confessions p 16

You are your own universe.
The Unnameable became man
so that man could become unnameable
In you, lies an entire world
the purgatory of your own deliberation
and all the heavens and hells.
You are a drop of the great churning heart of the cosmos
you are the universe looking back upon itself
the crowning achievement of consciousness.

You arouse the jealousy of the greatest Angels
and when you burn through your clay chains with Love
the stars themselves gleam with envy. Don't you know?
Don't you know that when Love was created
none could bear its tremendous weight
neither the mountains or the oceans
nor the ancient earth--not even the heavens?
None, but you.
You are a mirror unto this dance
between being and non being.

Like a black hole, we swallow up
solids, fluids, gasses, even light!
Our hands are executioners
smiling lips reading out death sentences
our teeth, guillotine blades
mouths the sacrificial alters
through which we keep ourselves alive.

Through the story of our bodies
you could trace the passing of our seasons
like the damp before the storm
and the rosy blush of blossoms
like long luminous days and the slow trickle
of sweat over sun-wrinkled skin
like the ripe fullness of harvests and the changing leaves
before the cold stiffness of our final winters
when we will all take that step without feet
and "they will ask you
what you have produced
say to them
except for Love
what can a Lover produce?"

**Rumi quote

the truth is like the sun

I have no words
for the perfect revolution of stars and planets.
That would be like
describing the brightness of day
or the darkness of night.
I have no words for the vibration
of the smallest building blocks in particles.
I am barely aware
of the thousand and one dominoes
that must fall in place for me
to even say this right now.
If just one of those dominoes missed a beat
I could have been illiterate
I could've been born deaf, blind and mute
or I wouldn't be able to breathe
or I would've never been born to parents who love me
or the earth would be too close to the sun
or the universe would not expand
and matter would never come into existence.
I could have been dead
a hundred times from sunrise to sunset.
I could have come into this world as a stone
or a dog, or a muddy stream
but I don't have the consistency of a rock
I don't have the loyalty of a dog
or the mercy of water.
I have no words
for the perfect revolution of stars and planets.
That would be like
describing the brightness of day
or the darkness of night.
I have no words for the vibration
of the smallest building blocks in particles.  
I am speechless before the sublime serenity
of this dance between stars, atoms and hearts.

Every journey is a circle

This is what I want you to do
turn off the lights
close your eyes
let your entire body become an ear
for your own heartbeat.

Talk to someone who can tell you your childhood stories
play all of your favorite songs
dig through the relics of your past
look at old photos
remember past lovers
promises made and broken
remember every moment you can't forget
even the ones you didn't enjoy
don't dwell
just, listen.

Trace with your fingers
the shimmering aurora of your past
and somewhere in the night sky
you will see the shining outline of your future.

the confinement of words p 7

People who claim mastery over the world

are often most afflicted by it

"The world is an ancient master"

and does not fold beneath images

In the world of images and words

Everything is and becomes its opposite

Let me step out of these black and white 

compositions into color. 

**

Rumi quote 

ceaseless sojourn

On that day
I will walk
and I will have
"miles and miles before I sleep."
I will walk
until the only mirror I come across
is that of my own heart

*

Revolution Intro

We were revolutionary babies.
Born after the revolution of 1979 in the middle of a war
We were the children of revolution and war
And there are entire generations of us

Raised on rations, air raid sirens
And tales of the ancient empire.
Raised behind closed doors and under veils.
Raised on the past because the future was bleak.

On the TV, we watched foreign cartoons
And men of 'peace' preaching about the enemy.
We lived in an Animal Farm (George Orwell book)
Where those concerned only with profits kill prophets
and script scripture because they deal in the trade of Truth
Where the images of martyrs are plastered over walls as ads
Where the graves of unidentified soldiers in parks and hiking paths
Serve as reminders extolling the virtues of the Republic.

We were fed the ashes of our parents' dead dreams
And we were waiting to come rushing into the world
At the bottom of their well of hopes.

