Who could claim a lover is more important than peace, in a world where the trees are apathetic to us and our tears. Everything is relative. Someone loses a child, we lose our kisses. No one determines the appropriate amount of mourning. This morning is full of contradictions, assuaged only by the power of communing with words. And possibly you, anonymous reader.

Relativity

Dubai, 1/10/2010

Outside,

the sun has been feeding the leaves

so life could insinuate itself into

a variety of folds

ubiquitous, and cruel.

Maybe a flower will blossom in the absence of wind

the grass is hot and in here,

pulse hides in the eyes of this statue

the way words between us are frozen.

In Africa, a child pleads flies away from his lips, hot too, and thinks of a

future green,

I have seen the yellow faces of famine in Pakistan, a

white trembling of stagnation descended

from the sun and its ocean. A small hand inches across the soil,

inert, their bodies strewn are river paths of hurt that the wind

whistles to me, as useless as the

Middle East peace process,

Jerusalem and our flesh lost in the tumult of money speaking to your unfair god.

In here, my restless toes want to wrap our morning

in sheets private, and warm. The ageless sun blinks

white lights into maps forgotten and wayward,

illuminates a path to your arms, overgrown in nettles

and poison.

Elsewhere in my mind,

a suicide bomber takes the path of least resistance,

rendering poetry useless to safeguard this love.

Limbs shatter across concrete, telling us we have arrived too late.

A man shifts feet in the slow prayer of a Friday afternoon, his heart

pumps faith through a waist that kneels in hope

for requests to a higher entity that could hold us. His form is the prostration

of desire through servitude to the power he imagines

he can wield over death.

I die a little every morning, where even the chocolate of your skin

and all that they baked is tasteless.

A woman bends over the drying lake, scooping hope this taste of liquid

wont make her offspring sick,

but this salt water in my throat, seeping across a face that flies

a horizon of highways to your bed, is parching.

An old lady picks a rose from her bush in the abundant garden of

apathy, wondering why her husband seemed to ache

in his sleep last night, a world of mystery to

her aged hands, now appeasing thorns to find a petal to soothe him.

I have no blossoms inside.

The earth still spins in defiance to my rigid hips.

The moon will come out again tonight to tease me.

The fajr love moans of shoulders entwined will keep the sun in time,

another day mourns this night of indifference

you bequeathed me.

A young woman in labor, racked, holds a bundle of possibilities to

swollen breasts, in hospitals where others have

seen their mothers chopped and stifled. Everything is relative, I think.

But not the frozen words between us,

for they too,

have physics of symmetry and rotation necessary to survive motion, apart.

I am still.

My lungs lose their battle with nicotine, breathe the way my waist

could turn in angular circles to mesmerize

you. You win.

The leaves outside are now making love to the breeze, in playful energy that mocked

my lethargy, and this void.

In here,

in the space of my fingers to this voice, swallowing

dryness, a moist memory of you

is vapor rising, and

I awaken.

I awoke this morning longing for what you dreamt.