One of the pleasures of my Dubai life has been meeting the good folk from Ludwig salon. They invited me, randomly, through the riveting power of cyber searches, to be the guest speaker at their second salon event in Dubai. A small select group of good people were to meet, eat (whatever cheese was left over from my gluttony) and watch a trailer of my film, listen to some of my poems, and be introduced to my world of socialist PLO poetic filmic curl haired rants.
I was very impressed with Marc and Agri. I was even more impressed when Agri showed up to a party of mine with a wax-sealed non-sext pest certificate on red paper, to prove that he and his buddy had passed the various tests that feminists may throw at them. The party invite had jokingly mentioned that no sex pests were allowed into our glittery home. The certificate now proudly hangs over my desk, and makes me grin. Most things about Agri make me smile. His wit, his self deprecating yet incredibly arrogant sense of humor, his big words, his glitter tops, and most of all, his total support for the Poeticians, and the fact that he can insert kittens into any email, whatsoever. I asked him once if he ever wrote…thinking to myself, no one, but NO ONE can speak like that, facebook like that, and NOT be a good writer. Lo and bloody behold, the man was a star behind the screen. He performed this long piece at his first Poeticians event and the audience loved it. I did too. Thank you Agri, for the smiles you bring into our world, for the Poeticians love, and for future collaborations waiting to happen. I am looking forward to the next Ludwig salon, where we can be even MORE pretentious than the last one.

She Insisted All Reckoning be Done by Hand

by Agri Ismaïl

The first time I did it, I hurt myself. I bent down, and had to unplug the wire from the fax machine and stick it into the grey box. The modular connector’s tongue clucked into place.

Then there was the dial tone. Waiting for the world to pick up. Then the electronic blizzard. Sharp Short clicks. Configuration for protocol synchronisation. Welcome to CompuServe.

This is how we were born.

Then we embraced a nightmare of noise, we chose our avatars and they were never something simple. It was never First Name At Aol Dot Com. It was always Incredibly Obscure Reference and Birth Year at Hotmail. Or Unflattering Late 90s Nickname at CompuServe. So when the inevitable happened and our hypocrite_no1s (actual e-mail address) became embarrassing to who we had become we had to fold our real selves – which probably still existed at this point – into our former shunned selves. It hurt but it fit.

So, fittingly, we began worrying about anonymity the very moment we chose to no longer be anonymous. We became a reflection of our tools.
After all, Kittler says, it is we who adapt to the machine. The machine does not adapt to us.

You learnt everything you ever needed to know about sex from women whose names ended in .jpeg. Then came that moment when you looked up from a screen and found the real world lacking the colour, the depth, the realism in your palm. The backbone of this whole infrastructure that were kittens. Always kittens. Ads. Adblockers. Betas. Betablockers. Click Here. Commodities became gold became paper became numbers and the numbers went back and forth at light speed back and forth until the rich had become very rich and as for the poor, well… nothing ever changes for the poor. They smell and stare at our women while they wait for their transport in 50 degree heat and are so useless they can’t stop being so poor. We turned off the lights in GeoCities.

Anne Carson, the poet, claims that at the bottom of the ocean is a layer of water that has never moved.

Poets, as you will remember, were at this time generally more trustworthy than scientists.

Because, to quote Joseph Beuys, only art provides a space of playful activity free of means-ends relationship of capitalism.

Of course Joseph Beuys died before having seen Transformers 3 Dark Of The Moon. So. There’s that.

We constantly ran low on battery power. We never had enough RAM.

The dead pixel on our screen annoyed us far more than the news of the dead people we read about on aforementioned screen. And dead fictional characters were the worst of all. Something really shocking was on Game of Thrones that made people in Turkey start rioting and go full-on bananas.

Something happened.

Let’s call it planetary technosentience. Let’s call it Skynet, but don’t give it your clothes, your boots and your motorcycle. The natural world was already past, the preoccupations of humanity all just a shadow play, the drug that kept us going feeding our synapses, telling us what to do how to do it, all for the reckoning of something that was not cattle or properties or gold or pieces of paper. And after each crash there was blame, cut into various pieces and doled out. Entire countries were said to be broken. Our leaders spoke to us with the vocabulary of disappointed parents or gleeful sadists. We had been bad. We needed to pay for that. We couldn’t act the way we had acted, however that was, without impunity as we whirred dervish-like faster and faster and faster until

But wait, you say, this isn’t a very good story. Where are the characters? Where is the plot?

