Midnight city strolls
find me occupying this vacancy,
somewhere between a
resistance fighter’s wet dream
and a concerned father’s nightmare.
In a street decorated with taverns,
and the stained pictures
of forgotten martyrs,
I can smell the rotting corpses
of revolutionaries
hidden under the stench of vodka-
flavoured vomit
of kids who have forgotten
where they came from,
who dance inebriated and unaware
on the breast plates
of those who
have paved the way,
with bullet wounds and dreamer’s eyes,
for our degeneration.
In the midst of the madness,
and all the bottled amnesia,
there is a girl
whose smile reads like a Bible verse,
as her hips paint the room with temptation,
unaware that these streets
will one day watch her body
get treated like currency,
as an empty night sky
watches in apathy.
Anthony Chahine is a third-year Engineering student at the American University of Beirut. He wrote two poems for his Creative Writing class and thought he should try to submit them to Rusted Radishes.
