I’m posting this for my few lovely darlings that come and visit me regularly. I wanted to let you know that my passports are on the table, my bags are almost packed, and I’m off soon. Europe calls me, and then family. I will be blogging over the next two months, but not for the next two weeks. Bid me bon voyage!
Ciao, xx.
This is one of my all-time favorite songs,
I’ve been singing this all day,
I dedicate this to all of you,
because I love you all.
she said my dear,
though your compliments are embedded with razors
you have mistaken my multifoliate face for another’s,
for that’s not it, that’s not what I meant, at all
about the rise and fall of the ocean,
you are the bright sun on the brow, and I,
well, if I told you that I radiate life
that I have been called a source of energy
that I swim for at least an hour on most days,
every year, twirling in the water like a happy dolphin
from March to November, that in person
I am always smiling, helpful, giving, charming, skipping,
and have a bountiful inner gift that infects circles of people
weaving them together with a fierce loving knit.
I am, you see, a coffee drinker, not tea,
a sea-breeze that fills the lusty lungs before warbling
the book-ends at the start and stop of night,
it is only that I choose to hum like this
I am a mirror reflecting the dark, the stark,
hiding in the shade and coming out
at night, like a beautiful secret. I love the moonlight.
It compels me, calls me (haaaarmoneeeeeeeeeeeeeee….)
it is a matter of the neck/slant frets on my acoustic guitar,
the wood slightly warped, definitely
a different style of expression, but not of sadness;
there is a purpose to it I can’t even begin to explain but
yes, it is a grand opera, the harmony of the spheres
each chord’s strum has its own spectrum
and point of resonance on it that suits it best,
of course we are friends have we ever been anything but
words, lovely minds and lovely words, birds.
Suddenly
the breath of spring barely exhaled
and the pink lush petals of the flower bush turned pale yellow
hello, now how is this possible, where did the time go
how many poets have written on the darling buds of May, the flickering
blush of bloom caught out of the corner of an eye
instead of looked at directly in the face,
smiling at our reflection as if to say
how beautiful the self is in each phase
instead of focusing on a pimple or a dimple you wish you had
or green eyes like your mother, or bigger breasts,
noticing that furrowing third eye on your head
or those few kilos you needed to shed off your thighs because
then you really would be beautiful.
We take notice only in the leaving,
in the fleeting departure of things,
holding up our hands under the harsh summer sun
taking note of the growth rings around our knuckles.
Does this happen to others who write? I’m going through a bout of silence. Thoughts and ideas for poems I want to write cross through my mind like passing clouds in a field. I can only listen and observe in quiet wonder, without words to shape the universe within.
.
.
Last night I dreamt of Salah again.
.
.
.
.
.
Strange how dreams work, a small part of me slightly conscious that this is a dream, remarking that I am eighteen once again and feeling happy, like I had a chance to do it all over, though I am roughly ten years older now than Salah was then, lying within the quiet curled plastic walls of the intensive care unit, tent city hospital, somewhere in Saudi Arabia. He still has that same startled look in his wide eyes, that look before the death, that glittery-shocked gaze I became intimately familiar with in so many eyes, back then.
He was special to me, probably because when he first arrived to our makeshift hospital he was in a coma, his belly cavity split open from breast bone to pelvis, bound together by rubber hose and a miracle. They found him wandering in the desert two days after he’d been shot in the stomach. The infection had settled in by then and they couldn’t sew him back up, so that the poison could drain out of him first.
When he regained consciousness I would still go and visit him at night, after my shift was over, and he would tell me that he remembered someone stroking his head when he was under, I think because he knew it pleased me, for it was my hand upon his brow, perhaps because we both searched for meaning in all of this carnage and wanted to hang on to something to believe in, that there was a life outside of and beyond this bodily existence. Perhaps he comes and pays a visit now and then to remind me that there is something more, or that my mind wants to believe that there is and so dreams of him, of me, still caressing his head, hoping that he will wake up.
Salah was a school teacher. He taught English to children in Iraq before Saddam’s men forced him to join the army under the threat that they would kill his young wife if he didn’t, the wife he left behind who was pregnant with his first child that he never got to see or find out if it was a boy or a girl.
Who is to say that each and every war taking place on earth right now is not all of ours to contend with?
I wrote this last year for the most beautiful pair of eyes….I should say handsome, but beautiful is the right word…never saw such a depth before, such intelligence that rested in brilliant color…one could drown in them. I fell hard for them, I did….
A
pair of eyes
mesmerize
the notion—
capturing the
ocean!
Oh
yeux!
your sea green
emeraldine—
I drown in
hue.
bit of a spin-off-second-draft from a recent postpoem, but i like it a lot. i plagiarize myself.
But when I say you are like
a prickly star
it is only Mercury’s children
standing under fractured skies
lattice the waterfall’s thundering.
Then there’s hue, refracted twilight
bleeding out your splintered spark
amplitude e-pitch—shattering
the panes of night.
something i wrote last october…
Mokie,
when you took me
to your special spot on your rocky hill you called a mountain it seemed so big to you in the flatland deserts an invincible mountain you loved so well where you hid from the world to watch the sunset the sun setting it was unsettling that it was only several weeks before your passing that you took us there on a deceiving New Year’s eve where you lit firecrackers against the new year night they were brilliant and beautiful just like you in flight even then I noticed your wasting form and recoiled in repulsion from your immense rotting odor from my eminent impending destruction in your dying that you knew I knew was
coming for you how did you know I felt it too like how I sometimes
still feel you
Mokie,
did you know that your mountain
was really only an enormous pile of rock dirt and cement collectively decided by others in the new houses miles away that this was to be the dumping burial ground of superfluous extra material leftovers they did not need any more like your body did you really also hear how your death was knocking at your kidneys that night below your chattering teeth it was very cold but what a beautiful fleeting sight of your silhouette’s light against the backdrop drop of night do you know that I used to go there every year on your happy death day to you all by myself and climb up there to catch the dying light of the sinking sun and listen to the rattling wind in my ears I did this for years I would remember the light in your sunken eyes as I lit one up in memory of you as I knew you would always want me to do
Mokie,
when death took you
it was a beautiful day such a beautiful day to die I remember telling you that too in my head and hearing you laugh and mock my chattering teeth and you telling me not to cry did you know I never thought I would live to see you go do you know I knew which of your friends loved you the best they were the ones that tried to kiss me after your death they were the ones that dug out your grave as the rest of us stood watching the growing pile of dirt that stood so little next to your mountain that still stands far away in its place I will never forget February seven or my concern that day that the earth was too cold of a place how I worried for those first two weeks I didn’t sleep a blink how I worried for you that it was too cold to beburied in dirt that deep you were simply too young to go at twenty-eight how I raged at how I somehow knew you were going to die but never managed to tell you goodbye or give you that last kiss
you asked for in the hospital that I only heard about much
later, Mokie.
