THE SOCKET

Indeed I am no three am-er

Type of guy

But last Saturday, or was it last summer

Pain spikes were more severe

Than a screwdriver could bear

I called my dentist, Miss Overa, 

She was, I guess, sound asleep

She could hardly hear 

The torture in my cords.

She came nonetheless

Within half an hour

With a needle, a gauze 

And something of a plier

And lo and behold

Pulled out my middle-upper tooth

In as little as a quarter of an hour

Truth is, I am all the wiser for it

And best of all,

The pain subsided within the hour.

Other than the gaping socket,

The impact, I felt, 

Was rather insignificant

Except that it left me

Thpeaking with a lithp. 

ELEVENTH HOUR FLASH

The head mechanic's guillotine
Where my car engine is hanging
Is hanging my car engine by the head
Its bolts and nuts, seals, and joints
Interspersed all around
Its apertures agape
Bleeding dead lubricants.
With his hand of iron
The head mechanic securely framed by the right hand
Is firmly securing
The center-slanting iron carcass
Into new middle ground.
Said she before he got
The chop-ahead sign
"You know, iron brother,
I can't make head or hose of us
But why bother to comprehend
The local structure of the act
Where the means justify the end;
Dispose of me wherever
You deem fit to
Dispose of yourself:
We are both expendable".

BETRAYAL

With the palm of your hands

Amidst the cries of seagulls

and the deafening thunder

You could barely holler  

Your voice lost in the brouhaha.

I paddled my way to you

Despite the tumult

And against practice

I reached out

And by any measures

I delivered…

As the scribe later penned the bond

The waves and the clouds and the moon far up

Bore witness to our deed

Only to realize

Ten cycles later

It was mere theater

To be replayed

On other random stages.

Ali H. Raddaoui

10/19/2019

A TRIP TO THE LANDFILL OFFICE

What I am attempting to do here is to translate one of my texts from Arabic. By way of background, I will say that whenever useless stuff accumulates in your home, gets musty and gathers dust, what you typically do is to haul it over to the municipal landfill where you pay a nominal fee so they cleanly dispose of it. I am Dr. Ali Raddaoui. Your take on what you read matters to me, whatever it is. 

A TRIP TO THE LANDFILL OFFICE

As the late-night began to beat a retreat

And the builders of the universe were fast asleep

My mind was made up.

I packed my memory gears

From among my dusty shelves

And computer chips

The margins of dog-eared magazines

And the traces of whispers

And midnight chats.

Not that I was in a hurry.

I lined them up prints and notebooks

Some scenes gestated out of pure fantasy

Others were larva moving about in my entrails in real-time

I put them together

I placed one hand where my veins crossed

And with the other

I tied the rope over them to my back,

Off to the landfill office.

…

Off to the landfill office

One of my inklings looked askance at me

Under a drizzle from the sky’s eye

I peered into dark matter.

Behind me was a light year

Whose fragments I had gathered

Without much thought

While listening to the Four Seasons.

Ahead of me an hour’s trip.

I shoved my way through the dark

To the Manager’s office

And arrived there an hour before the bells rang dawn.

She greeted me with no pomp

I placed my bundle on the scales

She made me pay the disposal fee many times over

And I found me throwing away my memory

On a pile of debris from men and women of days gone by and those to come

Thereupon, I returned to my home

As I was before the memories.

Keywords: poetry, free verse, translation, Arabic, English, city landfill

رحلة إلى مقبرة النفايات

خلفية هذه الخاطرة أنه عندما يكتظ بيتك بعفش لم تعد في حاجة إليه، يتعين عليك أن تأخذه إلى حيث مكب النفايات وهناك يتم وزنه ثم تتولى دفع رسوم إتلافه إلى من يدير هذه الخدمة البلدية.

في الربع الأخير من الليل

عُمَّارُ الكون نيامٌ

حسمت أمري

حزمت حقائب ذكرياتي

من بين الرفوف المغبرّة

ورقائق الحاسبات

وثنايا الكتب

وهوامش الهمسات

ودردشات منتصف الليالي

ما كنت على عجلة من أمري

صفّفت صورا ودفاتر ..

مشاهدُ بعضها من نسج خيالي

وأخرى نطفٌ تسبح  في بحاري

استجمعتها

ووضعت يدا حيث نبض عروقي

وبالأخرى عقدت الحبل

وأحكمت الحمل على ظهري

في طريقي إلى مقبرة النفايات

...

في طريقي إلى مقبرة النفايات

استوقفتني واردةٌ

على أطلال رذاذ سكبته عين السماء

حدقت في الفضاء مليا...

خلفي سنة ضوء

كنت جمّعت شظاياها

دونما تفرقة

على وقع سنفونية الفصول الأربعة

وأمامي مشوار ساعة

شققت طريقي

وصلت إلى مكتب مديرة المقبرة

قبيل الفجر بأزمان

فاستقبلتني دونما حفاوة

وضعت عفشي على الميزان

دفّعتني أجرة إتلافه أضعافا

وألفيت نفسي ألقي بذاكرتي

في حطام من مآلات اللاحقين والسابقات

بعدها رجعت إلى مكتبي

كما كنت قبل الذكريات.

AUGURIES

I asked a small bird
Barely a few weeks old
A novice still at wing fluttering
And water diving
Who migrated from
His hatching place up north
In the mountains and trees
Ever humming the song of birth
Where home was.

