Beat Poet Osama Redux

The Best Of The Zola System

Osama wrote a diary, watched porn and used couriers to communicate with the outside world.  He also wrote poetry.  In the al-Qaeda, Hamas, Fatah, Hezbollah universe they call him a renaissance man.

One of the major questions still left over from the ongoing war in Afghanistan is the whereabouts of 9/11 mastermind Osama Bin Laden.  Was he killed during the Tora Bora raid in December of 2002? Is he residing in the lawless territories in northeastern Pakistan?  Just where is he?  Personally, I think I saw him selling thePost on 7^th Avenue and 49^th Street but hey, what do I know.

Perhaps I’ve watched one too many Law and Order episodes but it occurs to me that we don’t know enough about this guy to know where he’d actually go while on the lam.  When looking for a neighborhood drunk who knocked over the local 7-11, you hang out in the neighborhood bars.  Although we have a wealth of history about where Bin Laden has been and what he was doing at certain points in his life, we have no idea who Osama really is.  Case in point: Osama Bin Laden, number 1 on the FBI’s Most Wanted Criminal and Terrorist lists writes poetry.  Not Vogon poetry, mind you, which is considered to be some of the worst in the universe according to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. No, the man at the head of al-Qaeda writes love poems to his mistress.

The woman in question is Kola Boof.  She is an author and has been in the US Witness Protection Program for nearly ten years.  The poems were originally supposed to appear in her autobiography Diary of a Lost Girl, but legal issues with the Bin Laden family, specifically his wife Naweh, forced the poems to be edited out of the manuscript. Now, however, because there will be no payment, Kola Boof is going to publish four of Osama’s works of verse in the Russian edition of Esquire magazine or Italian Vogue.  The four poems are said to be three epic pro-jihadist pieces and one of the sarcastic love variety.

This information comes from a 3/17/09 press release distributed byPR Wire Press Release Newswire.  When read carefully, certain other facts come to the fore: Bin Laden is a Pisces and the love poem written for Boof is entitled ‘Naima Cat.’  So to recap, Osama is a cat person, had a mistress, is a Pisces writes epic and love verse, is on the lam from the US government and his wife.

Jesus, I was wrong. He’s not selling papers on 49^th and 7^th.  Bin Laden is probably living in an efficiency apartment on Thompson Street near the Holland Tunnel and is waiting for the weather to break so he can read his work in Washington Square Park, with his AK-47 at his side, of course.  Thus is the way of the modern warrior love poet.  I guess if you don’t want to be found you hide in plain sight.