To Whom It May Concern Again it is coming of age, blown open blossom, turn key operators and survivors, coming up for air twice. Yet forty or fifty are burned alive, forty or fifty are buried, forty or fifty become lost scrambling up the hill to check. When the machines start to stop at zero, replacing the hums with great silence filled and fitted by one huge conversation between nature and her guests: promises and facts, big success stories, all of it gravity gravity gravity.

The Sea Shell

 

In this heaven shall they wait and all those

like us for you to pound your fist on the wall

and heave your head upon the concrete, to scrape

your knuckles before digging into your long lost skin?

Like your father listening stupidly to the radio

in this vault of sadness pending, as you tidy

up bank notes and shave for the last mistress,

there were so many things I could have told you.

It isn't love on the verge of the moon's darkest side

that locks those that ponder out of paradise. It isn't

the sound of night as it groans along and takes

out breaths one by one to examine them.

This ultimate secret that poisons the years

bloomed and blustered before it pried open

our mouths and eyes and ears, entered us

through our dreams and premonitions.

News and music and announcers whisper

sweet nothing into the landscape of time,

into the thousand years of study and testing

the ignorant and ugly ear.

The Parable of the Snake

 

Can't remember what that one had, when it happened,

a part of me began to let loose on the reverse side

of Jack's feeding plan, another spin off

with a nod to final debate, the gentle leading

as if we completely understand.

Who swapped peas for beans in the jar

and then switched jars, the one heart

scathed and debrided with scissors and flame

the other still chock full?

Too late say the stick men, too early

says the yawning hole at West 23rd,

keep walking toward the uneven light.

This army of bitten tongues swells

then retracts as if it is breathing,

a long tailed carnivore begins

and ends the similitude by swallowing.
Who will stop the marching? how deep
the tunnel winds toward the turbine,
tourists forage in the racks on the way.
We pass a sign that says buckle up!

There might not be enough love now

to finance the mortgage, hold up the cow.

These souvenirs might have to go, price slashed

and cells remaining on the handles.

A generation to come, several files by law

demolished in seven years like itches,
snouts and beaks crud and fodder,
bait and switch, rattle and shed.
One more long minute is all
the clock ever said as it clicked and tocked.

 

QIBLA

No one is more surprised that me.

There he is with his Qibla. I am fixated on the girl next to him, she couldn't be more than 18. She is adjusting her head ...cover, fixing it the way hijabi girls do when they are interested. Pushing hair in while pulling it out, eyes up and then down again, no one noticing the way their lithe bodies twist toward the object of their affection.

There is clapping and a bride and groom. The most beautiful bride a person could imagine. Her groom sits attentively near and love is revealed in its small moments. Ruths rule the castles of other people.

It is so.

I watch it over and over, stop, replay. A child wanders in and out of the frame, belongs to no one. The young woman cannot resist another look over and another. The cameras of heaven between Qibla and Qibla.

The two wests, the two easts under the pleasant lights . Tulsa. The way cities look from 35,000 like giant lava flows. The world is ancient.

And there she is, Rabab. Her heart beating inside the camera, her steady hand is on the wheel, and pushes him away and toward the person who with steady hand and that awful eye, one terrible eye and the other shut, packages memories.

How many angels were there? Two? Seventy-two?

She enters from the right side of his Qibla. Did she know I'd be watching her now six years ahead? How many treatments had been completed, how much chemo left to push in? In the beginning she used to wear ice caps but by the time I reached her after six days of one person after another entering Adlieh, entering Babdaat, it was clear that ice had not worked to prevent the theft of hair, the stolen color of her skin.

He is throbbing and glowing. His mind awash with houris. Taking his risik* before its time, playing the part of Sultan to his crew. The man of the hour and a child wanders into the frame, belongs to no one. The girl straightens her head cover, pushes hair in in order to pull some out. It is so. Take a walk on the Wild Side.

And Rabab turns him Qibla-ward, she is there forever looking at me saying: wake up.

In Fact the Last Yard
I dig grave after grave
to put this into piece by piece,
the advantage of time...
when it serves the guilty
is time, like Satan
forever waiting for the inevitable
to come, bartering and stipulating
as he does. Put each one to rest
says the self accusing soul.
Resurrect them again says the devil
and again and again.
Try to pull the scatter
into a single location
as angels stand guard
and retrieve data
and how the stockpile grows!
  I, the forever grave digger,
shovel in hand, half asleep,
stand in the stillness. The glade
of anger a few yards away,
that wholesome place
where the wicked meet death.
In the chorus one hears
the cracked voice of reason
who screamed late into the night,
death opera, she sings lullabies
to the frozen and ashamed.
If only the others understood
the list of sins, the stinging ablation
of forgiveness, the Z track
of the maze where the surgeon
cauters and amends.

Forgiveness

...an origami in reverse
unfolding wing and leg and snout
Was it you that said
I am just crazy, that
my imagination takes over sometimes?
Did you whisper in low tones
that God was punishing me?
How natural it all seemed
in those times
all the wild animals tearing
at my flesh as you spied into our voices.
The checklist includes
miracles, backstabs, brainwashes.
A wallet sized photo, in the wallet.
The pink shirt which you testified
was green, as if that meant
I hadn't seen it
or the sandals and list.
The five separate swears
from which I abstained in fear
for us both.
As you thumbed through the files
in my backseat try as you might
to catch me offending another criminal
like yourself, does that make sense
to anyone but me?  And you?
There she is now trying to shake it off,
having the time of her life
as perpetuity forms into her regrets,
having lost love at that age,
having lost her hopes and courage,
all I see is alopecia and a black bra,
a few antics at the beach
and a liquor store receipt.
All I see is the desperate poverty
that drives non believers into hell.
Would it help to remember
the first call, the 'how are you now'
as I lay in a catatonia
from which escape is never certain:
love of my life/liar
and now as I hold back the demon
during lovemaking in a stupor
of mere tolerance, as I weep for passion
and her ghost, all is still
when I awake to the duty of ghusl
one more time.

The Skulker

Betrayal has seven layers, five of them destiny

sandwiched between black and white.

A card arrived with the bouquet,

in the back room on your bed.

The signal was busy the day at the beach.

One hundred and forty vignettes,

doesn’t matter what happened next or who held the camera.

In Adlieh I kept a key tied to my thumb

when you first met in long glances.