You are part of the problem, wanting this. It is in fact the infatuation with individualism, the novel bourgeois concept of the Novel, of linear narrative, of capital-R Realism that stopped being realistic a long long time ago. But fine. If that’s what you need to keep listening. You can be the character. We can talk about how you looked as a child, how photographs of yourself confuse you still as you cannot imagine that ever having been you, the you that tortured your sister’s Barbie dolls in pre-pubescent psychosexual haze. How as a child your favourite fruit was the pomegranate. Its violent, poetic name. Its myriad rubies nested inside. We can talk about your first premature ejaculation, how it took a while for you to find out that the post-ejaculate disinterest in sex was normal. And then we’ll skip to the time you saw her kiss someone else and you felt like someone had let loose a horde of tiny barbarians amongst your organs who were hacking away while you had to smile and be happy for them (because yes, if we are to humanise you we need some far-fetched over-emotional metaphors). Then you became the sort of person who knew that Diet Coke gives you cancer but regular Coke makes you fat so you drink Diet Coke. You began going to the gym and you hated everyone there who looked glistening and sexy and perfect as they worked out while you sweated and basically looked like you’d been raped by a washing machine. Somehow, you got a girlfriend. A girlfriend who once told you that she would rather have thighs that didn’t touch than world peace. She was like a letter received by fax in 1997 where only a few years later it became impossible to see what you ever saw in her. Then. Remember how it was to be unemployed. Then you found a job and you got a job and the joy of this made you forget that your job consisted of making money for other people and you were grateful that they gave you the honour of making them money. You had not read your Bukowski.

This is enough information to go on, we can extrapolate from here. You are our character and you are hopefully believable.
Oh, I almost forgot: you are also austere. This is a fitting trait of course. Austerity ran in nation-state veins. We double-dipped so that’s why we can’t have nice things. It was the self-induced asceticism perpetrated by sadists who gave up second homes and were appalled that others weren’t willing to give up food. That’s not how China does it, they said.

Everything was China. All the time. China this China that. Every once in a while a list of prohibited words in China escaped, words that, if you were to type them into Google, your computer would just be all like “I have no idea what you mean”. These include:

sex, dictatorship, Tibet, red Ferrari, playboy, multiple parties, whore, corruption, torture, anus, Jesus Christ, scrotum, riot, insurrection, red terror, 89, 69, evil, pigeon, timeshare, penitentiary, bra, and Growth.

Growth. God everyone was fixated with growth. This is fine if space is infinite, which it is in the virtual world, where storage was not a luxury, oh cities how much you had to learn from the hard drive. So. Communication whittled down from interpersonal meetings in the physical world to voices decrypted across telephone wires to words on a screen to 160 letters on a screen to 140 letters on a screen to a poke to a Like to a +1. Remember how entire civilisations feared the 0 and how right they were to do so.

The apocalypse of the dodo is not remembered by the rhinoceros.

To discuss wether capitalism had a heart or invisible hands is basically like wondering what a rape victim was wearing or what the median penis size of dinosaurs was when they became extinct. i.e. Totally and Completely Irrelevant. You remember how you bought overpriced books trying to understand how to make money into more money. You remember the shamanic nature of financial analysts, the oracles with their tiny glasses and beady eyes uttering their self-fulfilling prophecies. Bulls and bears battling it out.

We tried to renegotiate history when there was nothing to renegotiate. We thought we were communicating. We were wrong.

messages, (said Freidrich Kittler one day on his MySpace page,) are essentially commands to to which persons are expected to react.

Acronyms flooded our tickers. The restrictions of obsolete technologies that we build into new machines. More offers were sent to you to give you a larger penis than you would ever know what to do with. Humans became cheaper to use than machines.

We tried to recreate the virtual world in the real world. Commodities should be accessible whenever you want, wherever your shell is. A McChicken is a McChicken in Bangalore, a Whopper is a Whopper in Lahore.

Our flesh became cumbersome, restricting simultaneous presence. We set in motion a dynamic series of estimates. Rauschenberg’s Oracle could be modified but ultimately could not be controlled.

We created this cult of efficiency and now we were superfluous. Not just men with their remnant Y chromosome who had been superfluous for a while, but each and every one of us. The physical world of dirt, of matter, of shame fossilized behind the vibrant living wires, of money-numbers coming, going, from terminal to terminal while we held onto our narratives in the face of a reality we were no longer masters of. You will remember this, your skeleton will remember this. And the systems, the synapses, the circuits will remember us after we are long gone, as these strange impetuous imperious gods that created them and made them act according to our whims and with time their memory will be hazy and the narrative simplified and all of humanity will be remembered as one monolithic contradictory creator with arbitrary rules and morals. All that will remain of us is love, no sorry, that was someone else. All that will remain of us is the data we saved.

