. the height of a lamppost and the distance from the ground of a hanged usurper's swaying feet. the line strung from the lamppost to the railing opposite and the festoons that decorate the course of the queen's nuptial procession the height of that railing and the leap of the adulterer who climbed over it at dawn, the tilt of a guttering and the cat's progress along it as he slips into the same window the firing range of a gunboat which has suddenly appeared beyond the cape and the bomb that destroys the guttering, the rips in the fishnets and the three old men seated on the dock, mending nets and telling each other for the hundredth time the story of the gunboat of the usurper who some say was the queen's illegitimate son, abandoned in his swaddling clothes there on the dock.

as this wave from memories flows in, the city soaks it up like a sponge and expands. a description of beirut as it is today should contain all beirut's past. the city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of the hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.

a boy weary 

of his body

of his eyes

has no favorite place 

there are no favorite places 

here

turn your head to the side

look at your feet

touch the walls

there is nothing 

but place

watch your step

watch the sky

balance your eyes

the train has passed at 13:17

you have missed the train

the earth still shakes

the ground still rumbles

the trembling of the bridge

the pedestrian tunnel dug out at its base

shakes 

mattress, pillow, signs on floors and walls

flicker

families take to the underside of bridges

with traces less violent

or traces erased

except names 

and stories

and echoes in the tunnel

where are the elections

no to the parliament

on your walls i have written a poem

new blood

we buy apartments

have a seat

have an oyster

wait for the traffic light

on the street corner

on a plastic box

where is the river

it flowed to the sea

can you tell where the sea is

if the fountain is dry

and the river still flows

despite empty faucets

hidden behind the wall

is a river that once turned red- 

blood

vengeance 

from the icons 

that have tried

to erase it

this is not true of beirut, in every point of this city, you can in turn sleep, make tools, cook, accumulate gold, disrobe, reign, sell, question oracles. any one of its pyramid roofs could cover the leprosarium or the odalisque's baths. the traveler roams all around and has nothing but doubts : he is unable to distinguish the features of the city, the features he keeps distinct in his mind also mingle. he infers this : if existence in all its moments is all of itself, beirut is the place of indivisible existence. but why, then, does the city exist? what line separates the inside from the outside, the rumble of wheels from the howl of wolves?

also in beirut, city of sadness, there runs an invisible thread that binds one living being to another for a moment, then unravels, then is stretched again between moving points as it draws new and rapid patterns so that at every second the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence

from my words you will have reached the conclusion that the real beirut is a temporal succession of different cities alternately just and unjust but what i wanted to warn you about is something else. all the future beiruts are already present in this instant, wrapped one within the other, confined, crammed, inextricable.