Somehow the raindrops come together
archiving the hallucinations of the sky.
A sky all clogged with clouds.
The rainbow absorbs all the tears.
Closer too, another grammar.
Another glimmer in the sad eyes.
With the passing of the years
you remember the crayons
you had thrown into the garbage.
You know the colours
as though they were your own.
You know how life drains you.
You stitch the remains of colours together,
while stumbling in the hall-ways of mud.

This statute has no skeleton.
Void. Ah, inertia.
With each gust of wind
bronze dances,
although dust particles crash
like waves into her eyes.
There will be new myths,
and somehow new narratives.
Curves of the sculpture dance again
with each new mosquito’s bite,
provoking hidden titillation
that lasts as long as rain.
{Silence}. Trees dropping leaves
onto her head. {The remains of a woman}.
Remnants of a history still in progress.
Sculpturing is just another version
of historiography.—Blood transmission
into a body of bronze.—A life recycled.
Don’t forget that historians always insist on
the life cycle of even a mosquito!
They ignore nothing...,
especially the embryo,
the umbilical cord, and that perpetual lust
gushing out from the navel chalice.

So many candles
and scraps of papers on the table.

The flies sank into the wax,
without emitting any buzz.
The flame became brightly stained with
the anarchy of those tiny corpses.

Now that rescued fly is so traumatized,
it has lost any sense of its body;
any sense of a buzz,
and it lay beside the scraps of papers.

Then buzzes followed in successive billowings.
—A reminder that flies can’t put flowers
or carnations on a grave.

Poor fly descended into a
trauma spiral, till it evaporated in a black fume. 

Looking into the wings of a butterfly,
trying to figure out those shades between colours,
I couldn’t find a decent enough palette
to plant or grow a rainbow
for the starving post-modernist artists.
Nowadays even butterflies suffer.
Even their colours become faint.
They’re even stripped off that force of abstraction.
And I think that might be the point.
You really ought to avoid looking
at the sky while feeling submerged
in a pale shadow between the parenthesis
of the rainbow,
but nothing prevents you from
drawing another alternative butterfly
to draw the line between truth and chimera.


Ali Znaidi, Redeyef, Tunisia