The Poeticians.

I just saw this a while ago on Rewa’s page. I loved it.  Some lines are too simplistic, but occasionally, that’s what one needs. The last couple of lines are so illuminating, they made me sigh. Internally. Enjoy.

A community of the spirit

How do you communicate with a person who is unware of the shape of your lips?

I thought that speaking is enough.

You cannot change a person who does not see you, eyes are blind till they themselves decide.

You can try to tell a friend you love them.

Love does not exist if they cannot speak the language, face turned away, humming another tune.

Waving

Dubai

you live in your private jungle world
personal geometry and colors of

haphazard
paint strokes too vivid

blinding

to recollect my eyes
a rumble of laughter imprints

from your smile to far distances of an earth i do not know

maybe it is the sky

you dance
tripping on inner melodies i do not hear
whimsy
desire
instant gratification trumps all that would hurt me
my hurt is buried and invisible
to the roving
eye

you glance away
like a tumbleweed swept up in private refrains
a symphony of vibrations
too loud for my
hearing
you breathe out of breath
feet away from me
your heart hitched to strings puppeteered by a magician
baking spells for person one
and i,

bereft,
stand apart, inner walls keep me

hard,
i willfully watch this story ebbing,
an almost love far flung in the distance
ending perhaps

through a transparent fence

a final sideways look to where i stand
waving

How many of you tell the person you lust for that they make your body ache?

How many try and listen to what faces are telling us, over kitchen counters and across rooms, behind screens illuminating silence?

How many of you are not afraid to care and then say you care and then take that care forward into infinite sadness?

Me, I am never afraid of love. I am only always afraid of the transformations within love, when little rituals in and out of bed could signal a shift in faith. But love itself, as Um Kulthoum would say, is never at fault.

Me, I love Stephen Dunn.

Stephen Dunn

Listen

Safe to say that most men who want
to communicate,
who would use that word, are shameless

and their souls long ago have drifted
out of their bodies
to faraway, unpolluted air.

Such men no doubt have learned women
are starved
for communication, that it’s the new way

to get new women, and admission of weakness
works best of all.
Even some smart women are fooled,

though the smartest know that to communicate
is a form of withholding,
a commercial for intimacy while the heart

hides in its little pocket of words.
And women use the word too,
everyone who doesn’t have the gift

of communication uses it.
It’s like the abused
asking for love, never having known

what it feels like, not trusting it
if it lacks pain.
But let’s say that a good man and a good woman,

with no motives other than desire
for greater closeness,
who’ve heard communication is the answer,

sign up for a course at the Y,
seek counseling,
set aside two hours in the week

for significant talk. What hope for them?
Should we tell them
very little, or none at all?

As little or none as there is for us,
who’ve cut
right to the heart, and still conceal,

who’ve loved many times well into the night
in good silence
and have awakened, strangely distant,

thinking thoughts no one should ever know?

I was wondering all day today what to post up here. I thought of writing a new poem, but the semi maudlin (yet sober) nostalgic and stressed out situation I’m in this week will only lend itself to lines such as “Oh, Love, if you only knew” and “This deep pit of despair, oh world how I detest you” type sentences so I best shut it.

Then I thought, dig deep into the poetry vaults in the recess of the laptop and find something you havent published yet. I am lazy and not super excited at prospect. I may just decide to do so at the end of this so not poetic blog. Wait, it will get better I promise.

Then, out of the purple horizon of this ether, an email arrives that has a wonderful little quote, from Kierkegaard’s diary. I decided thatthey would be the words I share today. I apologize for mine being so dry, exuberance of emotion is very much under control and I am as tight lipped as an old prune.

Here it is:

“Oh, can I really believe the poet’s tales, that when one first sees the object of one’s love, one imagines one has seen her long ago, that all love, like all knowledge, is remembrance, that love too has its prophecies in the individual. … it seems to me that I should have to possess the beauty of all girls in order to draw out a beauty equal to yours; that I should have to circumnavigate the world in order to find the place I lack and which the deepest mystery of my whole being points towards, and at the next moment you are so near to me, filling my spirit so powerfully that I am transfigured for myself, and feel that it’s good to be here….Will I find what I am seeking here in this world, will I experience the conclusion of all my life’s eccentric premises, will I fold you in my arms…Have you gone on ahead, you, my longing, transfigured, do you beckon to me from another world? O, I will throw everything away in order to become light enough to follow you.”

Sobering thoughts. Best of luck finding me when I am gone. Maybe you won’t notice.

First draft poems for people who don’t listen.

Hunter

Damascus, 20/09/2010

I will now lock my heart away, or whichever muscular part of me

constricts at the sight of your face,

pumping nerves throughout a body aching to root itself in your length,

entangling all your width in my folds,

letting you sleep as I wordlessly chant prayers to safeguard us.

I will now be silent, I will

write poems to you only in my stomach, and speak of desire behind

my eyes, opaque to you.

I will smile with only the front of my expression,

and leave all depths stowed out of the reach of your hands, undemanding.

I will wrap my lungs in bubble plastic, keep them

breathing out personal ash from flames you will only now vaguely remember.

I will wrestle you out of my center,

throb want only in places transient and too quick to dry,

slowly ebbing heat away to lukewarm union,

a door creaks shut softly,

you too loud to hear it between us.

I will take the best of myself and bury it underwater, let you float on the salt

water surface of my love,

until I am of earth and plant matter, sunlit through skies too blue to

haunt you, blind.

Until I am so far away, the kisses you stamp on me crack nothing

but a shell of what could have been,

until the words you may have said are lost in winds of a

distance, my

body sinking into itself, a cage constructed of your disinterest,

till I am a ghost. Till you are alone,

wondering what cold air gusted around you, a space devoid

of my breath, a coffin in the corner to plague,

the mourned demise of my laughter as I

shut

down

the entrances to our ever after.

I will lock down my heart,

precious trove,

hidden key,

till one day, sought eternally, from the center of earth

from my inner fracture,

I am released from the deep, from the down under,

by a traveler,

true,

strong,

eyes wide open to my rapture.