The roof was the place to be. I was fifteen
and in love with ash-cans, pigeon coops,
women hanging their laundry. There was a fifty
foot portrait of the King – always smiling –
by the sea, overlooking a busy junction;
like an ad for toothpaste or mouthwash.
At night, the shore on the west side of town
was the quietest, where hotels, natashas and haram
coalesced into parties. Every half-lit room
was a sure sign of orgasms and the passing
of money from stranger to stranger. Anything
interesting and pleasurable was haram. I envied
the King, and his sons, all eighteen of them.
The King was virile, a patriarch, Abraham on Viagra;
his people, on the other hand, were on Prozac.
Everywhere the eye looked was money; the nose,
meanwhile, hit only sweat: acrid, pugnacious, pervasive.
Most of the boys I knew sucked butane, smoked,
saved up for whores, waited for their parole in the summer.
Each back to their own country. Come September
the dissatisfied return; misfit mutts, at home every-
and nowhere. A friend compared cosmopolitanism
to being stuck at summer camp, to waiting for parents
who never showed up. In the twentieth year of his smile,
the King finally died. His mausoleum is a meringue: wavy,
white, empty… His sons have gone on squabbling, playing
‘whose is biggest’ with bricks; one by one, they die in car crashes…
Days of heat strokes, kif and bloodthirsty Ferraris.