I was awakened today, rather roughly I must admit, by a poem that just bludgeoned its way into my brain. The first line popped up, and the rest followed, with zero effort from my end. I sighed, got out of bed, thought emails and social media would distract me and the poem would vanish, but no. It kept circling. So I wrote it down. It is rather sad, specially on mother’s day. But thats ok. Sad is what I write. Been a beautiful loving day, otherwise. Dubai’s windy streets welcomed me, and a kind brown eyed man made me laugh, and together we created a bit of art. Here is the poem I wrote, fresh out of the oven, as it were, and probably in need of editing.

Today, a poem woke me up.
Dubai, 21st of March, 2013.

Nothing stops when your beloved dies,
not the breath hurtling through your body, even if your
fingers would no longer move.
Not the crescent moon in the silent sky,
smiling its cheesy grin,
poking a silver arrow at your sorrow.
Not even the sun, whom
you think should black out the day, wear a shade of night to
honor departure, a darkness to cradle pensive dreams,
for even rainbow dream-rays of daylight
do not stop.
Nothing stops.

Not the trees gorging on air,
leaves unfurling in mystery to screech echoes
of life, life, life.
Not even the bark chips, or the flowers wilt, or the birds
shut up to admire your pain.
A small “Ha!” in your face, a defiance remains
to taunt the pumping matter that
carefully folds in on itself, inside your body,
and chokes.
Nothing. Everything natural continues to blossom,
as if to spite the burgeoning hole in your lungs.

Nothing stops when your beloved dies,
not the capitalist money systems, not the sweat on backs of women in the fields,
not the budgets of bankers,
not piercing cries of the oppressed,
nor the songs of dismal angels over seas we yearn to cross.
Not the twinkle in the eyes of strangers, nor
the trains that speed them away.
The arms of your lover continue to be warm, and
old pictures continue to encapsulate
light, glow.

Not the civil war slithering around your father’s old house,
nor the decay of lush plants your mother loved on a balcony,
now abandoned.

Nothing stops for a minute to say, I am sorry,
I am so sorry for your loss.

Nothing stops when your beloved dies,
and worst of all,
the very worst of it all,

not even the love.

I wrote this many years ago, and it was published in my first book. I think, from all the long drawn out painfully emotional poems I wrote for Yasmine,
this one encapsulates my questions about her passing on in a simple universal way. Aside from missing the person you loved very much,
those of left behind when this person passes on are always left wondering what would have happened had they stayed. Every week I wonder if my problems would be different,
if choices I made would have been easier, if the concept of home would have existed in any house she lived in, if I would have eaten healthier, and loved more and smoked less and hugged more and danced more and worried less…Yasmine was a very beautiful woman, in many ways. It has been easier to deal with her early departure due to the continuous emails, msgs, phone calls and conversations about her from a long line of people she helped, loved, sheltered and laughed with. We have been blessed to have her with us, even for a short while. Today it has been 15 yrs since she passed on. Time flies, my memories remain, rooted in immovable sand and flowers and rivers.
And tears.

QUESTIONNAIRE

I wonder
if tears would remain heavy with salt
if father would still have learnt to cry
if the shape of my center would change
less of a pinprick in my heart
less of an ache
I wonder
if the sun would beat down not so harshly
snow not sting this flesh so sharp
so bitter
if my curls would spring forth lighter
and my flesh shimmer
abandoned in love
I wonder
if the morning wake would be tender
and the future would beckon in arms of peace
if the youth shining in me lost not its splendor
the loves I destroy not split me asunder
I wonder
I wonder what would happen
if you were still
with me
Mother

A few months ago, we welcomed an exciting new addition to the Poeticians community. Blunt, to the point, intensely reflective at the same time, filled with yearning and nostalgia, mixed with a hyperactive hyperverbal curiosity about everything and anything, Zeina Hashem Beck is no typical Lebanese woman.
Her work is cultivated by personal experience that resonates with so many in our region. Her scrutiny of what makes a poet a poet, a mother a mother, a home a home is fascinating. Add to that mix a restless spirit, ready to smile, and a voice that is strong, deep, and so sure of itself, the stage seems to exude radiating pulsating beats every time she speaks. We are super happy Zeina is a very active, vital and rambunctious Poet in our midst. Thank you Zeina, for always being there,
and writing, writing, writing, every week, when I am sure the world pulls at you in non-poetic ways all the time. Her more recent work is also very exciting. Below are some older poems of hers. Stay tuned to this blog for updates from her and other new poets, coming up soon. I have been so busy with the whirling world that this small safe space here has been relinquished for badass journeys, but the spirit is forlorn and a sojourn with my anonymous readers, poems from around the world, and the useless meandering of my brain is much needed. Thank you reader. Thank you, Zeina.