A falling star over my right shoulder

as you dropped the last vestige of your humanity.

She slid on the stretcher as we headed south

between love and the last meal.

That year the tomatoes volunteered and grapes returned

when beauty turned its hard back on memory.

I noted that it was a rudder not an axle

as defeat sculpted a new side between breezes

where we sat on the banks of Patagonia

waiting our turn.

Is In The Details

A neighbor reported that a woman had been yelling

For four hours on Blank Avenue, he did not know

If there was anyone else at the residence.

He could not see the last two months nor did

He pretend to have remorse over his actions.

The police shook their heads and then nodded,

Perused the array of dead plants on the porch,

Her disheveled hair and bloodshot eyes,

The witnesses parted curtains and sighed,

It was eight pm on the Ivory Coast,

Contaminants swirled in the air

But this was not pertinent nor did it indicate

The launch of a new investigation.

He whispered into the mouthpiece,

“Do you see how God has punished you?”

From his seat on the airport bus driving

Through the streets of Montserrado County

The day after a body was left until a quarter to four,

The viral count spewing itself onto the ground

Outside the luxury goods store beside someone’s

Next whore just before the curfew.

No, the neighbor reported he did not know

If anyone else was at the residence,

He could not see the torn clothes

In the bag at the back of the garage,

Could not see the last shard of glass

From an old portrait of boys that had hung

On her wall, he could not reach the bless-ed

Fragments of the wallet sized photo

Or the stack of boarding passes and business cards.

The good cop bad cop routine lasted a half an hour,

Until one of them spoke into his lapel,

The listener and speaker following the unwritten code,

“Aren’t you the mayor’s sister?” he asked,

Or weren’t you the one we caught behind the hedge

In the park?  Why haven’t you changed your address

With the DMV?  The cops evaluated sobriety as they

Perched their left hands on the holsters.

Luckily, this was not reported.

The devil wept in the back bedroom,

Looked solemnly at piles of documentation

Unable to decipher one last signature

Unable to sample the DNA or hear

The hand as it witnessed to the foot.

Letter To The Dead

"Didn’t you like the way the ants help
the peony globes open by eating the glue off?"
-Galway Kinnell, "Why Regret?"

Don’t blow out the last light in my soul,
the one called pity, the one called empty
for it is the only one that burns.
Its unsteady flicker consumes
atom after atom of air,
the breeze wanders through her door.
The lighthouse keeper has locked
his shop and turned away the sea
in agony where his breath holds
the final blow to all that burned
all that beckoned he has stowed
away his key. Beware the cool
vapor that settles near the quay,
beware the tips of your fingers,
beware the beating of your heart
where nothing but stones and stitches
remain. The movement of its chambers
disrupt the universe where stars
melt into time and the past
behind which is more past
and the past.

Kaak vendor on the Corniche in Beirut, circal 1990s. All rights reserved.

In Monrovia

the hundred aliases of evil

know poverty’s single house address,

familiar with all her drab,

pointless days spent in mud

and frustration, robbing Peter

to pay Paul. The taxis carry

the message of God to every door

and gallons of rain wash

the rusts of love from the naked

bodies of the dead and the dying.

The pungence of death’s naked stare

on the floor of a hut bearing

her breasts to an old man there

waiting for Judgement to come.

The last view I saw as he stumbled

toward the back gate, broken

and breaking will haunt

the waterways of our prison no more.

All those hours spent waiting

for the guard to pass by, to pass

us our crusts and slop

sink into the sewers

on the tales of snakes.

Rub al Qali

Here in sacred spaces, these invaded places

where the last of you retracts

the lips of my soul, not once

did you read the cover to cover,

not once did you stop to take the time

to hold on and craving after craving,

the taxi driver past the gravestones

in the wadi, the gull as she shat

 a slap from the Lord of the Worlds

and Istanbul

might wake me from the sleep of prison.

Chain after chain encircled until finally

chin, nose, eyes were wrapped

into the blindness of bondage.

Did you know love that I bleached

every single uniform, took time to

clean the blinds? At last to collect you

from your airports and first class lounges

to brush aside these meaningless advances.

Here my heart lies listlessly

between creation and time

waiting alone until Paris closes,

until Morocco flashes her headlights

in the whore-light of dawn.

The Intercessors

Have they at last clipped my tongue,

severed the last nerve of the agnost?

All that watches waits,

all that plays dead, the shiver

of the ropes in the wells

rally at last in the echoes

of occultation, near that fog.

The Fifth One Ended Up in France


-inspired by Harris Burdick’s drawing left w/Wenders



She sat there with her coffee

Incredulous it seemed (to me)

re: the abduction, the beheading

the explosion down in the wadi.

Her elderly husband

nodded to sleep near

a Hindu yonder.

How would it be if I spoke

about the angels and epiphanies,

the series of dreams?

How bourgeois to come all the way

to Paris and be fearful

of using a password

on the internet:

dressed in the requisite blacks

and whites that are expected

of Americans in Paris

-so as to avoid detection

amid the fashionable French.

There, as I observed

a young man dashing to and fro

each freshly abandoned larder

to pay his rent in some

run-down Parisian

haunt, tapping out hope

in case-sensitive detail,

rubbing his hands each time,

a bit Dickens, a bit Faust.

Her poor dog it seemed

would be all alone until ten

in Boca

because of the delays

and that’s all that matters

to someone, somewhere.

I Remember Rasha

Baabdat, September 2013

When suddenly I thought of Rasha there,

between the jail walls and under

the stirring portraits of ladies

in handmade fantasy dresses,

each one from a different place,

foreigners all at home within

these locked-up boxes,

like mix-matched jewelry.

I thought of Rasha there

pulling the dark hairs

from her armpits, drawing out

her long Kurdish brows,

primping for the someone outside

who must be waiting, who sends

us coffee with sugar, for whom

she left her children back home

in Syria along the border.

I thought of Rasha and the way

corruptible people laugh,

inviting tramps and robbers

to suck them dry and move on

to the next home-wrecked

easy to please wife.

I thought of Rasha as she squatted

over the flat hole, eliminating

the insides of herself,

scrubbing her mons, her

heavy white thighs open

and plucking, plucking, plucking

for hours at a time

while we waited to urinate

until she emerged hairless

and smiling, see!  she says,

as if it were easy.

Her smile lit a thousand

dungeon lanterns until

the portraits on the jail walls

curtsied in the flickering

boiler-room light.

