Hayy Ibn Yaqzan

After Ibn Tufayl

I am Alive I am four post-card
-sized watercolors of factories making death

My father whose name is Awake
is the gas that makes clay as tousable as hair

All factories are factories that make death
but not yet

I hate to emblazon I am allergic
At the risk of holding my breath with my breath:

From head to toe I am made of the openness of eyes From
my skin to my lumens of grief And

After I am long gone they will understand that
utopia comes early in the mind and late in the mind

On this Island which is everything
I taught myself everything like

Love and that Did you know that your mother
can be a gazelle even if your father is a death factory

Still, I don’t know from sleep I only know
to spin because I am planets this week

On Monday Am I a novel? if
I learned to undergo hypnosis? which

Is a social contradiction since I am alone
I reconcile it by imagining my mother’s pain

On Tuesday and so on I am
breakfast lunch and dinner for plants like palms

On Wednesday they will find petroleum
Only eight-hundred years from now

Until then I will wait for pearl-divers
who will teach me about their tongues

Am I a novel? if I pass before they
arrive? if they decide not to autopsy me?

But I don’t worry about that Coughs
are only the experience of being rustled

Tomorrow I cannot have any illness
because here you cannot own anything yet

Not sleeping is not an illness It is
how I continue to make up my mind

I dream of swallowing everything in the world
which I can already tell must be massive

Even with my eyes open my vision is
oneiric and Of the rise and fall of industries

Trust me I am (not) an insider
When I opened the chambers of my mother’s

Heart doe-eyed
was the beginning of writing and relation

When I opened the chambers of my heart
to the Almighty

I did not yet have a concept of the Sublime
And then there it was

Right alongside my sleeplessness,
my grief, utopia, death factories yet to come

All at once from my ribs and from my
liver And then

Think of how disappointed I’ll become when
I wake If they ever shave my chest for surgery

Safi Alsebai is a writer from Arkansas, where he studies medicine. His work has appeared in Amygdala Journal, Discount Guillotine, Virgo Venus, and ballast; and has been exhibited at the American Arts Center (Casablanca, Morocco). He has poetry forthcoming in Michigan City Review of Books, Medicine and Meaning, and the new Vers Lit Mag.