To Hamra

Every morning Umm Nagi
makes a lousy joke
and stirs our coffee.
We look at her dirty nails,
we hold the warm paper cups and
walk
across streets that are endless
in their endless repetitions,
small labyrinths
we have memorized,
familiar labyrinths
in which we get lost on purpose:

Here is the yellow coffee shop
and another,
and another,
where our fathers curl politics
with their cigar smoke
all day,
and measure poetry
with their sugar spoons
and say,
“The situation is bad again,
it is bad again.”

Here is Modca ,
the ancient coffee shop,
where memories cling to the walls
like a wild plant that sprouts
voices and smoke and small conversations.
Here is Modca,
the ancient coffee shop,
turning into a Vero Moda,
no more spoons or cigarettes or the clatter of cups,
history buried in clothes,
outshone by Starbucks.

Here is the tiny cassette shop
in which the fat man barely fits,
in which the fat man sings and spits,
and nods and nods,
as if to God,
saying business is slower than old age,
releasing Arabic music
into crowded streets that move
to the inborn beat,
here is the tiny cassette shop,
and another,
and another.

Here is the flower shop,
and another,
and another,
they all have the same name
but insist they’re not the same,
a sidewalk of flowers and dust, dust, dust,
and we decide to buy the white lilies,
just because they’re flowers,
just because they’re white,
just because they’re lilies.

Here is the deserted theater
where the bald man sighs
into a red telephone,
then shouts at his wife,
and cries
his bills and anger away,
you’d never expect
emotions
inside the smell of old semen
and posters of movies that never really play.
Here is the deserted theater,
and another,
and another.

Here is the whorehouse,
where the fat woman gathers old age in a chair
and promises cab drivers a good time
with the worn beauties inside,
leaning topless on the bar,
leaning
on memories withering in the smell of cigars,
here’s another lost memory,
and another,
and another.

Here is the leftist pub,
where the grey man smiles
and plays the oud
(could wood and strings reach the soul like that?)
he sings,
and his rough voice sinks
into us like a rock,
Umm Kulthum and Fairuz and Abdel Halim ,
ya leil ya ein ,
the most famous words in our language,
ya leil ya ein
and we clap and dance and hope
the term papers will write themselves,
here is the leftist pub,
and another,
and another.

Here is Universal,
where Nagham the waitress knows
we have lots of lemon in our lentil soup,
lots of cigarettes in our pockets,
and tells us to smile smile smile,
“because smiling is such, such, a nice thing to do,”
and the black kohl on her eyes is thicker
than memories and Turkish coffee
and darker than
the street outside.

Here we are,
drinking sunset and soup again,
drinking time away again,
time that vanishes like a small white cloud
on a blue-sky day in Hamra,
here’s to another day in Hamra,
and another,
and another.

(published in The Arabesques Review)

The Nameless

What do you call the space between
the written word and the blank page,
names in the distance and distance without names?

I know forgetting. I know
forgetting happens before
remembering.
But what happens after?

Give me a word
lukewarm and not so
comprehensible,
a word that drops
like white shadows
from the sky.

What name?
Give me a name
that melts like rain
and smells like moonlight
on my skin.

(published in Silk Road)

Service

Here in Beirut,
you do not stop
a cab. It stops
you.

Money is negotiable. Silence
isn’t: small confidences in small mirrors,
you have to have time
for that whether you have it
or not. Conversations seep
through the heat, the rain,
along with hands (instead of
signal lights), along with
cigarette butts and

spit.
It takes time, it takes time
to master a driver’s technique.
You have to gather it
in your throat like
rage, and spit it out like
nothing, make it as ordinary
as a lemon on a table.

The car is the streets’ old mistress.
It trembles, it swerves,
it dies little deaths along the way,
as the man behind the wheel adjusts
the word Allah or the cross
hanging from the mirror,
tilts his head towards
the sky inside the puddles,
towards a girl in tight jeans,
offers you a zaatar manoushé , insists,
and tells you to forget
air conditioning.