Fatme Takes Beauty Away The moment she got news of her release, we all began to weep: not for her but for ourselves. No more mornings with her wrung out kohl colored eyes, her two beautiful dresses one from the Iraq that she slung on before her cold two-gallon shower and one for after. Somehow she managed to change them from moment to moment, or maybe it was her face that changed between one tragic thought and another, as a little boy floats left and right in a rear view on his old bike, the kind with a bell, that earmarks a vision you hope does not end because parts of your self vanish into these scraps, odds and ends.

All Our Cracked Voices

These might be the last
burned cars where hens hunt
and peck, drab green
noises heart break in the distance
the body parts in stunned engines.
War children hide between houses
and behind skirts quickwashed if at all,
squirrelly, quiet and big-eyed.
Borrowed goods are returned
by doubt and shame
not so much a pair, more
like siblings of fear
near such grand exits
as the sky ends twice.

The Stream

Through the forest the wind
does whistle and up the stream
where time does end
a backwards clock
and pounds the drizzle
that fills the lake
for fish and men
with all the things
of which we're made
so to walk into the glade
or swim on down
past the still
and green green trees
that leave us by
to swim and leap
beneath the mountains
oh so steep.
Can you hear
the water call
as it treads
the waterfall?
These breaths betray
the breeze and say
today you might go away.



The Time...from an ongoing discussion I have been involved in for about fifteen years on a message bored...I mean board. I've known some of these people for over a decade! And they still get into the nastiest arguments....
I appreciate both people and have known you both for a long, long
time. I wouldn't referee this match if you paid me.


People just need to relax and get along. The point is to learn
something..share ideas you know.

The Islamic calendar....doesn't stream well into modern life because
it is ever changing in the geared-to-Gregorian year. In all
actuality, you need both things and a year actually ends up being
the Metonic one which is roughly nineteen years long. But we cannot
have birthdays so far apart it seems!

It isn't a competition you know and the fact of the matter is....we
live in space and we don't even know which part of space we live in
or whether it has edges, directions, etc. Time itself is distorted
and I think it is the most amazing thing that we live in a "plane"
of existence where the sun and moon are available to us to "reckon"
our days and our lives. Without them we'd not know where we stood
and truly, we'd not be alive to know about our ignorance either!

This is what the Quran relates about it and it cannot be refuted by
anyone. Period.

[6.96] He causes the dawn to break; and He has made the night for
rest, and the sun and the moon for reckoning; this is an arrangement
of the Mighty, the Knowing.

The argument that ought to be waged however isn't about which
calendar is best or more accurate (in a universe of many
conclusions) but rather the argument is about causality. Wicked
little argument that it is and if I had a nickel for every time I've
seen it waged here at the Cafe or elsewhere...and I don't
particularly want to wage it again because it tends to be a circular
argument.

I'll just state the case of Causality in the Quran. To me it is
perhaps one of if not the most important statements in the whole
Quran:

[25.45] Have you not considered (the work of) your Lord, how He
extends the shade? And if He had pleased He would certainly have
made it stationary; then We have made the sun an indication of it -
from The Distinction

Two things.

1. We BELIEVE that the sun creates our shadow but the Quran refutes
that and states that it is only made to appear that way. Allah
actually created everything independent of everything else with
unique characteristics that are so fantastically arranged that they
APPEAR to have causes and outcomes that are intrinsically related.

But they aren't and the world is an illusion.

2. When Armstrong walked on the moon he found that distances and
surfaces could not be judged accurately by his senses. What
appeared to be close was in fact far away and what appeared to be
deep was in fact shallow.

The eyes do deceive us.



So. Which calendar is accurate?

Neither.


The Islamic calendar is dedicated to actions associated with worship
of Allah.

The solar calendar is dedicated to actions associated with the
material world.

It's all about measuring things accurately in the first place and to
be honest, I've never quite understood why it would be the case that
ancient people had to invent a calendar in the first place except
that they wanted to know about the future events so that they could
plan better. That is common to us all....ignorance about the morrow.

There is no one who knows about the future except the prophets or
who related it with any accuracy whatsoever. That isn't to say that
we always understood their prophecies but we do try.

The most important prophecy in my estimation is relating to the
prophets themselves and the people to whom they were sent. Back in
the day....prophets were sent to certain groups..usually villages
that were isolated from other places. We don't know about the other
places so much except what exists in the historical records and the
archeology. We only have these few handfuls of stories about
ancient people.

Okay..so cut to the chase.

Prophets were sent to clearly defined people...the people of Noah,
the people of Madyan, the people of Gomorrah, etc. Each group was
given a prophecy of destruction and ordered to mend their ways and
each of them (with one exception that I know of and that would be
the people of Jonah) were destroyed. One prophet for one group.
Other communities apparently were unaffected by those events.

Then you have the last prophet and messenger named Mohamed (SA). He
was sent to which group and with which prophecy?

It is something that concerns us all you know and even if people
don't believe in an End Times they usually know a person who does.

So...he was sent to the whole of mankind.

Al'ham'dulillah.

And so the question is...who will listen? I'd
say..personally...that the message is loud and clear. Not a person
on the planet hasn't heard that there is a very big religious
conundrum about.

The Catholic church is reconsidering celibacy....and rightly so.

Those are the signs that something bigger than anyone here is at
work and no one can stop the clock now. They can only try to hear
it ticking.

Ode to a Savage Nation
(For J)

Tables and more tables
and on them books,
the right books near
coffee, the right coffee.
Poses, the right poses
for people who hate
the measles vaccine
who hate injustice
by playing the right music
at the right time
for their customers
of thought, painstaking
work though it is.
This is E flat, G sharp
right near the Brie,
drink the water
of lillies mixed with
the books on the tables.

But we just hate the measles vaccine!
Bully. My precious bully.
Where are you today?
Ah. The church is coming
on strong today
we can go in and out,
we can see how much
the windows matter
but we hate this measles vaccine.
Our name is Jenny, all our names
are Jenny and our boys
play tag all alone.

There is something wrong
with everything, this poet
states we hate photos
of beards because
it is wrong to use photos
of beards when using
bombs on the muslims
but she still says: beards.
She thinks the beards are bad
and hence, prefers photos
of muslims dying without
their beards on, just as juicy.