"Wherever I roam is my home"
He said, panting,
Awkwardly palming
Behind the flock.
"Every sport,
- Liquid or rock -
And wherever a birds' eye view is caught
Is a nest I cherish
And an instant where I flourish
I know of nothing
You call jet lag
I'm all the time zones of the world
I've been and will be to.

Yet,
The one spot
I wanna rot
Is the one
Where I was hatched."

RAPPELLE-TOI CELESTE

Rappelle-toi Céleste
Des contrées qu’on a traversées
Entre le nord et le sud-est
Des collines qu’on a grimpées
À la recherche d’un instant
Des amonts sous lesquels
Nous avons tous les deux édifié un recours
Des mots qu’on a tissés de part et d’autre
De nos rencontres
L’eau qu’on s’est partagée
Au milieu du désert
Rappelle-toi Céleste
Ne me dis pas que le temps est plus fort
Que la vie à des manières inédites
D’éteindre les murmures
De faire ensevelir les mémoires
D’enterrer les pistils et les fleurs
Céleste, chérie;
Jette un coup d’oeil sur le trajet
Qui sait quel serait son concours
Pour toi, et pour les images
Qu’on a peintes sur la toile de ce parcours
Qui est le nôtre
Quand j’étale le bagage que nous portions
Tous les deux, l’un et l’autre
Ses couleurs, ses refrains, ses odeurs
Ses promesses et ses lueurs
J’aperçois un soupçon de ce qui fut.
Merci tout de même pour les mots
Les gouttes d’eau, les traversées
Et les mémoires
Au revoir.

WHAT ON EARTH OVERTOOK THOSE CLOUDS

What on earth overtook those clouds

Happily fluttering in the sky

On this special summer day

And wrapping the heights near and far

And stroking with their sea breeze

The landscape all around

And the twenty-seven trees

Shading this abode in the middle of nowhere

So much so that the skylarks

Thought it early autumn

And went a-fetching twigs and sticks

From last summer’s crops

To build their nests

And prepare for mating

Come December...

Whatever overtook

Those clouds

Fizzling out in the heat of the day

Without a moment’s notice?

THE TRUTH CARTEL IS FALLING DOWN: WHAT TO DO?

PLENARY SPEECH

Venue: Higher Institute for Applied Studies in Humanities of Tunis, Tunisia

Occasion: 2^nd International Conference on Truth and (Mis)Information

Language: English

Date: 04/12/2019

Length: 0:45. Size:

Media Type: mp4 (please scroll down below the summary to view)

Summary: How knowledge is constructed and whose truth is received have always constituted the focus of human endeavor in the fields of social sciences as elsewhere. However, the proliferation of knowledge-making paradigms, now accelerated by ease of publication and dissemination on cyberspace, has yielded a state of extreme relativization and erosion of what was traditionally canonized as truth and knowledge. The current landscape amounts to a collapse of the knowledge cartel and calls for an examination of the status quo, in order to theorize it and to delineate the lines of corrective or preemptive action. This presentation starts off by identifying and explaining the traditional rivalries between two major cannons of knowledge production, namely the scientific and interpretive paradigms. The next step will be the description and analysis of the effects of the technologically-mediated, web-based, social-media paradigm on the domain of knowledge construction. Preliminary analysis reveals a host of gains emanating from this paradigm shift, with attributes of democratization of de-commodification of knowledge assets, and an evening of the playing field allowing more users to contribute their versions of reality. A more sinister take on this shift will be described as one leading the academy, society, and the world into a state of chaos obtaining from lack of distinction between what truth and knowledge are, and what they are not. The final leg of the presentation suggests the lines of action which can be initiated by individuals and institutions to offset the effects of the coming destabilization and loss of meaning.  

Keywords: Knowledge, Truth, Post-Truth, paradigm shift, social media

ON SISYPHUS'S ROCK

Whoever said
One should envision
Sisyphus merry
Rolling the rock
Back to the top
Of the Rockies
Week in week out
Can go
Eat schist.

Zenith Is

No bleach of whatever make

Will make the Zenith fizzle into decay

Now that the day is nearly done

And the figures of the evening

Are seeping into the night coming.

Tomorrow at dawn,

The new day will stand

In no pump and circumstance

And shed away yesterday’s fluff

--Small talk of food and perfume

Fashion and fret and whatever else--

Over what was coughed out

Or implied

On the way up the lift

To whatever floor

And departure through the backdoor.

As always though,

The centerpiece

Will remain

What it is.

To William Carlos Williams

I ate them

The apples which I had put away

In my travel bag

The night before.

Soothe to say

Both were sweet

Though one sweeter than the other

The other still sweet

With an aftertaste of je ne sais quoi

That lingers

And gnaws into my taste buds

Long after the journey is done. 

Ali H. Raddaoui

02/16/2019

Recollections

On Grand Street of Montenegro Town

Evergreens come and go

After a fashion of alignment

Calculated from before inception time.

They slip into the rear view mirror

And out into oblivion.

On Grand Street of Montenegro Town

This olive tree stands tall

Her foliage slanted

Toward the end point of the horizon.

On the ground, underneath

The breeze jazzes with the bushes

And buzzes with the bees

And pats the wings of humming birds.

Underneath the trunk

Her roots dig into the ground

Sink toward the four corners

And seep into this Midwestern soil

As the branches up above

Wave good bye to the passerby.

I acknowledge the foliage

And wave back

Not knowing whether

I will wind back there

In this life or another.

Ali H. Raddaoui

02/16/2019