(published in Quiddity)

I Call It Home

This place where
electricity and water
take turns,
I call it home.

This place where
earth matters,
where we’re dust and sand,
and slip right through
the enemy’s hands,
I call it home.

This place where
we die and rise and
die and rise
again
every few years,
where we fold and
unfold peace
like a paper boat
(and hope it floats),
I call it home.

(published in Quiddity)

Peace Oil

I know what oil is and I know what it means.
“Eat oil and rub yourself with it”
were the Prophet’s words. This sounds
sexual only in English. I don’t know if the quote
is accurate, word per word, but I know
olive oil has healing powers.
Only olive oil. And the olive tree
is mentioned in the Koran, along with the fig tree,
but that is another discussion.

I don’t know what peace is and I don’t know what it means.
I know the world wants peace, and so should I.
I know now that peacemaking involves
olive oil, and I know it is as harmless
as knitting a jacket on the sofa or frying
an onion with hot olive oil, which smells
as good as olive oil and onion does.
I wonder if peace smells the same.
I know we say “Peace Be Upon You” for hello and goodbye.

I know what Peace Oil is and I know what it means
because it is right here in British Homes and Gardens:
three bottles with different sizes and shades of green,
perhaps to indicate the nuances of the olive tree.
(My grandmother says olive trees cannot
have nuance. They have roots and history.)
English, Arabic, and Hebrew inscriptions,
too much writing for an olive oil bottle if you ask me.
What Peace Oil means, and this time I quote exactly, I am accurate,
I have even kept the line breaks to be faithful to the poetry:
“Produced in Israel by Jews, Arabs, Druze, and
Bedouins, with profits for reconciliation projects.
Peace Oil, £9.95 for 500ml olive oil, Good Gifts.”
Just like the Prophet said, healing powers for 9.95 only
peace for 9.95 only, although I still don’t know what peace means.

I know I imagine a world with many kinds of Peace Oils.
Can you hear the music I hear in my head?
Olive oil in Lebanon and Palestine. In Iraq
the black kind that explodes from the ground.
Imagine that in a bottle, I mean imagine
all the colors, the possibilities of Peace Oils,
one could even make mugs, recipes for
peace with parmesan or lemon, advertise them on Facebook
for 9.95 only, with profits for reconciliation projects,
although I’m not sure what reconciliation means.

(published in 34th Parallel)

And old poem I thought I would share again today, as the situation around us escalates into a spiral, enlarging violent connections, deep despair for the future of all refugee children. This poem is a love letter to Damascus, where I was a child in the 80’s and remember Palestine. Remember crying when I knew Israel was the future.
It is a love letter to all the solidarity movements around the world who stand with us. It is a love letter to you, reader.
For the victims of the mass murder in 2009 of our people in Gaza. Murdered again, as I post this.

Headlines
Dubai, 22/4/2010

What is it this intake of breath
the word fuck hissed as if shock was
new to this body
as if this news was new to this body
what is it this slight widening of nostrils flare, tongue bloated inside
lips drowned in despair, too laden with history to
envision present, what is it, this gaping stare at jumbled remembrance-
–deported from west bank to gaza– IDF pass law– apartheid
state blossoms– this bodies shoveled by bulldozer to mass graves– this
girl, 12 yrs old,
found dead on way to market-
this sniper tshirt draws belly of arab womb is target
twice successful–
Where do all the tents go?
– land grab graphs– walls through a father’s face
sullen concrete of his seed–
what is this plume of
white hides shadows of the daily exterminated we-
from where does it rise up, like bile, like vomit, like
acid- this surprise?
Surprise?
This has always been the way it is,
this has always been.
In 1983,
a 5-year old refugee slams her body on a warm bed, revolts a tantrum when
adults kindly confirm…”They have to call it Israel now, honey”… what does that child
know of stolen family?
Children learn.
What is this
this intake of breath at headlines gaza ramallah jenin
–netanyahu dines at white house– clinton says security first– abu mazen seeks presidency–old man dies of lack of electricity–
I have heartburn where I once had pulse, I have
spasms of stomach too full to chew this new
news I digest no more,
what is it, this surprise…”how could it possibly get worse”

–fuck–

I am bored, for the first time in a very very long time. Maybe ever. I do not know what it is. I used to be bored when I was a teenager living in Damascus, but books would always alleviate that. Now, I dont even have that sanctuary or relief. I want to blame the summer in Dubai and its oppressive heat and dullness,
but thats not fair. I could get off my butt and go bowling, swimming, drinking, dancing, etc. Its something more. I cant quite define it, and maybe I dont have to. But I have been meaning to write a poem about why I am not writing. And here it is. It has been a long time since I wrote anything,
and already, those who love me have told me that my writing has become less angry, less emotional, less filled with verbs for action to change the world, and I cannot quell the fear, the worry, the thought that maybe, if you live in the desert surrounded by malls, and allow yourself to get old,
your language will mold and wither and shrink and suffer. Who knows. Not good to rant, but trust me, I cannot wait to finish some of the projects I have been working on, I need that sense of achievement, and I have never been known for my patience or calmness.