We hate the measles vaccine
and our name is Jenny.
We at Jenny like to be Jenny,
we have all sorts of lazy cats
that wander around our stone
houses, figure out the prize.
This call was about shingles.
Should we send a letter home
to the parents and tell them
about the shingles? Should we?
Come on huh huh, should we, should we?
Send the letter home, tell me,
should we tell the parents
about the truth?
And our boys play tag
all alone but we just hate
the shingles and the measles vaccine.

Beard.
1A beard should only be as long
as the fist.
2A beard should not be left
to dangle on the chest
to resemble beards of old men.
3The beard distinguishes
boys from women.

Does she really agree
that beards are impolite?
Poets. Real good poets.
And just real good poems,
like us, not the same
thing as Jenny is used to
and calls herself herself.
Talks to herself all the time.
She must be tired, real tired
of all those books, she must
have conversations with cats,
conversations with lemons,
play hackysack when the bell rings
and the announcer says:

Play hacky sack now.

Cut the tall trees.
I keep hearing Jenny
in my head, keep telling her
it isn't about the vaccines
darling, it's not about
the bones either.
I've had about enough
of those miracle workers
in the alleys now. Had enough
of that poisonous tea.
It isn't about the beards Jenny.
It's a bit more than that.

A Poem of Somalian Piracy

I. The Chastisement

Thou shalt not read this
furthermore without the slim slap
of the mother waiting for her sons
at the doors of the ancient cathedrals,
down by the polished stones,
reverent river rocks of the Apache
in the oldest canyons of purgatory.

There is a wine-red glow in the shallows,
a tin flash in the sun dazzle.

A grim voice, no comparison.

On the deck we watched Bayruth
until the night churned a path
away into the foam. The sea
already spread into an oily wound
of war. There were no choices
but to watch and wonder, pray
for the steadfast. A telemachas-vision in the mess
bright with simple animations; children and women
held tight to the cots and cribs
of the Navy whose cargo was labeled:

The hypocrisy of mighty charities,
dry forms in the ether
the pirates of democracy contained
in the hold of great ships made
of steel and already sold to India
to outflank the archaics
in the next war, pirates
who pimp ships to battle, the
slaves in the caves of byzantium:
someone's children, someone's baby
no one knows how hard they've tried.
And few, if any, know the seeds
that are planted on distant shores,
no one knows this Obleo.

II The Reckoning

One vessel after another was boarded,
time zones failed the miserable ticking,
sleep impossible and tears plenty.
Some had been herded three times before
and others returned to the docks of Bayruth
unwilling to flee and able to bear witness
if only for one more day in the longest history
of the utopias, proud and prejudiced, as if to say:

we are not your playthings and your pathology
isn't what it used to be, a kind of show business.

O pathologie of the ancient
twisted mind rage, a cornered
battered animal with false teeth
shriven to the core, cavity stricken.
Blind, belligerent, cursed and chosen
for a confessio of popularity,
a pharoah's shadowy throne?
The several refusals and rebukes
are all out there, the big stone
idol witnessed the smaller ones
being beaten into gravel
and was silent, like so many poets.
Pardon and unpardon the pastors,
reveal and unreveal the pleasantries,
make and unmake everything into barter.

III The gray steps lead up to the Cedars

The creek Zacatecas meanders downhill,
swells and shrinks, borrows rocks
bones, marbles and screws.
Older stories are told in the silt beds,
grass returns as green
as the day grass was born.
No one knows the ancients
when time speeds up.
An ant carries the dead body
of an ant, drops it
then walks in a circle
around the corpse, nudges
his comrade once more and moves on.
War is the basic story of all things
pleasant and otherwise, empires
fall in the anthills eternal.
Forests plead with the fires and wind,
the ever returning floods.
Nothing lasts forever except the creation
and even that, is a trick of light
a toast to the cedars!
Mighty cedars in rain, cedars in mine
and bible, perpetually holding still.
Continually growing old for Gilgamesh
and the return of the ancient teacher,
the boat slayer, the little green man Kadr
with his problematic conundrums.

IV. To The Immortals

A great throng, generations of nostalgia
and those who believe they will remain









a thousand years more to discuss
the outcomes of Armageddon

your masks are made of stone,
metal hip bones and gravity defied
by the priests who guarantee
a kind monasticism, pedantic really.
Monk, Priest, Idolatress
are the foods of the iconoclasts
and the sand you leave behind
is the same sand to build more.
This awakening is only a taste,
there is no recovery room in hell,
no narcan and certainly few surprises.
Spring is for the resurrected
and goblets are full of rain.
The descriptives escape most,
the heat waves closer and the constant
night in the outline of shadows,
the gap free echo of the ether
is the chalk outline walking sideways
towards the joining hour, the eden time.
Do you not visit the graves of the ancients?

V. Mankind

In the days of distant myth
local stories drew close and closer
the parables of the future lay
dying in grassy fields full of markers,
where flocks used to go, herds
there, where seeds are planted
one by one, the now burnt
forests. Men like the sea
gathering the fog to themselves
in the dreamy coats of dawn
in tents of stone, breakfast gardens,
where graves full of saints stay sweetly buried.
How the mule used to bray
when one of them died but now

there are too many

and the herds run amok - invasion weary,
people rebuilding for the 100th
time, plaster gives up to the rain
before it starts and rust is soon.

VI. Troy

A summer it was
the city full of hot dreams
Standard and Quaker
the sea just full of it,
unquenchable, out of reach
near the boat wrecks there.
The head of Augustus, El Cid Pimpus
Aquarius, maybe two-hundred
thousand bronze cast idols lay
over it in the churning
deeps under ossified
strata, girder strata,
the strata of the quiet
years foreign between layers
Corinthian to the modern treasuries
cast into the deeps, strata
of sewage and sinew,
the lightweight strata of letters
fixed in juxta
bracelets of ruby, garnets
for eardrums, her eyes
were sapphire in the sweet wood
of the mines. Nothing but teeth
and guesswork in a blanket of fuel.

That summer the voices brought flags
to the indigenes, herded them into trans-
ports, gave 'em a bit of water,
some bread and cheese maybe
and told them to cry

A stalwart muslim's ha been killed
now cry, an easy compliant crowd
of schoolchildren and house-help.

