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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

silence

The shadow of your shadow

chases the words from my mouth

and scatters the thoughts from my mind like dust.

To gaze upon your face

can only be likened to staring into the sun

or the darkest depths of a starless night.

How can something be both lock and key?

How can that which is veiled be unveiled

when I am myself but a veil?

The faster I move

the faster these footprints catch up to me.

The more I learn, the less I know.

I have nothing to say which hasn't been said before.

I just want to graze in that meadow Rumi speaks of:

when the soul lies down in that grass

the world is too full to talk about.

reminiscence

Jul 09 entry:

Every illusion of control
every semblance and comforting lie
of independence
was for me to realize
the underlying interdependence.

Every fall and rise in the song of my life
every curve and bend along this winding road
told ultimately of my return to you.
Every betrayal and loss of faith
every bloody tear shed
in the unwritten pages of the heart
was for me to know this way.
I see only so much beauty around me
and I am ashamed for ever seeing it as anything but.

the veiled beloved

I told her

these words are yours

so too the voice that speaks them

the tongue that sharpens them

my lips, diving board of every kiss, are yours
 the curve of this spine, the hollow in my throat

the spaces between my fingers, every line on my palms

the calluses on my hands and feet are yours

so too the soft skin beneath.
The stories of my stitches and the poetry of these scars
are yours, so too this borrowed heart.

Every living hair on my body remembers your touch.

 For each tear you lent me, I cried another in joy.

Every crease around my eyes, every furrow in my brow

tries to tattoo your name in Persian calligraphy.

a bleeding chalkboard

Oh but for you
I would be lost amongst the voices
of the crowd inside me.
But for you
I don't know what tongue I'd speak
or which sun I'd seek.
Something of your echo struck a chord
and now that music is all I want to hear.

*

As soon as I heard the opening lines of your tale
I was beside myself in grief
watching my body weeping out my own voice
so that I could hear yours better.


If my heart were a chalkboard
from corner to corner it would be filled
with broken vows like "yesterday"
and empty promises like "tomorrow"
next life, next never.

If my heart were a chalkboard
you wouldn't be able to see
whether I was green, black or blue beneath.
Every inch would be rewritten over and over
so full that the empty spaces would have long ago gone bankrupt
so full that each letter could be everything from an A to a Z
each symbol and word representing anything to its opposite.

If my heart were a chalkboard
through some magical alchemy
tears would clear slivers of unwritten space
and leave trails of unspoken truth
as they wash out layers of old words
old wounds and chalk scars.

***

And so I listen for your voice
at the birth, betrayal
death and rebirth
of every love affair
ever told
every saga and epic
every tale of the heart
that made it to word
in the the hope of hearing
that one wordless love story
that draws me to all these words.