The Matter
Dubai, June 15th
On being bored in the desert.

Somehow, recently, I have lost meaning.
By meaning, I mean
the image behind the image,
the fable behind plastic,
the dream behind indelibly mute inner noise.
I used to be boisterous. All alone.

The bed was history. Arms craned, feet
curled
up thighs, necks extended and whispers
made poetry,
personal. Sheets longed to be soiled,
pillows squirmed under tugged curls
and all of the moment was a moment,
repeated,
the same,
singular,
mass experienced and individual,
art or desecration, pornography
a show,
or love.

The table was abundance. Crumbs of everything we spoke about
dropped like a fairy tale trail. Falafel,
chicken, avocadoes. I was always hungry.
We dipped French fries like they were
finger foods of gods.
We slathered sunny side up
eggs, on orange lime-green purple afternoons
like every weekend was a vacation.
Like your face was ice-cold cocktails, and my giggling, the ocean.
The way he ate was laughter, and I,
sipping on lady-like morsels of prayer.

The couch was a garden. We live
in the desert, but who was to stop us?
Somehow, now,
that fact creeps into our habits.
Sinews
draped on color, I buy
silk and sequins rustling
hoping peace or orgasms reverberate with
innocent fat-tummied contortions of bodies,
the repose of the lovers who have witnessed years atrophy,
middle-aged
gymnastics, watching clocks tick on walls,
watching time move for so far, nothing.
Your hand clutched my waist,
mine on your hip. Your head
nudged my nape. My knees curved into stillness. Sang.
Little sequences of motion created dance,
jittered, wordless.
We may lie in silence, or speak devil tongues of a thousand
sentences bequeathed
to ancestry. The folds of our bodies now rest, everything else
is seen from a window,
distant and not dangerous. I do not move much,
breath heavy.

In Dubai, summer wilts my breasts, my eyes, my belly.
I have no words behind words, no photo behind
repeated consumer snapshots.
A muse found in stupor earlier
recalls palm trees and now barren,
dissipates into civil wars and
awkward quarrels about love and duties.

And, nothing.
The bed a bed. The table a table. The couch a couch.
Wood, plastic, fabric.

Farah Chamma is one of the best kept secrets of our Poetician life. She is the youngest of the Dubai poeticians and is a remarkable young woman. We all almost envy that she gets up and performs and rocks the mic at such a young age…
She joins the Poeticians only at events that are not held in bars, etc. But when she does, the audience is very impressed, hoots and hollers support and her smile lights up the room.
Strong, independent, full of faith, affection, love for poetry and one hell of an internal lyrical world, I am sure that Farah will be gracing the Palestinian literary heritage for many years. How that makes us happy. How that makes us proud.
She is regularly joined at our readings by an entire clan of family and friends who send positive smiles and support for her across the room, and seeing her beaming as she finishes each poem, memorized, reminds me every time why Poeticians exists in the first place. You go, girl.

I Am No Palestinian
Farah Chamma

I am no courageous,
Fearless, valorous, gallant,
Proud, adventurous,
Selfless patriot
I am a soul in exile
Expressing my thoughts in
All languages but mine
” Hi…I am Palestinian”
” Salut…Je suis palestinienne”
I cut my mother tongue
In half
نصبت المبتدأ و لعنت أبو الخبر
كسرت الضمة التي ضمت ما بيننا
Palestinian poet
Rafeef Ziadeh was right when
She said
”Allow me to speak my Arab tongue
Before they occupy my language as well”
Well… to that I must add
Allow me to be the Arab
That I am
Allow me my right
To learn, to travel, to pray
Allow me to walk through any
Foreign street without having
To feel this shame
Without having to think twice
About my clothes, my face, my name
Or the visa I had to work
Day and night for the claim
Because at the end of the day
I am not the one to blame
For Bin Laden, 9/11, and all your
Other schemes and games
I am but a soul in exile
I am in no hall of fame
I have to opt to be
Someone I am not
Just to fit in your fame
Despite the agony I went through
Despite the struggles I overcame
Despite the diplomas, the degrees,
The awards I acclaim
I am still no Palestinian

