First

The best wife can make a throne of tattered linen and royalty of a drunkard. Hibba Amoud knew this, and yet staring at her snoring, whimpering husband, she could do nothing but strain in the unrealistic alchemy of swapping a smudge for sheen.

Even well past dawn, when the smells of a village collectively releasing pent-up gas and brewing ink-black coffee laid thick upon the wafer walls of her house, Hibba stared in vain.

Beneath his scowling, chapped lips and wispy beard, Yousif Amoud was nearly all belly, scrapping about with legs fit to buckle under the weight of one more errant slice of bread. His head was peaceful in sleep, washed clean of dreams by muscle relaxers he'd hustled from the local doctor. Regardless of how empty his mind was in (or out) of sleep, Yousif's body saw fit to enact a reign of terror on the Amoud's sole two rooms. Twig legs thundered out like a horse fearing the lash, arms coarse and hair-matted spun like those of a swimmer who just took a bump on the head, and Yousif's sinuses performed the nightly ritual of revenging years of jealousy on the neighbors and keeping them up past midnight.

“I could choke him,” thought Hibba, toying with the fabric of her dress and dwelling on plans made more viable through lack of sleep. She quickly abandoned her regular thoughts of homicide and got up to make coffee.

If there was anything more vile to Hibba than watching her husband sleep (she suspected there wasn't), it could still be remedied by a morning sipping cheap Nescafe and basking in the Lebanese sun for a few hours, if not minutes. Though it's said that the key to a husband's heart is his stomach, the assurance of a wife's sanity can surely be found in coffee grounds.

The unbroken thread of silence awarded by sitting on a neon-pink plastic chair scrunched in the corner of a porch watching folk pass by was actually filled with sounds. This din, however, was a balm whereas Yousif's cacophony was maddening. Occasionally tooth-less old men shuffled by with brows beaten by toil and still managed a wave, while their youthful counterparts danced and charged each other in naïve facsimiles of war.

Behind the chipped door, haunting reminders of her husband's nightly thrashing echoed.

“Let him crash,” Hibba said into the endless pit of her mug. It wasn't hate that kept her up, though her thoughts made it seem that way. It was more of an extended annoyance, as if her husband was a child in the midst of arrested development, incapable of maturing yet too old to be coddled.

Halfway through her first mug of coffee, however, her morning ritual of near-obsessive thoughts regarding Yousif was invaded by a high-pitched call, almost a warbling. It could only be her neighbor Hayma coming from her door, boorish and pestering where she thought herself sociable and inviting.

“Who's that over there?” Hayma called before she came into sight, “Hibba? By god, I need some coffee.” Hayma was testament that no matter how irritating the wife, at some base level a snoring husband was to blame.

“Come up, I have another mug set out already,” said Hibba, suddenly aware of her unconscious act of premeditated courtesy. She was quick to feign interest in Hayma's day-to-day activities, and whether or not she noticed the vapid affirmatives Hibba invariably replied with, Hayma blustered on, revealing more than what was proper.

When the only object one can give is courtesy, often the only punishment one can inflict is withholding it. In that way, many of the villagers living in Arab Saleem acted as saints, hoarding the hopes of one day shunning their neighbors and revenging slights to their honor.

That they rarely got this opportunity didn't enter into their judgments, and the villagers led well-mannered lives purely by way of miscalculation.

Fuga Mortis

This is the documentation of a mad man; such as it may be, prose in the form of invariably dextrous poetry that quickly bends the knee to feigned night-time visions of a higher calling. Rhythm as non-rhythm, and the fearful procession of words into spiritual legislation accompanied by the frenzied clacking of beardless man-children avoiding social interactions via the very same outlets that have formed for them a dependency. What could be mangled by run-on fortitude was nixed by the logical extermination that preceded its existence, and the world as will and representation presented the subjective with a categorical imperative to cease and desist all fearful functioning.

Pompous pubescent pillagers of responsibility hinder the sanctity of my LCD screens with 4 by 4 cut-outs of nights spent languishing in the delirious scenes of party schemes. While paltry seems the bitterness of the lone witness, in truth the rotten core that resides in his center of balance is dissatisfaction at an inability to grasp an internal truth; that morbidity and banality have rendered him incapable of conveying artistic integrity.

Everywhere the various tentacles of stimulation beckon and hearken with the babel allure of knowing something of everything and nothing thoroughly. It can be considered a venereal disease of our collected mentalities that pervasive in our culture is a sense of entitlement and a widespread whining about our lack of pruning. Take up the mantle for yourselves and these obstacles would prove nothing more than chimeras, whereas now they appear solid at a distance and your resolve purees in the juice of diffidence.

This is an interlude between paragraphs to remind the reader that Woody Allen's movies always feature a man betrayed by some haughty female, and that the correlation between Sir Allen's monstrous personal life and his archetypal fear of powerful Venuses is no coincidence but rather completely causal.

I've relapsed quickly and almost immediately, both literally in the sense of absorbing cup after cup of maple redolence and coffee beans, and methodically, relying on the effervescent effect of aurally rhymed 'e's and other schemes to facilitate the now scant blithering of pages colonoscopy.

Permanent mental impairment rings loudly yet the heart boasts proudly, fixating my psychology on the terminology of cognitive dissonance. No longer thrust between the primal rock and hard place, we lace the excitement of our times in a border of nicotine packaging and caffeine-based epistemology. Maybe Freud had a thing for his mother, and subsequently the putative passing of man has been a tale of sneaking peeks at maternal shower scenes and plugging lacy undergarments with spilled seed.

Onan's sin is mine alone, yet the will-to-live belongs to all. We share our disgraces, our times of glory, each hard-won triumph, and acrimonious defeat, just as we share the ennui of intermittent weeks. Death, then, is not a passing into nonexistence, but rather a rebounding into the holistic presence of shared reminiscences that constitutes the analogous aeons before birth.

Let us return to the womb of time with the glint of our inner-beings, so that we may be thrust across the Universe in sparking metals and elements unbound. Save your faith and theology, our breath is better spent inhaling virtuous art and exhaling our own truths into the spittoon of yarn-woven delusions.