And the fish asked

How’s the water?

And I said

What the hell is water?

History

Hasn’t happened yet

Today

Hasn’t happened yet

Take

A stream

In it

No stream

Near it

Stream is itself

Adrift

Stream is eternal

In it

No stream

Too lofty

Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being

Tangibility

Relatability

I was born

In The Armenian Highlands

I will die

In The Persian Gulf

My first words shattered

The Haditha Dam

There is you

There you are

Just across

Lake Tharthar

Pathetic first steps

Through Mosul

I’m lonely

In Fallujah

You flourish

In Baghdad

A series of blunders

Karbala, Babylon, Najaf

I learn to love them

My pathetic first steps

We meet

At Al Qurna

We enter

The Persian Gulf

Tumbling through waves

We’ve never known

In, near, adrift

Through waters we’ve forgotten

There is no stream

The stream is itself

The Gulf

Should be the end

A flying fish is asking us

Morning boys, how’s the water?

I put my hand into

I stretch my hand through

I reach my hand out of

No—

That’s the sky,

That blue