No matter how many
” I love Palestine” stickers
I stick on my car
No matter how many times
I cry over Gaza
And argue over the Israeli settlements
No matter how many times
I curse the Zionists, blame the media,
And swear at the Arab leaders
I am still no Palestinian
Even if I memorize the
Names of all the Palestinian cities
Even if I recite Mahmood Darwiche’s
Poetry and draw Handala on my walls

Even as I stand here tonight
In front of you all
I am no Palestinian
أنا مش فلسطينية
And I might never ever be
And that’s exactly what
Makes the Palestinian
In me…

Sometimes, it is preferable to have the alone heat of a sweaty laptop in your hands, writing, nestled in your lap,

than to be sweaty and flushed with words in the lap of a hot writer, elsewhere.

The following is how I feel about moonlight. You get a silver star if you finish it. I wont bet on it! I will have to chop this rant in half, soon.

For you, the moon.
Iowa City, October 2011.

I love the dark.
The mental synapses can be illuminated in ways that
matter,
open are foreheads to the galaxies.
To the birds, the trees, the trash littering rivers,
imprint in sobriety the flower you couldn’t believe bloomed
there.
But,
but my physical body seeks
contrast,
pockets of spillage,
light leaking to haunt you.

 

Skip behind little flames.
Light a candle for all that you have lost.
Weep whenever you can.

Let him touch you where he wants,
the flicker of motion gives renewal, both
light and your bodies have much in common.

You can proclaim love,
hidden behind bobbing lanterns on a river if you wish a
postcard for the moment.

Let the humid summer night insects glow occasionally to
guide you.

The street corners are shade,
are temples of all your familiars. Undress as you should,
the skirt barely lifted by a breeze, his eyes burst with
recognition
premonition
a love story can be born in cracks of walls,
by alleys, hushed
voices their own galaxy.

The sun benevolent to his brown
face while a shadow protects all that
alabaster in her, and on
her, and in her spring,
the steps she takes,
a clothes line,
fluttering she is,
pinned
to it are her half-snapped photographs,
the woman is a phantom when you tighten your
chest to remember her, the dart
of her glances is all answers.

 
You know she was singing.

 
You send prayers to the light changes, for her
appearance, savior.

Think of sunsets.

All the many you promised yourself you’d stamp on your
inside
forever, while they slipped
to the necessary
housekeeping of the soul.
The sun dissolving into a palette without borders,
degrading into space,
now you can start.

 

In a poem about love in the dark,
one cannot but display the word,
lurk.
Yes, lurk around the hallways of his privacy.
Leave a glimmering part of yourself to mesh with his
interiors,
the walls he has are now only places where she has
existed,
no more than that.

 

Stare at the face of your child in perfect darkness,
you might still learn forever the contours.

 

Perhaps the way the window pane reflects his eyes is
answer,
in a slash of light errant.
There must be welcomed intrusion of
day, refracted
the way his eyes crinkle at the edges, reminds
you perhaps of your first love,
the one that was not and yet you are so full of being,
staring at a window, thinking of a tattooed woman
reading poetry to her last love.

 

His knee should be dipped in darkness,
his not giving bare the stripped body in
noon light but a fortress
of somber shadows to adorn it,
the way I could move like a ghost in your bed,
slithered vital
conversations, half a dream away.

 

I would rather, my love,
the infinite repose of soles in sand on
afternoons where kissing the sun
is possible, her molten lips simmering, warming
yours like that one grasped soft hand
under the sheets, asleep
in December.  You can
lick the sun, when
the world is behind us,
our day vanished, like another planet.

 

Give the physical body not
the laboring of midday excursions, where baring the self
is endemic, the loss of power.
Their faces bleached by the direct rays
and when they rest,
to breathe, they
sweat,
maybe silent.

 

For me, the languid talk of dew, the desert evening,
dark skin a mattress,
my fingers a scorpion.

 
The nurtured annotations on my scarred skin are mine.
For you,
the fantasy of shadows.

 

Words can be chosen to lighten
and
fasten all the loose ends lost by this fluid
dance in the dark I love.
And you could say anything to me.

I can listen
and even the bed sheets do, and that bottle of lavender,
the books steal your lines,
and our invisible sleep.

