I cool down in anger.
When I write I lose my noblest side,
My most rational part.
I look poetry closely in the face and let loose my eyes like someone drunk,
I let my tongue hang out like an idiot.
Sometimes I stare at it and laugh, laugh, laugh.
Poetry is a farce.
I write as if polishing dishes alone at midnight,
While listening to female neighbors shouting: go to sleep, you misfit . . . !
The alarms in my brain cease to function,
Sensors screw up,
I walk while lewd metaphors burst in my hands like dynamite.
Things are not as I imagine them to be, O old Rhetoric,
Things are as I experience them
You liar . . .

I never memorize my poems
And never believed in poetry societies.
I never believed in the theory of ‘great poets’.
My sole belief is that accessing a poem is like going to the brothel on Sunday,
Going with a dissolute thought in the head,
Going alone, burdened with despair, hunger and oppression,
Going with plastic and political condoms.
I didn’t learn poetry from books at all,
I learnt it from street vagabondage,
From over-excited pan-Arab theories at the gates of luxury hotels,
From the screams of commercial love in hotel rooms.
From seismic and volcano data and weather forecasts.
From the sitting-in-a-public-garden theory of Norddine Zouitni
While feeding stray birds of his heart and eyes.
The spinning of the Earth makes me dizzy.
The thought of the New Year’s Eve
Crossed my mind.
Only drinking oneself dizzy removes dizziness.

Slow justice is like asking for a lift to planet Mars on a wooden cart from the 17th century.
220864
Is the secret number of my heart safe.
Enter the number, O poem,
And then you’ll know
How angry I am.