Cairo Syndrome...

Could you hold the sun with bare palm

cupped milking summer 

to ooze through your fingers?

There's no clouds to shield faces

soft white 20 variants of sensitive 

A grim desert vestment

Melting in sunlight reserved for

ancient courts and 

celestial movements

Rooftop sunsets of satellite dishes 

suspect movement in slums

Hungry street kittens crying

for mothers milk and crumbs

My eyes hanging fixed

on minarets and ears tuned to

sweeping vocal chanting

bass vibrato

The meaning of life

Alarm clock set as Holy

sunrise and sensual

caressing of tender souls

The smell of lavish past lives

in glorious Cairo

The marble and whitewash

united with sheesha smoke

and falafel

Billboards for Pepsi when I,

I rather mint tea and a Marlboro

Bodies in bandages not unlike my father

though this time I saw the face

This ancient history exposed
in glass case

I thought about their many frowns

Looking long at long dead men and women

who once ruled lands as Gods

Built in honour of their divinity

Superiority through stone over slave Jews

and the uneducated

This decay was once a Pharaoh!
A Pharaoh! This decay!

Oh my, there's the death mask of Tutankhamun!