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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.