Richard George (June 1,1965 / Cheltenham, U.K.)

The dark young man
with the curls of the Maghreb
is in an altercation
with the ghost
that lives between his eyes.
'He's harmless', our cadence falls.
'He's harmless'.

But on the eighth of July
he is grinning ear to ear,
boasting to his djinn of jihad
'I did it! ' Our
intonation shoots to the top deck:
'Harmless?
Is anything harmless? '