Mail me. Go home.
By some lucky accident, yesterday the newspaperman left a copy of the Baghdad Times in my box by mistake. I like to think he's got an eye out for my best interests when he does things like this. Although that would mean he ran out of eyeballs long ago and had probably beggared his child's marble collection for suitable replacements of the glass variety. Hardly a week went by where he failed to vary the monotony of giving me the paper I'd ordered.
But I'd like to leave the image of marble-less children and newspapermen driving their routes with two glass eyes behind for a moment. In the past, I had received--through his bounty-- such rare things as the Alaska Sun: a guilty pleasure, coming as it did on December 21 and making me worry about sunless winters; the Greenwich Times: didn't that contradict the usefulness of having only one Greenwich Time?; the Wyoming Globe: a square state seceding from the planet to form its own?
These wonders proved in the end to be mere fool's gold. The titles alone were significant, and they hardly signified. Besides, the jeweler I asked to make them into a ring for my Beloved caught the mistake straight off.
The Baghdad Times, however, beckoned to me with mysterious allure; its pages pungent with sweet, heady poppy-ink, its columns dominated by those exotic domes, marble everywhere I turned my eyes, and a Siamese cat snuggled in the gutter crease. I was transported, enraptured, and how, buddy; and then my feverish, transported gaze alighted on the harem blurbs.
I don't mind telling you my pulse throbbed. Just to prove it, I'll do it again: I tell you, my pulse throbbed. How could it not? Let's look at a few together. Hold my hand so I can feel you're near.
Addresses were given with most, but I'm quite sure I could have found the places by following the warm, musky scent of testosterone.
Farther down, there were the desperate pleas from those seeking work:
I all but tore the pages in my feverish haste to read more. Oh, how those little fragments of lives so far from my own made my soul hum. But not only did I not know the words; I finally had to give up on that weird scale system they use there.
But those ads put a yearning in my heart, a yearning that refused to be assuaged by anything so hum-drum and ordinary that I could find it at the Mall of America.
And that's why the next time my newspaper man comes by, he'll find me with a cloud of heady odour around my head from the Baghdad Times-flavoured hand-rolled between my lips, a siamese cat clawing my shoulder, and a song in my heart as I scream something about turgin domes and poppy harems.
On second thought, put out the cat. I'll be in bed with a damp veil on my brow.