Capernaum

Capernaum

 

Have you seen it, Capernaum*?

I saw it, last night, before I nuzzled in.

 It vampire-d me.

 Capernaum: a world of sin

 where lives are smeared in macabre tales

 of dread,  death.

 

 There is no birth here;

 only regurgitation of distress.

 With no name and no day to remember

 children are disgorged into the streets

 to scour, scrounge, scramble for life

 here in Capernaum.

 

 Mothers sleigh-bed their children in vegetable trolleys,

 hidden in shit-splashed toilets; brothers leash their sisters

 on public poles and watch her sniff dog-like, pull at the rope,

 defecate and in hunger…

 while the opium-ated world drags by

 here in Capernaum.

 

 Fathers, for fear of deportation, starvation,

 sell their daughters in marriage at eleven,

 withered meat, to be pounded in death mills;

 Mothers ‘Rotalact’ their breasts and fill

 the nipple bottle with squeezed-out-life

 here in Capernaum.

 

 Hell is here in Capernaum

 where there is no smile.

* Capernaum is a 2018 film portraying Lebanon’s rampant poverty and treatment of undocumented populations.