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Tuesday, March 22, 2011

confessions p. 9

For years I've answered this call and that, played hopscotch
through different ways to understand the world.
I've snorted beliefs, rolled up everyone
who had an answer and smoked them like I wanted cancer.
I speak their languages, I know their words
I've heard the ideologies, and the revolutionary's crescendo
against Orwellian authoritarianism, I've stormed the streets
and thrown stones at the Silencers
I've known fear like a sickening helplessness.
I've listened to the talk of old men
I know time is both linear and circular
I know the face of my enemy and it looks like my own
I know the detachment of objectivity, the sign and symbol
the simulation and the real, the subject and appeal to individuality.

Every layer only led to another and yet, beyond these...
I've felt the whispered call of the Unseen
I've heard the echo of footsteps in the winding alleyways of my heart
I've wept and danced beneath its sky. Here is who I am
not in between all those words but in this beating.
My pulse is more honest than my tongue
when it hangs somewhere between desire and fulfillment.
I think the only way I can find expression
is through the language of the heart
I've studied the grammar and words
but bear with me Love, I am only just learning
that speaking of the heart of hearts
is seeing the universe through the alphabet.

Sunday, March 20, 2011

full moons

Sleep knocks but tonight
  The moon is like the sun

She creeps in through the blinds
  and caresses the darkness
Like a long lost lover
  with kisses that quench
an insatiable thirst

        I live
To soak in the fullness
of such moments

So when I'm gone
Look for me in the moon

When these words
No longer remember my voice
       Hear me
In the ripe stillness of the night

**

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/19/us-moon-idUSTRE72I3PS20110319

Monday, March 14, 2011

confessions p. 8

It's four thirty in the morning
I have an overdue essay
and so many other tasks to do
but I can't stop writing about you
in words that betray at every turn
I want to turn off this tap
or let it pour without restraint
here, in the stillness of the night
I am unfolding or folding inside
orbiting around a sun I can't see
blind beloved of an enraptured moon

first steps

To be tossed at sea like flotsam
the waves taking you where they will
to be both guest and prisoner
to see with eyes closed in the dark
to become nothing in the forge
then heated and molded to shape
to grind away stones with teardrops
to be like water receding
to laugh like an unfolding rose
to be so empty of yourself
that you can forget how to breath
to be laid out flat on the ground
and be pronounced dead at the scene
to cremate your own heart, and give
ashes and half-loves to the wind
to emerge from your own cocoon
to die and come to life each day

Sunday, March 13, 2011

the confinement of words p.5

This is how you came to me
like water receding
your story etched like veins in a fall leaf.
this is how you came to me
when I least expected it
when I didn't know top from bottom
but all I felt were rocks around me.

This is how you came to me
like a reflection
when all I could see were shadows
this is how you came to me
like you were there the whole time
but I only just noticed you.

this is how you come to me
wrapped in veils and veils.
Sometimes you peel one back
and I remember why I am alive.

Black Tea Cafe

In these downtown streets there are no half smoked butts
only the erratic heartbeat of cars, vents, and lights
in the rush hours, quick smiles, eager laughter
in between hurried bites and over stressed words
amidst the red, green, yellow, stop, and go
the gray panorama of sky and asphalt
second hand smoke, cheap coffee and stale glances.
Fancy store fronts and the reek of back alleys
don't loiter, don't solicit, don't stop traffic
blue and red OPEN signs flashing like sirens
sea of uniforms, pale faces, possessed feet
pallid tones of flesh beneath fluorescent lamps
old christmas lights sagging expired from branches
with amber brown buds about to bloom anew.

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

la petit mort et l'amor

This is how I remember her deathly stare
Frozen mid expression, and so fleeting
Her mouth, the eater of time and moments
Her lips, dark from sucking out all color
Eyes the velvet of the night sky's dark depths
Her tongue, the sword that cuts the throats of words
And her attire, midnight blue breeze
With stars on her ears, the moon on her neck
She smiles; as her teeth grind planets and suns
Yin and yang become one between bites
She is the great desert at the road's end
The one to be walked without steps or feet
Yes, she can choose to be ghastly at times
But I find her wildly beautiful
She is Love's favorite hand to play
And death too requires love
Most often the love of another
For what is each successive death
In a ladder of evolution
Other than an act of love?
Ask the butterfly
Born from the death of the caterpillar
Ask the fetus
Born from the deaths of the fertilized egg and sperm
Ask the human being
Born from the death of the fetus
Death is thus, Love's actualization
Love and death conspired and traded faces
So that they could clean out the whole table
They exchanged masks to collect from everyone
Traded outfits, but death is only Love's night
And Love, the day that follows each night's death




***

http://www.consolatio.com/2005/04/i_died_as_a_min.html

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

X is

Through elbows and exotic scents
we wade through local tongues
and the din of the bazaar.
Lacquered fingernails reach down
she feeds me a piece of coconut.
Her scarf, trailing from her hair
captures the summer nightlights of Tehran

***
In a cold Toronto January
I try to furnish a renovated basement
with my life packed in two suitcases.
She laughs, and next thing I know
I am waking up in a queen size mattress
to the sizzle of bacon and clatter of cutlery.

***
Behind a bar in downtown Ottawa
she waves sparklers, short white dress
illuminated beneath golden trails
that appear in the pictures I take.
Someone congratulates me.
She looks my way, her eyes light up.

***
We lock glances like we've met before.
Beyond the doorstep of words
 we speak the tongue of lips.
Her eyes smile into mine.
  It's like looking at my own reflection.
It's too fast. And it's getting late.

***
We walk beneath a moonlit sky
feet burrow into the cool white sand
as the ocean makes her nightly confessions.
The quiet expanse of stars
kisses the words out my mouth.
My eyes find hers and smile
as we leave footprints in the sand.