I know it is true cuz I wuz there
minding my own business, plying
my trade quietly not asking
for forgiveness or barter, few
friends had I save for the tricks
of the fathers, doting diligent men.
Schoolmasters 'til ten then after
lunch the brazen begin
in offices and backstrips.
They'd see a Russian bargirl or Romanian
or an Asian, no funds ever changed hands
until day break in a distant room.
Sometimes up in this very same edifice.
She'd come in as if to clean up a bit
for the tenant 'out of the country'
who'd left his keys with a friend.

So I know it's true, all of it and no
one can pay a woman
like me to lie, I won't do it
although the tenant did try -
gave mepickled batinjaen
and clocks. Oh he'd do it alright
but I never turned by back
on him, a daring
thief from the Be'aaah Valley.

What a dear valley for potatoes!
Potatoes like human heads, pearly
white with thin skin and guns.
So what I relate is true, belligerent
with the good intentions to advise
the innocent. I once was that too
disbelieving, minding my own business
plying my trade, not asking
for barder nor accepting any bribe.
In other words, I was trying
hard to please myself sometimes
but not more than that.

Late at night -early
in the morning sounds in the stair
well, he'd be carrying a crate
of tomatoes, his pockets full
of cash -he worked as a newspaper
salesman, so he said, so the hours
were quite odd, deliquent even.
There'd be the sound of a bag
placed near my door,
then he'd go up the last flight
of stairs, the lock would groan
and his keys would be finally
silent as he made something
in the kitchen, cold food
for a bachelor somewhat
of a criminal but a passionate one
who'd touch any woman he could:
wife, sister, baby - he didn't care,
just wanted something feminine
to take care of. I'd pull away
and complain to mi esposo
pero no mucho entonces
I pitied him and he pitied me -
a tenuous love and honesty
is the issue when they pay
poor people to cry.

Beirut is mostly tent and the buildings
are sometimes stone and sometimes
sticks. It is a mobile edifice
for treason and statuary, shifting
shadows of the markets, a newspaper-
man is a convenient neighbor
when a Valentine arrives -
Bloody Big Hole in the Heart
of the city, the blood ran
for two whole years in the aquaducts.

All the while he'd bring his
cash and tomatoes in the early
hours and I'd wait morning,
then afternoon, then eveing
plying my trade of watching
then writing the treaties.
I never wore shoes and contracted
the hookworm's cough
so I could reach his door
unnoticed as if a sleeping baby
was inside, the big door would open
and his eyes were large, they'd open
more, he was twice my size
and kept a toy gun in the foyer.
He'd grab me and pull me close
to catch my old thrills
if only tangentially, his hands
were very large.
Then he'd hury back to bring
some chocolates. He loved
chocolates, really really loved
chocolates, German ones.
Near the settee where once
we drank tall glasses of apple
juice and the Philistine for hire
thought we were drunk on whiskey.
He was a cheat and I caught
his eyes in a glance at my breasts -
didn't like it and the philistine
thought I'd not notice nor would I
notice he'd started stealing
my properties, one and the same.

Look Here Archival Works/middle easte

Archival Works




The goodness of words

it all starts here
with the goodness of words
the feel of words
sound, taste of words
coming out of the mouth
the pen
coming out as new born babes
fighting breathing
all at once
release sliding out
sliding and sliding
laying still
gasping
goodness all around
eyes and more eyes
looking in, looking out
blinking
wet and finished
smothered in ink
blood tears
out at last
free,
no more aimless
floating in another's
sea, another's supply
no more silence
only words
coming out
fast and ripe
cry baby amen
cry allelujah
amen
hosannah in the highest
hey amen
this crib is a church
this cry is hunger
amen allelujah
this is for love
this for pain
cry all over
again
again
cry amen
try a little harder
make it a little broader
fill as much of this space
with cry amen.

Easter: Paul to the Corinthians

It used to be that forty days
was enough time
to tally everyone's sins
starting with burned palms,
Mardi Gras and Schmirnoff's,
all of it clamoured
to BE
in the words of Paul
to the Corinthians
-that was before I knew
what Ephesus looked like
under the clear blue Turkish sky
-before I saw the library
and the brothel ad
chiselled into the stones
of ancient avenues-
it was there and then
fact took precedent
over the great fictions
regarding very specific crimes
and indecencies-
when I saw the employment
of natural reason
in the cause of genocide
over there in the Promised Land
-indeed I determined the promise
to be nothing more
than a barbaric token
where nothing really existed
but the lack of ethics
and good politics-

Where has reason gone
that you would subject yourselves
to such meandering gossip
tailored to your hopes-
casual and unrelenting?

Advent and resurrection aside
your logic better add up
in the end
to righteousness, lest
you find yourself written
into the history
of the Angry God who studies
intent better than action
and waits your return...
the event horizon beckons
your better self without breath
or substance, gravity is not the issue
on the lawless ground, only an afterthought
to your stubborn network of subatomic
particles on their way through
obeying the higher commands
without handicap or false intention..
unstudied and wiser than the books
written over and over
in caves and bar-rooms
throughout time.

In Riyadh, God sends snakes

Right before the fourth inning,
and my third cigarette taken in the parking lot,
the home team and the away team
gather near what must be the naval of the earth,
to see a sand colored snake
laying on the mound-
as if it was blown into the halo of park lights
between strike three and batter up,
by a Riyadh summer storm or divine intervention.
James Joyce would have stood clapping in the bleachers
for this proof of one moral second
near the center of everything right here.


Hymm

A weeping man and his boy
at salvation's door
gunpoint.
The deadly gaze of a soldier
a photographer, the world.
Surely it will win the Pulitzer,
we all say
gasping on Friday afternoon
before another dinner
and the stretch of time
stolen from a mere
ten year old boy.

They so easily forget,
what they themselves
remind every slave of
in clips shedding crocodile tears.
They forget Goliath
in imagined largeness.
The great heaving machine
plunders and rapes
with the rapture of a criminal.

I once saw a baby
murdered at C'anaa,
his scalp peeled forward
from his pillaged cranial vault
as the peacekeeper wept.
A whole family shredded
like coconuts, opened wide
at their table.

You want me to paint sunflowers,
write hymms?

We drove through the South
past a village, marked
by the bones of houses
and a rusty sign.
Knowing full well, treason
galloped before us,
taking with her
their flesh and secrets.

I arrive at the border,
declare myself dangerous
armed with bloody stones,
praying for their destruction
like a Moses in Sinai.

Addendum to Hymm:

I will use my mouth
as a bomb,
my heart a plane.
Launch rockets from my womb
if that is what is left me.

