Taxi Music - Civrene K. Brabt

here comes autumn.
on the cab radio
Itzik is singing
my king is sleeping
and there in le chat noir
in Belleville
we bought this hash,
and ce mec il a dit
comme ZeroZero,
mais meilleur.
it fucked us up, habibi,
made our arabic better, habibi,
made it feel like we were
walking through deep water
when we got up and
went for a piss.
he said listen,
it's the bit of the arab song
at the beginning
that takes your head off,
the bit when she
breathes out forever
in that beautiful
long
wavering note
about how her baby
done her wrong
and how she sobs
in the long
broken-hearted
melisma
about how she smoked at the zinc
with the shabab
in the midst of all this anguish.
maybe the cali guy
was used to bagpipe music,
because on the way to rue Titon
he kept on
about how
he’d never heard music like this
in his life before.
the cabbie comes from al dzhair,
il a dit  you will like this
and the mechanics of the music machine
sucked the cassette to its
electric heart
and his countryman lamented take her
away from me
and the cali guy kept saying
this fucking hash this fucking hash
and then another cheb sang and  then another
and then a chebba
and then a cheikha
and we longed to be in Oran
rather than in rue Titon where the old graffiti
was european – andreas baader s’est detruit!
croyez-vous cela?
and someone said maybe
postwar french philosophers were
the worst fuckers on the planet,
something  to do with Sartre being
and not being
a dick
when it came to seeing
stalin for what he was and wasn’t.
and we didn’t get to hear
the end of Itzik’s song,
but the start of it was so exquisite,
the cali guy cried tears
so real, so torn from his heart
they were almost silver.
it went
here comes autumn,
the leaves have fallen,
all the nightingales
have stopped singing.