Epic Fail

My third day poolside and I am relaxing
I guess - but I'm still quite uneasy here
What kind of taxi drivers find it taxing
To read a map, a sign, or use a mirror?
Just more clues to a place where no one's home
Where people aren't spurred to use their brains
More money here than water, sense. Just chrome
And grease and wastes of sand and roaring planes
And vanity and tribal pride and scorn
Where aliens are used as slaves or brought
As tutors, then ignored, or to adorn
This barren land that petrodollars bought
But know this ugliness is mine as well
In many ways each modern city's Hell.

Pool

27 October
Bizarre hotel again, in a sun chair
A Russian fencing coach (team from Kuwait)
Makes forceful but controlled moves in the air
While chatting. Thought him ill to agitate
His wrist like that, as if to music swift
Now realize it's how he earns his keep
These tiny thrusts and turns. Training or gift,
He nonetheless must do that in his sleep.
As for the rest, it's squealing pudgy tots
Of all skin tones- while parents loll porcine
What strange ill-logic or mistakes have brought
Them to pretend this Emirate's a fine
Place for bikini suntans and a dip?
I feel such caste/class tension on this trip.

Arabia

27 October

A balcony, a pool on reclaimed land
An empty golf course, Russians, Speedos. Breeze-
I taste construction dust - or is it sand
From desert's bleached interior blown to sea?
An ugly land, quick-built for profit, fake
And sad, with workers barely scraping by
To live here is to serve crude masters, take
Their scraps while cringing under dust-choked sky.
But while I'd turn down work in this dry place
Of greed and coarseness, profiteers and snakes
I must be honest with myself and face
That as an immigrant I've had to make
A bargain different only in degree-
To give up home, to trust hosts unlike me.