The American Century as Seen Through a Brick (extract)

 

Cimarron 1930/31

Isaiah fans white folk from the ceiling,

One nation indivisible –

An empire pillared by pioneers

Counting notches on their pistol grips…

 

Time will mellow hearts

Say: America

Hide me in your love.

 

 

 

Casablanca 1943

The speech of the refugee is the living breath.

Let them speak of their roads:

… Through Europe we have travelled

Fleeing tyranny and vultures,

 

The devil has us by our throats,

The ghettos burn and displace our children,

You must remember us…

 

 

 

Ben-Hur 1959

This country was built by slaves

– It still is –

There are no guilty faces

Just    conquered people

 

Oar weary on the galleys

Air wary on the gallows

Fire       environs       us       all

 

 

 

In the Heat of the Night 1967

– No Vietcong ever called me a Nigger –

For Virgil, hell is in police officers,

The detail in the dead and suffer;

Tweezers, toothpicks, thermometers.

 

Just what they know about the King’s insomnia,

The wet cemeteries in the state of Louisiana,

The struggle when fear is attached to color?

 

 

 

Patton 1970

If it takes a bloodbath

Our blood, his guts

Blood in Chicago

Dams of blood ready to flood

 

Foreign blood stung in battle

The prayer’s spittle, blood pour.

Enlightened absolutism – War

 

 

 

 

Out of Africa 1985

Alleles of eloquence

Cradled at this rock

Bear the scorn/pity of aids

And are nothing more

 

To marionettes

Than the withering victory of:

Blood/safari/diamonds.

 

 

 

Schindler’s List 1993

Show/er of darkness

Give me strength

For I am lost in the weakness of others

Their cracked house cruelty.

 

… Light dimmed in interrogation,

Held hopeful, eternal,

The fractal lobe.

 

 

 

 

No Country For Old Men 2007

There is no greater me than you;

The birds will die, the trees too.

The flesh of fish will foul

And the song will lose its soul.

 

I will be hot, you will be cold;

The sea’s of what’s coming,

The intensity of the plunge.

 

 

 

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) 2014

I don’t exist

, This representation is an act

– An intervention. A medium

Of absence, contradiction, negation

 

. When I am killed again with impunity

, My autopsy transfigured as found poetry

, again I will’ve been defenseless/muffling… I can’t breathe

…

 

About the poet

Asim Khan is from Birmingham, England. His work has appeared and is forthcoming in various print and online journals. He blogs on www.photoetric.co.uk. He Tweets at @photoetric

 

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