Stardust

To Obe

In two different orbits we circle now
Planets tethered to separate suns

In another dimension I float, I breathe
I speak where you cannot hear

We cross the earth telling the rest of the story
We intertwine like unraveling schemes

I glimpse the round of your head from a distance
From memory, scratchy and blue

I see you where you ought to be
In the absence I make you on the corner, on the street

But in another street you dwell now
One with an unfamiliar smell

The syncopated silences between us grow
Until nothing is left but retorts so delayed

They are rendered obsolete
A handle, an encoded song

Is all the dust that remains
From the burst stars we became

© Copyright 2010 Obeida Sidani

And you wonder why?

According to an article in MSN Health & Fitness - "Is Your Town Down?", "Philadelphia has earned the melancholy distinction of being America's most depressed city"! No wonder I am, too!

Revelations

To Roland

We are absorbed
like stars consumed by the sky.
Sand under your feet,
it smelled of youth
and before
of fear,
of an embrace in frantic streets
where people were running for cover
and you covered my ears.
Sulphuric was the smell of my childhood.

A vacant stadium,
a wall of bags,
a storm spun of running,
and stars we were.
When the roads unfolded
we deflowered the city
one corner at a time.
You held my hand and told me,
“This is the city of my grandfather,”
and I inhaled it so I won’t forget.
You lit the church in candles
and walked the line of an old song,
a hokey dream you wrote on sand
and then watched retraced.
The tree where we once stood
twisted in the heat of abandon;
the rooftops drizzled that humid night
and shed, like an old hairdo,
the folds of what we were
and were to be.

I stand here and hold you
in a crumpled box upstairs,
remnants of glitter under your eyes,
pieces of the sun stuck under our nails
like splinters of the cross.
Is my hair clogging the drain
when you shed at night?
Is my smell still stuck under your skin?
Is the beginning of it all suddenly tasting
like the end of days
when all was one
and bubbles spewed forth from our eyes?

Galileo

The void threatens from the edges--
“For you are childless,” she said
“You are godless,” she said--
And I fill it, like a stuffed crocus
--She said—
Spill the scribbles on its blankness
Like sidewalks in the rain
Hold it, your breath
For Jupiter will never make it to Galileo
And yet he yearns
That point of suspension will return
And so will he, so will he
Look it’s coming to an end.

Essential parametric moments

“An essential parametric moment”

“You used to smile more,” she said.
“Yes, I did.”

------------

“I witness”

I watch from a distance
The surge of red and white on the streets
A flood of sweat and song
And rekindled hope
--cruel hope!—
And echoes of billowing sails
And a bearded youth

------------

“She was a good woman”

She’s gone
A cold slab in a sea of stone
A lonely bed in a desolate park
Gone is the collar of her dress
The color of her wrinkles
And the smell of her smile
That I loved to sink in

------------

“What is the nature of that sill?”
“That is snow.”

Tell her I’m yellow
I am drowned in the
Guck of life
And life is a--