Emily Dickenson is not my mother.

Do what you want with my clothes,
burn them bury them.

An Occupation in Three Acts

In this scene
we consider the actress
addressing the entire
Syrian armed forces.

During Act III
she is butchered on the third floor
of the abandoned building
the Syrians use for recreation.

When the climax
takes place
audience members
are asked to walk out.

Back to the opening scenes
in which Courtney or Faith
stumble onto the remains
of an occupied building.

In the farthest room
are wine bottles and a flak jacket,
twisted pieces of old rope
and pictures of half dressed women from magazines.

Other rooms have similar items,
old pieces of rotten bread,
discarded clothing
and cigarette butts.

In the closing scenes of Act II
Faith or Courtney find belief
in the creator and sustainer
of the entire universe.

When we return to Acts I and IV
we are reminded to applaud
at certain preordained times,
the moments of liberation.

The encore is performed
while Faith or Courtney
rise into the air
suspended by thin bungee cords.

American soldiers advance
dressed as dancers in full regalia
lifting her spirit
from the refuse of her occupation.


Ode to Wolf O'Meara

Arriving dressed as the Canterbury Tales
no small effort, I placed my keys
in the wife swapping tray of American Beauty,
decided to keep my Ice Storm legs crossed,
mind all a-whirl, dancing in the mizzling rains
which could be seen through a window
made of polar bear skin and whale fat,
a real Iroquois squaw-maiden in the Long House.

What could be done about the matter
anyway? I was there, riding in the Range Rover
man-made comfort interior with the radio
playing What's that flower you have on/
Could it be a faded rose from days gone by?
O vey! Miss Ellen Steiner might agree
that I'd learnt the paux du chat in a room
occupied the next year by Sister Miserable Josepha
but in my mind, it was here, in Yellow Knife
where the snow blowed cold, the will stiffened.

My human body trembled, it danced, it weakened
the snow blowed some more, a desert freeze
if you will, the shag carpet near the bookshelf
contained particles of food from the maiden voyage,
the bookshelf held Ecce Homo, My Book House
and several dozen anthologies of trout poems,
mostly. Some editions of Wordsworth, unabridged,
one by Alice Notley born in a river entered once,
and only once, by two poets. She wasn't there,
no need to be available to the press at press time.
You miss your friends in these times,
alone and looking through the whale blubber.

You also miss Wolf O'Meara in times like these.
Nothing like the town drunk to make things a bit lighter.
Listen to him tell the story of the town Vet
stitching up another bar-room fiesta will you?
"Walk in Beauty" Wolf often said and I gave him
a photograph of a Mexican girl in a party dress
walking towards her front door (if-you-could-call-it-that),
walking through a sea breadth of reflective monsoon mud.
A parting gift and his wife Patty long gone at the time-
cancer, alcoholism, the etiology of broken hearts.
How they loved one another, how young they were
when they entered our-ville, still sexy.
Still with that Hollywood glow that they entertained
as the clause for all the impropriety they wreaked
on the city council.

Yes, you miss Wolf in times like these,
alone at Yellow Knife and it's so cold in there.

San Pantaleone Sees Anne Sexton on the Corniche, Beirut

"Becoming a parody of oneself is not so bad when you figure
everything is a bit fetish, the tickling tease of the ego."
-Dr. Soandso, 1990, Commencement address given at Bryn Mawr, "The
history of stereographic photos revealing ladies' bloomers and the moral
controversies of our time."

Oh that divine itch!

The fuel of the fire, man
-the fractional distillation
-the rising to the top
-the sparkling rumination.

Oh that jet fuel!
How it makes us fly!

A system of clockwork,
spins its spine,
the Hurly Gurly
at Lunatic Park,
the Hurly Gurly
at Lunatic Park,
ferris wheel and gypsy
in our hokey hoboken
on the boardwalk
lit up in the dark,
the sea is waiting
to see under her skirt
her frantic nipples
and her eyes so alert!

Our Hurly Gurly of Lunatic Park.

Published Wicked Alice

Oriental Storms

I

What would be good here is to sleep through the hierarchy
let it rip open by itself and all alone in itself
without me to introduce it to my voice, the sleep one
which chatters into the nonsense of nonwaking, the miracle
of losing touch next to the boulder breathing, cat purring
the whizz of appliances at night, snap of the clocks each
per room divided into the drops of faucets and drains,
each passing unnoticed falls into the curvature of a steady building
on this precipice near the sea of hidden color.

II

buzz drip drop whizz galore
a symphonic clause of night
the cat bats around a piece of plastic
the wind rattles the big metal door
occasionally a jet removes itself
the anxious boarded people sit strapped
if only one could see them there
praying good lord praying
don't fall into the sea, don't drop
the wind rattles entire shackled tenements
runs in a river through the shafts
chimneys full of air until the glass
shakes like a fun house mirror
lightning over in the west
part of it from Istanbul some of it
having touched the Hagia Sofia
where the cistern serves water
to the dead, the big door arched
over one thousand kings and consorts
and the small side doors for the poor.
Cisterns and drains, the same.


III

Just back from Turkey eh?
Food was great. We spent Saturday waiting in the car
for the business men. Against the law she said
for covered women to enter the government buildings!
Yes I said, that was Kemal Ataturk's business.
We sat up in the hotel bar, we could see everything
but not the Bosphorus, stood near the double bridge
Asia and Europe, you did? Couldn't enter the mosque
because we'd just had sex at the hotel and a drink
but that is a tourist attraction anymore I said
she didn't know nor did she know
to buy a ticket to see St John's arm encased
in a golden jacket, absconded with by the Turks.
Five days of eating at restaurants.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

IV

buzz drip drop whizz galore
the whizz of appliances at night
the cistern talks to the bottom
of the catacomb
each eye closed for a time to the miracle
of losing touch
another jet to Istanbul on takeoff
the wind whips the big metal door
the heater off and cold
and out there, the sea without a color
under lightning, under the oriental storms.

Goat's Rosary

Derrida's metaphysical framework displaces the facts of mimeticism -
Peter Goldman

Say: I sacrifice myself to the martyrdom of dawn,
in all that is secret within the secret itself,
this goat whose basic inner desire is unknown,
wears this rosary, in every awakening there is all knowledge,
all reason yet on momentary reflection it evaporates
with the cool mists of early morning fog, the whow-wee
calls to the mule, Man is Dead!
All over again, each day the secret is maintained
or related as the stranger in the copse,
the evil tongued whisperer filled with contempt
for all that the Dreaming Eye sees and obscures
with the regularity of the Opening Eye.

