Poetry: 7 MINUTES TO SEPARATION[Khashoggi]

Suffocation
mutilation
isolation
exploitation
miscreation

the Saudi enfant terrible brings his alligator-clad foot
down
Down on the neck
of another free-thinker
last breath floating out of him
like a puff of sand at the death of
a desert storm
where totalitarianism is
bliss
Tis folly to be progressive
And in the confines of a Turkish
back room
he felt  - for 7 minutes - the excruciating
horror
of successive
hacks and
slices
anxious bride-to-be
not then knowing that he would never
come back
to her
at least
not
in one
piece

consolation
vibrations
stimulation
acclamation
confirmation
salvation
integration

Now she will never be
his wife
the sanguinity of
greed
Trumping the
sanctity
of life
the President stubbornly seeking
a pinhole
of conjecture amid
a mountain
of conviction - "Maybe he did, maybe he
didn't" -
and the great irony
being that the same
agency
that has sown division
and disrupted the collective will
of peoples the world
over
in the name of democracy
now defends one man
in the face
of two despots
separated by thousands of miles yet
joined by
their common
obsession
with self