Welcome to the Green Zone

I opened my eyes as wide as I could and that wasn’t very wide at all. The bruising and puffiness aound them forced my eye lids back and all I could make out was a room of bare concrete and my feet. The light above me was coming fom a recess armoured by a glass and wire cage. My head was throbbing and my mouth felt as if huge holes had been excavated into the previousely perfect set of teeth that I had had. I felt sore and lonely, my face pulsating with aches. I trid to move but my hands were cuffed with something behind my back laced through the framework of the iron chair virtually immobisling except for a slight twisiting motion that strangely, made me feel contemptuous towards my captors.  Then slowly as I gathered my senses and my memory I realised I was a prisoner of the Democratic Fundamentalist forces that had taken me , my country and all free artists into custody behind the moth of concrete teeth they had built in the centre of the city. I was a prisoner in the Green Zone.

The colour green. At once holy, pastoral and calming belied the reality of this notorious self made ghetto of the Fundamentalist forces of Democracy, a loose union of independent powers that had come together to control my homeland and rid it of an independent artistic voice. A voice that was a clarion to the free and artistic around the world. They had lost patience with the errant state and invaded  clearing all free press and independent artists from the thriving capital and instigating a policy known a the Peace Voice with a viciouse thoroughness that began in the schools and then had migrated over the years to the studios and garrets, of artists everywhere except my city. We were the last and now they had me in their prison.

I sat still preserving my strength but sent my mind back to better days when my work was read by so many and my books had uplifted the people of my nation. But of late my poetry was being handed in small magazines from individual to individual, secretly , like a banned drug or packet of explosive , as if it were in itself a dangerous substance.  My age precluded a memory of the Golden Time as we called it, when literature was free , when creativity was rewarded with food and money and we celebrated our artists in theatres, concert halls and on the cyberart walls of the earth.