On the cross it is said our Jesus doubted
the final cue to his incumbency and ever since
that final propitious moment all things ensue.
Baptisms, bloody engagements, adulteries..
nothing really changes from one of the other moments,
Abraham abrogates Isaac for Ismael, the displacement begins
and is repeated as casually as fratracide does.
The clap of thunder recites itself in the Universal Whimper.
Floods and earthquakes, beasts with three heads, insolent,
scantily clad women take over, chaos produces the kind of order
which was clarified in the twinkling of an Eye,
this Universal Eye with no stake in the prize
for all is already in possession for he who creates,
who intends only to destroy and rebuild,
for that is the Game of Time imprisoned in the special wrath,
of moments, hours, deaths and births,
the shower of our blinking and these tears,
within the glitter of some laughter.



September in Riyadh

These are the days
when silence fills
spaces where no
words would do
eyes meet eyes
wondering which assailant
will lose,
which will proceed
into the final chapters
the author of a new history.
These are the days
when flight is more
than wings or sailing
when the notion
that all is not at rest, is
and so many more hours to come.
These are the days
when coins are thrown
like so much schrapnel
through the skies
paying the price
that must be paid
for carnage, for success.
These are the days
our children will remember
like bracelets of molten steel
lacking charms, relentless
the days when they will ask
if it hurts to die
and when will it happen
and to whom
These are the days
when work stops still
in the gaze of a stranger
walking blindly in
a barrage of alien scenery,
when nothing seems to have moved
for endless hours, billows
of towering smoke
odorless on the screen

These are the days
when I let them
watch cartoons -
all day long.

Flight

The exact moment
you disappeared
from the radar screen
a night sky stripped
from stars
when reflections stop
the talk between themselves.
I, just awake
one world still
open to the next.

Were you coming or going?

Just another day.

She and I get along better than most,
I do the talking and run when we near the dumptsters.
She does the smelling.
The brindle's carcass is rotting up by the corner store,
wet and hollow like the rats she used to leave in bits and pieces.

We've made plenty of friends, the masons on the corner,
the old man that died last month, his widow,
school children waving in the rain and our good friend Jacko.
Jacko waits for us, rain or shine to take him along, pull him over
his fence, tears in his eyes.

We've got a pack.

Some of us have given birth and starve in down pours,
others have gone on, look at us from above, Boots.
Oh Boots. She was something. Waited for us down at the garbage,
nipping at my heels occasionally in gratefulness.
Don't know what happened to Boots but we still call her,
every day on the hill strewn with waste, perhaps hers as well.

There's Broken Kitty. We scooped up his boy one day,
eyes gouged out, blind. Fed him and let him go to his creator,
watched the Vet insert the needle deep into his tiny heart and it
stopped.
Buried him the same day as another, one of eight pups,
mangled by a person and a car contemptuous of life.

The Vet told me his father wasn't at ease with this,
this taking of life. I had to laugh.
It must have been a strange occurrence...two animals in one day.
Nevermind I said. Nevermind.

I've taken human lives. Three exactly. One accident and two on
purpose.
The inoperable baby suffered along on a trickle of air until I undid
it. He breathed his last breath in relief.
Another, eleven years on this planet and the last two leukemic
coded seven times before we agreed, the others and I,
to stop informing the intern on procedure. Knowing the intern would
forget.

Knowing the vet needed absolution.

But the other, oh. Ninety three years old and a lesson for me.
Pains in the neck should never be confused with heart attacks.
Funny in a way...he'd have gone on to reach a hundred if it weren't
for me and I'm sorry, I suppose, to that old man.

But she and I get along alright. Monitoring all this.
Monitoring the births and the poisonings. The litters
and the availability of food at the dumpsters. Smelling.
Monitoring the Syrian soldiers and the skidding traffic.
Monitoring the ill at ease people, going to work each day.

Our pack grows and shrinks irrevocably.

A Note About Paul


They thought I was a tire burning.
They thought I was a Marine Barracks--Sister Cities

This is a piece of obsidian,
a crocodile tear from Apache land,
this is the way a squaw makes amends,
it is, natural glass.

Like lemmings on their suicide march,
over a ravine-scraped into a pouch
this is where you point
through the superstition chain.

Double back to this year,
that proletariat under various
types of calm and unrest,
all the same, natural glass, not a tear.

How many weird sisters to make
a necklace like that! How many
obsidian tears must we hear,
weird weird sister?

Diabolical graces, evil lies
in the trust of the trance, this is
the superstition chain, this is
what you call, several necessary goodbyes.

This is the zahir given
in a lapsed remedy,
old men, old ties, old sameness
this is a cochise tear, not a bolshevik revolution.

This is the way it is, this is the return
to the superstition chain, the code
no one dares to understand the zahir
as what was split, what has landed.

Not iron or phosphate, not fractional
distillation, this is natural glass,
a tear and a reunion, a proletariat
on the notorious ground sought after, sought into.

The Lazarus

Abu Riyad found me again, down on the lower road-
must have seen me pass by his house,
checking to see if his dog came back.
We go through this all the time,
he is still looking and so am I,
so's my dog, still looking...

JACKO JACKO, come 'ere boy
is what the thunder said.

Last time I saw Jacko, Abu Riyad
was beating him, no, he'd shaved him for the summer
and cut him down to his scalp, exposed his spine,
Abu Riyad was miserable and sulking, so was the dog.
Jacko had a mercurochrome tatoo, monkey's blood -
Abu Riyad's answer to everything.
Then Jacko ran off again and stayed gone.

Somewhere in the rain and starving,
or on a front porch, he's there
we both know he's somewhere, just not here,
but we keep looking:
past the skinny lame dogs
past the giant Russian on the corner
past the abandoned sheep dog
past the beauty parlor next to the bridal shop
near the dry cleaner down from the pharmacy,
we keep looking.

Abu Riyad hobbles down the hill pretty fast
to catch me on the lower road
near the place where I found Lady giving birth once,
used to bring her food once in a while,
her dogsbody is somewhere in the rubbish,
almost a year now -
she watches with eyes from a photograph -
I recall her long miserable teets
and shrunken thighs, the way her pups
grew up with her and she never left them,
even for the next litter -
three generations under the same rotted couch.
She and Jacko passed the languid coital hours of dogs
there, across from the dehkena where every old man waves,
I am memory scooting by.

