I wonder if poetics will continue to embrace us in the new year. I miss the churning vileness of inspired blood on the page. I seem to spew only marshmallows recently. The sweetness perhaps does not become me. Perhaps its the mellowness of sand and sea, the lack of troubled wind disturbing both these forces of nature, idle within me.

May you always have peace in your life, and raging wars in your poetry, world.

May you always have some warm arms you trust enclosed around your dreaming form.

May the sunlight of mornings after never burn away the stars you held in sleep.

240 days

Dubai,

December 20^th, 2010

When you leave, I sleep alone.

But the curve of a back is made for two, to align breath

and knees, perhaps the singular hook of a toe against heel, these rumpled sheets

and the chalk outline of a phantom embrace I feel. It is difficult to sleep,

with or without you. Hands seek pillows to hide, exposed lips thirsty for

the minute words only cotton and a moon can hear.

Sometimes the silence of this room is loud and clear,

a litany of death knells to usher in moments when my heartbeat, thudding

on, is reminiscent of arms pulsating heat,

their palpitations a beat a  lullaby

the heaviness of your face in my neck, in search of answers to keep

the hands roving midriffs, the shifts in conscious departures, as

delirium seeps,

oblivion, the realm of anotherness and otherness and togetherness tumble

into rising music instruments of our fatigue,

I can see eyelashes in the dark, I can listen to poems in the movement

of our shared recess, this abyss of you and me, this sleep.

How human it is, this discovery, this secret I weep,

I know you,

I know you better in dreams than in all the potent coffees of lucid mornings after.

Leap off the end of the year with the Poeticians. Glide out on a wind of words and open up new vistas of aural experience. Come read, come listen, come celebrate the power of words. We promise it will evoke a feeling of warmth, holiday cheer, slight inebriation, probably a little awkwardness, but no reindeer, no jingling bells, and no sudden addition of ten pounds to your waistline.

TUESDAY 21st December in City Max Hotel, Barsha, behind Mall of the Emirates. 7:30 PM till whenever…

The lounge/bar is to the right of reception. Please note that no one under 21 yrs of age is allowed.

You know you want to.

Happy holidays to the ones we wont see next week!

Did This Happen to Your Mother?
Did Your Sister Throw Up a Lot?

by Alice Walker

I love a man who is not worth
my love.
Did this happen to your mother?
Did your grandmother wake up
for no good reason
in the middle of the night?

I thought love could be controlled.
It cannot.
Only behaviour can be controlled.
By biting your tongue purple
rather than speak.
Mauling your lips.
Obliterating his number
too thoroughly
to be able to phone.

Love has made me sick.

Did your sister throw up a lot?
Did your cousin complain
of a painful knot
in her back?
Did your aunt always
seem to have something else
troubling her mind?

I thought love would adapt itself
to my needs.
But needs grow too fast;
they come up like weeds.
Through cracks in the conversation.
Through silences in the dark.
Through everything you thought was concrete.

Such needful love has to be chopped out
or forced to wilt back,
poisoned by disapproval
from its own soil.

This is bad news, for the conservationist.

My hand shakes before this killing.
My stomach sits jumpy in my chest. My chest is the Grand Canyon
sprawled empty
over the world.

Whoever he is, he is not worth all this.

And I will never
unclench my teeth long enough
to tell him so.

A few words in a poem about Ennui and Decadence. From a woman who does not know where to live or how to do it well.

Domicile

Dubai, 27/11/2010

Everything is as simple as breathing.

Cities tug at your skin, cracks appear where you thought

sheen and silk would endure, be

the past and the future, an opposition of drives split

this impulsive body into fragments, a battlefield of religions, a philosophy of me.

Some cities awaken you with hard brown bodies, penetrate shivers all day,

a taste of tequila burns the numbness we each

inherit, smoke to open horizons of self inside you, a clearing of cobwebs private

where sugar lines and circles of laughter crisscross

shameless triangles of flesh and

poetry. A city that spanks you before bedtime, hurts you

on your knees, showering you with stories of murder, bathed in

vengeance and looming threats of

disease, telling you,

whispering,

cackling, to live for this moment eternal, to breathe, to

take all clothes off and jump in the nudity of a dark dirty sea. Some cities smear their

name on your back, a welded tattoo of pleasure

and war

and words you will always fear. Heat and cold interplay in equal measure till the

rational you needs to scream. Some cities are merciless,

a tattered rose hangs from their teeth, beckoning the romance

of an old, returning,

wasted

good-time fuck you love to keep.

Other cities let you sleep. Sand is warm under your toes, and there is silence,

knee deep, and rising. Everything is open, even your eyes.

Possibly, even your heart.

Your mind follows patterns of peace, till

the timid voice you killed coos inside you to say,

love, love, love

marry,

have children,

wake up early,

sleep early, stop drinking, stop smoking, make money,

make a car, make love, brush your teeth, eat veggies,

make more babies, check your balance, walk on the water,

stretch out your limbs to the sun,

breathe. Marry, have children, you’re aging and still swinging

from chandeliers of glitter,

hanging on to nothing yet sparkling just to tease.

Some cities have no history, no future,

and a present full of insurmountable seconds

of ease. Be secure, be safe,

look around you. Everything is clean. A machine of urban wheels in motion

spinning on an axis of dollars,

vulgar at times, tasteless at others, always obscene.

Still, your stomach is languid. A cradle for life stirs in your

chest, the correct words tumble out,

prim,

proper,

full of luster and gleam.

Some cities smile at you, in your sleep.

But you,

you know,

you will go stir crazy,

wanting both the abandonment and the homebound yearning,

wanting the colored smoke churning at

the center of your sobriety, wanting the liquid

seething at mediocrity,

wanting the peace to pen words on paper not aflame,

wanting to burn that word you just penned

in ennui and shame,

wanting nothing but an answer to this future question you think

you seek.

You know you will drown in this clean quicksand.

You know you will drown in that dirty sea.

Nothing is as simple as breathing.