Khaled Juma Biography

'Await not that I play for you…'
Says the flute maker to the strange moon,
'I am but a flute maker'
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My face is the forests' unease. I occupy a chapter in the tale. I sleep with one eye open, puzzling the night, star by star. Solitary, I arrange seasons, and trees. Solitary, I make imaginings from fear. I induct the words of a scared rabbit to make my fable. I am the wolf, unsurpassed. Only I know the roads that curve and turn in the mountain's slope. Only I hide the distress in a rock on which a shepherd sits with his flute, dripping sadness, not knowing that I am right behind him, memorizing the melody to repeat as howls on assumptions of hills.

My claw is the tale's pen, lightening my way whenever the smell of homes reaches my tame forest. Homes are the death of the wildness in us. When we befriended their owners, we became dogs, guarding goats from the assaults of our brothers. We sit planted like gratis soldiers at masters' doors. We glorify the moment they release our necks from collars of imprisonment, having entirely forgotten how we were the freedom of land, time and magic spells. We have totally forgotten our children, who we left in battles with nights and wails. We forgot and we attacked them as if we never knew them. They killed us. We killed them, and did not notice that the circles in the lake's water were the place's cries for what we have become. We did not notice, not for a moment that our names have also changed.
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To the boy abandoned at the edge of a homeland abandoned at the edge of a boy

What would I tell you if I were there?
You scream with two legs folded underneath you, blood streaming from a place in your body I do not know, I feel horror sneaking into your tender soul, as they are about to attack you, not only with words, but with a Talmudic history mobilized like a war machine aged a million years. In every one of their pockets is a Torah, in every one of their eyes is a gun and in every one of their hands is a heart, afraid of a twelve-year-old boy, abandoned on the roadside. Were you an easy hunt? Even in jungles, predators sometimes hesitate to hunt a little one when they're hungry, they smell the milk off the newborn's lip and turn back, perhaps, they transcend from preying on a little defenseless child who cannot even escape. However, they all were there, and the others wished to be there, so they sent their thoughts instead.
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-1-
Nobody raised me to love you. My mother did not plant virtues of death in her tales. My father did not tell me that men had to die in order to be Men. He said, take the city's distress off her eyes, and she shall love you forever; and at that moment of my death, and in the long time between my stand and my fall, I saw her, with my heart, I saw her, crying and smiling, while calls for prayer arose like a premade ritual.

-2-
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Tomorrow, I shall die
Like everyone alive, I shall die
Death will not warn me
Will not give me a chance to say, any last words
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