A poem for the upcoming Kuwait Writers Club event at Bayt Lothan this Thursday 19th December.

We are arguing in the oilfields again. 
Not about oil.
About the environment.
The arguments are not so bad this time.
Some have been cataclysmic.
Their guy and our guy going at it like
One Full Metal Jacket drill instructor trying to train another.

Somehow I'm okay with all the
Trauma though.
I always have this reassurance
In the back of my mind
That it's good we're taking this so seriously
It ticks all the boxes,
This project,
For living my life as a civil dissident

Doing environment work
In the second largest oil field in the world
Amongst all the gas flares
The burn pits
Spewing forth their black plumes
A kilometre away
Feels like just the right amount of arrogance and audacity.

Was this same sense of
Satisfaction
In the mind of
The man murdered 
Over dinner
On the Wara Project in the south last week? 

From Korea, 
An engineer, 
What liberated the mind of the man who stabbed him 
From the rationality rammed into it for years
Making every judgement of his subject
To a rational, objective, evidence based approach? 
Was it the incessant, 
Sand drenched wind? 
The kamikaze traffic so
Wildly unregulated compared to the
Military precision of intersections
Back home? 

Did this sense of unreality
Lead him away from the restraints
He confronted in normal argument? 
Surely yes he wasn't the only one who thought of stabbing the other
In a heated moment

How would the man stabbed
Have occupied his dying moments?
With thoughts of disbelief
That an argument over
Food had lead to this? 
With thoughts perhaps that
He shouldn't've wished he
Could die today because life
Here anyway was just about impossible? 
That the work of 3 that one man, 
He
Was forced to do without pay for
Overtime
Was another pile of
Meaninglessness?

Whatever went through the minds
Of these two men needs
To not remain a secret

One stabbed another to
Death in an argument
Over the quality of food

No arguments
Support descent into such
Barbarity
The true barbarity here
Then may have been
The conditions they confronted
And our willingness to ignore its effects.