Physicists are born when bombs fall
on heads like apples. According to the law of inertia,
once a dictator falls he never stops falling
flat on his face in Homs and Aleppo and Damascus
and Deraa, on graffitied walls invoking broken Hippocratic oaths
and stripped bare down to his underwear in a leaked
boudoir shoot and photos by the pool,
skin draped taut across collar bones like tent poles,
albums showing all the skin where the sun never shone:
girls raped and children raised in prison cells
and corpses crushed between metal, dead rose
pressed between the pages of a ledger, each pose
for the camera a little sassier than the other. In the second law
of motion, the greater the suffering, the greater
the force needed to suppress it. Sednaya’s red wing walls
varnished in the most sensual shade of blood
a shrine where the mouths of praying prisoners
are forced to swallow his name in place of God’s. Starving
for some form of salvation, a country cannibalizes itself,
a dietary regimen to sate the appetite of the regime: detainees
swallowed and digested in the guts beneath ground.
In the third law of motion, revolt is regurgitation,
bowels of bloodlust rising in an upchuck reflex,
streaked across his tongue like the sweet nothings
and the blush in his wedding pictures, too shy to look his bride
or his people in the eye, fleeing from the gravity of his vows,
from the fact that he’s been falling
and falling–
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| One of the photos of Bashar Assad discovered by rebels and posted on social media. |
