Al Khobar at Night

Mechanical monsters hog the roads,
untamed and mismanaged, amid unfinished
buildings and desert expanses, in fifty
degree heat, among the natural desert lines
and undulations, a new empire is building.

In imitation of the west, these lines of men and women
stand ready with trucks and construction materials,
steel and glass structures, cables and pylons,
as the oil industry's centre this nation senses
potential, an attitude in response to disapproval,
an uprising against discontent at this notion
that Saudi is desert, and thus uninhabitable
man's mission to overcome the impossible vividly evident.

In the warm hair-dryer breeze of evening
I secretly steal internet outside my bosses' apartment,
Islamic prayers are on loudspeaker from the cenotaph,
fill the dark dusty air reverberating with the 'God's will' prophecy,
as the streetlights of the desert
reveal its motionlessness, and in the eerie silence
which follows, the city seems preoccupied
by it's own spirituality, lost in the sense of self
and place in this universe, the unifying
force of religion binding its occupants in.

In the tranquil zone of night, I tread to bed
aware of the silence and stillness of desert
windless and motionless, the sense of emptiness,
a space for the soul, as ambition itself
quietly begins to stir.