 

Cluster to one’s self in daylight, where
the face prepares for night.
Release of its alertness,
the jumbled colors have left the sunset to swim sepia
over your smile.

I can see your tongue peek
out, so very
faintly,
rumbling in my chest is awareness
of its taste.  You can
still see love, in enclosure, black.
Silver.
 

Grey
Yellow ripples
Moss green, color of rot
sometimes, are the brushed strokes of
nighttime.

 
Do not speak to me of your mistrust of darkness.

 

Look,
bathe in orange by the street lamp, restless
to throw its body
around yours, hard metal to all her curves, the hardness
within you,
eroding.

Find
the nearest wall,
pin a moment,
your feet firmly planted, the
night- suddenly, lava.

 

Consider existing in the night. Consider language.
That unwinding of
all that is responsible,
all those allowances-
please fall into yourself, you
have lost all the clocks they gave you.

 

Bury work,
that gnaws at your 2 pm hunger,
and the daily sandwich,
coffee a respite in that loop you may find yourself in,
but the night, well my love,
the night knows
how to have its differences.
A fingerprint.

Even you, touching my thigh absent mindedly
reading a gorgeous
book that isolates me, even you,
beautiful sleepy you,
aren’t here tomorrow.

 
Try living in the shadows, in the
backs of rooms perhaps,
letting poetry tell you in huddled stolen
stories, eyes sting
and wonder, all you
could ever need to muster
of a sudden understanding of the other,
and the smallness of physical separation,
and solitary exhaustion,
fall into a poem whose words can fit her hips, when she
sleeps.
Remember.

In the dark, some plants glow.

In the dark, plants can grow,
and music is made
by millions,
to save you. Try listening to the same music in
moonlight,
and keep only few
around,
note the sensation that you are altered, possibly
transfixed in one plateau, or suddenly
able to hold her hand, or
toss her on a bed, or
crawl up her navel,
smash sofa edges to the mercy of her stretched neck,
where only that
and music, is a planet that you own, a
home that can save you, the continuous burning of a
resurrected altar.
 

Every night, small awaiting of finitude,
dreams
little deaths of the daily I, who
are we, those passengers of tales we
ascribe to our inner, constant elusive of all your
hallways in the personal architecture,
giving the night only palor,
and ardor, and fervor to claim
the word “shadows” beyond the etymology of
mere parlance of the word
Sunlight.

The night
and its dark is separate
cellular matter, a
universe, the rules once attempted, now
a drifting planet
where you are creator, and yet also the murdered by dawn,
conquered.
 
Give me the cool of your language at dawn.
The half profile of you,
sentences tumbling at discreet intervals, my
parted sides contained by the way your eyes are a mirror.
Touch me,
I can see you.
For me, give me the nights you could not sleep,
and not the mornings after,
not
the days where death openly saunters,
mocking our expressions,
our dry eyes unblinking,
squinting,
parched for the possibility of water on the moon.

I am so lucky that every (afternoon) as I have my morning coffee, Joel ambles up to the river bench and smokes with me, and we look at flowers and talk of poetic syncopation and the gossip of last night, and invariably he offers me a new name, a new poem, which he thinks I would like. He is usually correct, smart soulful man. Today it was Mary Oliver, and how hot the sun suddenly, on our black attire, on our toes, the coffee burning more than my lips and his warnings that she may make me cry, but in the greatest way possible, the way only poetry can do. Enjoy today’s tidbits.

Wild Geese

Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

 

Random thoughts on a grey afternoon.

 

Iowa City blues

Iowa city, 17^th Sept, 2011.

 

That river, once blue in your mind’s eye, is swirling mud green,

you can feel the squelch in your toes and

the vile teeth of creatures that mean you harm, even

if distant, even if voiceless.

The clouds are in gestation, their grey omnipotence harkens

whirling gusts of sorrow.

Please rain. Perhaps that will distract from

a small desert I have put through a sieve,

inside my gathered splintered spaces.

There was a promise once made to never write of nature, but

a midwest rakes a brow,

unending,

and there is an understanding of why they wrote of birds and flowers.

I would like to write of your shoulders and

other homes I have relinquished.

I would write of wars enclosing,

and even your words would be part of that assault.

But the clouds are pregnant with witness,

I share a landscape with no one but my sobriety, and on days like this,

the flushed rose of hips is alchemy, now blubber, where

beached whales of my perception of self are choking on a bed,

charting an ocean between us.

I promised to not write of the river, but

but water is reflective, and

it has not rained.