Abu Riyad catches up, and my pointer sniffs his boots.
He says something in Arabic I don't understand,
The dog and I wander home, a bit sadder each time.
Abu Riyad is getting too old for this.

The Pelvis

As women we must
protect ourselves
and daughters:

from green card seekers
and noise makers,
from insufficient funds
and defects in plumbing,
from hosts of maurauding males
and temptation get thee behind me,
from wrinkles
and cysts the size of a golf ball,
from eating disorders
and too much salt,
from underwear stains
and chalk dust,
from history written by victors
and Victor's history,
from having children too close together
and infertility,
from drinking in the closet
and DUI's,
from rapists
and adulterers,
from monsters under the bed
and ones under the sheets,
from slashed wrists
and overdosed best friends,
from memories of love
and reading Lolita,
from talking too much
and talking too little.

We women must protect,
virginity in all of it's guises,
the way it follows us to the grave,
held in our pelvis
in some part of the bone.

II

He is the kind of man
who gives back
what he took
so long ago it doesn't seem to matter
anymore,
a boy who pilfers an apple
attached to a string
in the corner market stall.

III

Getting caught...

The UN Sounds Blue


There are jackels out there in the fields,
guarding a hundred ghosts,
dead Roman soldiers
disintegrating near Saladdin's castle-

-a bat skirts through the early morning air
swallowing and swallowing-

The UN makes another patrol
down the thistle lined roads of South Lebanon
the sun will climb over the horizon
one more time
to make a small history
as if Christ walked here
sweeping for land mines
in the frost cracked hills.

The jackal out back is innocent if we let her be
leave her to her pups.
Their cry sounds like a herd of goats,
or a hundred frogs,
or dying birds,
a plague of locusts.

We could catch one and give it a name
create a race of stray dogs
sought after by collectors of uncommon things.
but a god damned hunter shoots her anyway-

As bats witness to Rome and Geneva,
the weary eyes of the UN
hide in jeeps and tanks,
big white tanks
their blue flag courses in the wind
flappity flap flap flap,
it sounds blue, like blue flappity flap
in the cold southern wind
full of jackal.

WARNING: you won't know where to turn next but it is such that you are in a welkin of some definite plausibilities. Not for the faint of heart or the archaic. It isn't that type of place. There are so many brothers in the world, blood brothers, half brothers, dead brothers and Jacks. There are always the Jacks. You have the doogs and the Lanny's and the brothers of the elk which is a rhyme to the starry blisses. It is a long story of beginnings, endings, tragic and blistering comeuppances. There are no politics in this world. It might be said that Carmen is a fine place to be when one trades one's soul with sisters and mothers, darling kittens. You've got so many Mira Labs but it is only the current one that matters her eyes full of shame and contagion. You help up that dog in the rain: Pip on down through to the bassett hound with three legs moving through a steady course to the most Noble Imposters and Just Buddies. The tricks are all there but you don't know where to turn next. Is it the sea calling? What is it that is ringing? It must be the lilacs again, always ringing and the peaches falling. A rhubarb tale disguised as a hallowed pie. A baptist pie, a cherished fruit. This is the last one of its kind. The machine ex post facto of the Anchorites with the tiny windows, peeking out into freshly fallen snow....freshly fallen snow. A silent kind of reverence towards the ancients of Mogollon where in the deep hollows of summer, fresh from the fears of gypsies up near the creaks, a lonely man sells his Russian memorabilia declaring he is being chased by the wealthy landowners who know for certain Rasputin. Hunted. He is wanted. He believes this with his almighty heart. His windows are boarded up. Butterfly mimics in the flowers have utensils that listen and pray to whatever is going on up there in the lava bombs, a sister walks by because she is in on it. She is totally in on it but we've got to go. The man mentions a place called Hafr Al Batn and we agree to never meet again but only silently. Only in the perfect sun.

The Ninth Inning

Poets and bugle players
employed by wars,
clasping hands
with death and it's gathered mourners.
Breathing a line
whose phrase escapes
and must be repeated over
and up and over and down
embroider and careen
with a soulful exertion
that lays the crusade
to waste.
A tangled play of
soldiers forgotten,
chaste and dying so very slowly,
drumming, agonal rhythm,
fingers dance heart fingers and heart
dance dance dance fingers and heart.

what everyone of us must run from
what every soldier has seen

the truth of cancer,
of the pitcher's father
the mother the pastor the daughter
your uncle my dad someone's dog
a girl you dated before me,
young and leaving
all too soon.

The pitcher's father arrives
before the last play
as his boy shows his worth
in solidly delivered strikes,
mortar shells
driven with an unnatural force.
His mother hard and clear
in the bleachers, managing well I'd say,
thins bravely,
her strength nothing more
than the vacuum suck
of the surgeon's mighty will,
a lieutenant with soldiers on the line,
the surgical oncologist.
Words on his face
holding the end of the season
between forefinger and thumb
orders to march.

When the Music Comes In, It Comes

In the beginning, it was written over water
written across a broad staring canvas
stretched as taut and meaningless, without a mountain.
Clouds ascended the steam of creation heavenward where God sighed,
and apathy reigned over the lack of distinguishing features
on the earth, the Great Plains never suffered
but the land waited and it waited. Some of it,
waits still, open, level, the grasses.
Water came down, oh how it came down, a deluge
of which it is written there is punishment
defined by groups and pairs, a boat full of collage.
It came down, it carved the great Canyons,
the Bryce, the Grand, Everest, the Andes,
carving, sculpting, resulting
rivers and rivulets, mammoths drinking
shark teeth even still in the Sand of the Arab,
the dry dwelling sand mongering Arab, feet cracking.
The divide between the ocean and the mouth of mighty rivers,
rivers that held still the voice in rushing waters.
It was then written, the sound of it. Carried
down through the ages, repeated by sacred apathetic warriors
called the Angels. Calling out in the canyons,
This is how it sounds! It sounds still.
But then, how it was! Empty and floating
over the flat land and sea without an ear,
without the appreciation of an echo, the canyons.
So playing is the piano, the concerto, the crescendo,
for this is what the thunder said. It said, itself.