Intro
http://alialikhani.blogspot.com/2012/01/revolution-intro.html
***
flash forward 25 years, it is the summer of 2009
and I am in Tehran, protesting the results of a stolen election.
In between all the batons, stones and tear gas
I find myself following the footsteps of my parents
playing Russian roulette with the hint of another revolution.
and I'm fired up by all this talk of something greater than myself.
I want to be a part of this revolution! Hell I want to start a revolution! I'll burn down flags and dissolve differences with my words! I'll load these words like weapons and bring systems down to their knees.
Kneel knave kneel!!
But wait a moment...something's not right.
I've been here before...
These bloody words are not mine, they've been said before me. Revolutions come and go. Power switches hands like a juggler keeps an audience in check. Thirty years ago, the generation before me ousted a corrupt monarchy supported by the powers that be. They took to the streets and threw their bare bodies in front of tanks, and corn poppies littered the asphalt, painting it crimson.
And for what?! For a loaded word like freedom?!
You want to see the result of violent revolution? Look no further than my country Iran!
Watch as the Shah, the mullah dictator, and the powers that supplant them one day and support them another--get to die of old age in their gold beds. While a mother bleeds out her heart through her eyes as she outlives her children...because they fell victim to the rhetoric of someone who believes himself righteous enough to order others into battle but won't take up arms himself.
No.
This isn't what I want.
What I really want...is that inner revolution. I want that revolution against my own ego.
I don't care for systems and power-mad politicians, they're always the same though they change names and faces. I want to be an activist to myself and against it. I want to tackle my inner self, ambush it! Light it on fire and let it burn itself out.
Every time it says "I'm better than him or her!" I want to do to it everything the revolutionary would do to the powerful and corrupt. Every time it raises its head and claims "I deserve more!" I want to strike it down like the revolutionary lashes out at inequality.
Every time it tucks tail in fear, I want to break it like the poet breaks swords with his words.
What I really want...is that inner revolution. Because even if all the inequalities of the world were to disappear tomorrow, I would still be found gagged and blindfolded, hands and feet bound through the chains of my own ego.
As Promised:
ReplyDeleteEXODUS
Could I form this prayer into a psalm? Could my words run towards you, embrace you in a hug, speak to you without uttering a sound? My questions are shadows of haphazard dances on edges of Grand Canyons. Thinking what if I teeter tottered over the edge, blindly bolted to Bahrain with arms in a fist fighting the tides of the Black Sea, in a Mediterranean Middle Eastern sea of Arab Springs and white colonial slave ships that chain us to each other. I CPR your 9/11's falling from twin towers like beads of sweat from temporal lobes of craniums. You speak in silent soliloquies. Wishing to return back home, but home is a grave, and no one lives there.
Tel Aviv I grieve. I weave seeds. I reap. I sow woe.
You flinch at the sneeze of a grasshopper. My words will tread lightly so as to not set off bombs. I know your family lives here, as I catch your eyes and visit the rooms there in. Slowly running my fingers through Siberian arctic fires that cause my pulse to tremble. I breathe breezes of cactus splinters against Sahara desert skin. Hurrying against raw mouths. I fall into your Nile Rivers. Mad. Dazed. Perplexed. What would you have me do, Jerusalem?! Sprint! Dashing, haphazard leaps, I ricochet bursts of fireworks rupturing from tears of molten lava gorging out into Victorian Falls. I roar at your punctured lungs clutching sulphuric acid. “Get out!” you snap. Your eyes growl shut.
Cairo there is a siege in Gaza. The Wailing Wall refuses to let me in.
Blockades clench my arteries.
The written word reveals so many references that are hard to catch in a live performance. I really enjoy your imagery in this poem. Thank you Angel :)
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