We were the safety net waiting to catch our fathers' ideological fall
We were the wishes that our mothers aimed and shot at the stars
And they loaded us with everything they had.
We were the prayers of the war-torn and the revolution-tattered
And even as the pillars of our parents' ideologies crumbled around them
We were held up like banners as if to say
"You almost fooled us!"

***

For the rest of the piece...http://alialikhani.blogspot.com/2011/02/revolution.html

What's in a tear?

I am an alchemist
I make mirrors out of hearts
I am more than an alchemist
I make something out of nothing
I am nothing
I can make something of my nothing.

Watch my tears turn into a leaf, a shoot
Grains of sand, desert flowers
An extended talon, the gaze of a tulip.
My tears are parachutes
They are floodlights in a storm

They are letters lost in the mail
They are notes in a bottle
Bobbling over the waves
They are sparks leaping upward
They are flares in the middle of the ocean

My tears are dolphins, leaping and streaking
Over the golden waters of the sea on a summer day
They are peals of children's laughter
And the exclamation of newly discovered life.

My tears are the flight of birds
They are the promise of migration
They are the arc of a sword swing
The hungry teeth of the blade.
My tears are a blacksmith's anvil
My heart is the forge
the blade is my memories
And the target is myself

take two

she smiles
"Have you given yourself entirely to your Beloved?"

"No" he responds.
"I have given away my clothes
and come before Her naked.
I have folded the paper wrapper of my self
and returned it to the world
as the debt I owed it upon birth.
To my Beloved, I dare not impose
such a burden as a self, no matter how refined.
All the packaging in the world, no matter how elaborate
will capture even a moment of Her attention.
It is my very self that keeps me from my Beloved.
Were She to glimpse even a shred of it
I would be left with only Her shadow
and She would leave me for another more selfless.
My Beloved resides not in the realm of words
She flees from the false countenance
of the currencies of words and images.
The only receptacle for Her terrible brilliance
lies in the inner ocean of the heart of man."

confessions p 15

It is a dance, whirling before me

like a constant drop and buildup

of rolling melodies against a sea of cacophony.

It is the growth of seed to tree

It is the eating of a fruit

It is the laughing bloom of the rose

and its slow growth through the heavy earth.

It is the passing of seasons. 

An accumulation of now.

It is a single dot of punctuation

in the greatest story ever told.

****

We are like the drops 

that make up the crest of ocean waves

like the rays from the sun

and the blessing of darkness.

We are the words to the greatest story ever told

and the impossible notes on the scale of infinity.

We are the individual breaths 

of god's human life

one leading to the next.

We came from the light.
Innumerable.
Immeasurable.
Immaterial.
We came from the endless fields of pre-eternity
to taste one moment of this now. 

birds and lashes

They say you are yourself
when you are alone.
If that is so, this chapter in my story
can be summed up in a single teardrop
quivering on the cusp of vision
melting perception and perceived together.
O you who would know the song of my lament
I've spent so many nights
asking my heart "what are you?"
I've bled so many tears
over the bones of my breast
that a path has been carved
through the sinew and flesh
seeping straight to the bloody beat of my being.
I chase sorrow like love hangs in the balance.
I want to taste all of them, every heartache
I long for the notes of every one of those songs.
I race along the foreign shores of imagination.
I become the teardrop coursing down the cheek
of every broken-hearted soul.
I am like the smoke to the smoldering heat
of their searing stories.
They breathe through me
I release their fumes.
The flames breath, and I bleed
till it is no longer me bleeding.
I am just a single teardrop
offering myself to every cheek
that has a [love] story to tell.

the confinement of words p 6

We will come up with different ways
to describe ourselves
and names with which to identify.
Being names, they will never truly contain
the spectrum of our being.
We are not of the realm of names.
By virtue words can not hold us.
Come away with me
let's step outside
the glass house of these words.

confessions p 14

This is for
all the days and nights
that I wrote with a broken pen
all the floors that soaked the salt of my story.
This is for the stirring in my heart, the swelling in my chest
which melts my vision, squeezes out of my eyes
and courses over my hands down the length of the pen.
This is for the shadows of the tears
that sometimes trail down the length
to the tip of my pen onto the page.