I am dirt with desires Animated by anger, lust and greed What I want, I see! These poisons imbibed continually Have made me A fetid swamp A putrid creek Of sensuality. With thirst unquenchable I drink from Unfathomable carnal seas A polluted chalice held on high By a sneering defrocked priest Who beckons me come nigh Quaff liberally from the potion vile of voluptuosness Become his slavish devotee In the church of hedonism and debauchery I am a collector of sighs Wearing tattered penitent’s robes Ashes on my brow With the scourge marks of accustomed melancholy Acquired avariciously A mark of Cain for everyone to see I gaze with longing fatuously At the passing parade Quotidian charade Longing for the cause Misperceived as cure For all my maladies! My aging body still yearns and throbs To nestle like a suckling babe Between a Khmer woman’s golden thighs To crown her with a diadem of ice Garland her with necklaces of smoke While she makes a mockery of me! Soon, all too soon, yet far too late This compendium of lust, dirt, and pain Will dissolve, disintegrate, dissapear Sans sense meaning or consciousness I will vanish and none Shall note or shed a tear What comes after All cognition and function cease Disperse in the air I anticipate With loathing And with fear. - Waheedk