The Wrong Crowd

Before you were used as a Taliban sentry in these hills,

before you were a bone, blown apart

and lodged in the rock of this cave,

before the geckos found you and made nests of your skull,

you were not necessarily against the West.

Maybe you just fell into step with the wrong crowd, got recruited

from a refugee camp on the border, somehow hoping to be reborn

or maybe just make a buck. After all, the Madrassas

can only take so many

and your mother had other children to feed. You used to be

one of those

typical kids from the camp, wearing a donated sweater

with a leaf pattern

and too-short sleeves. Constantly wiping your nose on them. Kind

until you learned not to be.

Maybe I’m naive. Maybe I want you to be something more

than what people say you are – an opium-smoking

religious faggot. A product of the buggery

you must have asked for

in order to keep watch from this rock face. Not much liked,

but still used all the time, you took the grunting of old men

behind a pigeon-laced wall at noon.

At night your Taliban brothers would have made supper,

laughing at the fact that they wouldn’t be the first ones found

if the Americans stormed this place. It would be you –

up on the rock cliff, struggling to take a shit –

your eyes wet with yawning, your lungs remembering

what it was to run through camp with a plastic bag kite

in boots too big for your feet, the taste of smoke

from your mother’s cooking fires and all the things

you had to eat – before the bad choices –

naan bread with rice and chicken,

sometimes saffron.

Once you had a soccer ball.

And a name –

Abdul-Hanaan, slave

of the merciful.