Nudity

__________Remember when
you used to try to seduce me
__________and then you found out
that all I wanted was to be seduced
__________and you stopped?

__________I remember because
the day is grey
__________like the first day of school
when the sky looked like
__________the beginning of abandonment
and the soggy sandwich in my lunchbox,
__________rampant with banana and chocolate spread,
smelled like the birth of longing.

__________What is it about that chill
that erases May only to replace it
__________with the fragility of first sex?
Because that animal in me shudders
__________in anticipation of touch
before it had consequence,
__________and Spring stood shirtless still.

__________Bendable
is that hunger in me,
__________like the folds of first nudity
when the clothes piled on the floor,
__________and his skin was there, right there,
bristling to grow.

Vacancies

For Teta, it's 4 years today...

A house full of absences
like a graveyard on a sunny day,
all mine to dip in
as I please.
A language full of words
and I choose none;
I have never been good at choice.
Let it simmer;
anniversaries age like everything else.
I must admit,
I miss him more than you;
fresh absences are tart.
But you loom larger,
lapel and scarf,
like a wide-grinned moon
over my sleep.

These are the vacancies that never fill.
I wonder if you stroll the hundred yards at night
back to your house
and hover over the bed
to plant a kiss on his forehead.
I wonder if you can taste it still.
I like to think that you stop
by the bakery when it’s closed and dark,
caress the wood boards and feel
the flour under your fingernails.
And that you pass by the shoe store
that no longer carries red slippers
since you stopped coming in.
Selma’s ghost meets you across the street
to sell you pretend groceries
behind rolled-down grilles—
even the dead play charades.

But when she visits you pretend
to sleep under the marble
just to smell her hand above.
And then she cries and reminds you
that it’s all over
again.

And the 2006 Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere is...

Ron Silliman. Congratulations, Ron!

It was, much to my surprise, a very close call: 1 vote! So, I'd like to thank all those who took the time to vote.

Best,

Ashraf

Frames

How ridiculous,
flowers sprouting from every crack,
colors making mockery of the street;
it's bright like no one dies.

I come back to his grey face
parched with longing
like he wants to be human again.

Someone out there is claiming their siesta,
and somewhere they gather like every night.
I have my dinner with them
on a separate table,
though they cannot smell me.

The hallway opens wide and long again,
nothing but a vision of myself
and frames still waiting to be hung.
We could never make up our minds
what to feed them.
And it's not becoming to hang
an empty frame.

The yellow one sits empty still,
staring at every snapshot that could be.
Passing, passing, passing,
like the days I have left
to spend with her,
their finiteness killing God
every time.

What If

What if this is happiness?
This thing, tasteless as water.
What if this is the perfect day?
The one where nothing happens.
What if I didn’t notice;
would it count?

What if this is it,
missing them
but still able to hear their voices?
What if this is it,
waiting up for you till midnight
and then you come home?
What if all there is
is this cat, turning on its back,
waiting for a tummy rub?

What if all that happens
is this
and then nothing,
would this be a life?

Well Done

In "celebration" of "Poetry Month"...

I am done with poetry.
Henceforth, I write postmortem.

I am done with poetry
that doesn’t sound like poetry,
and poetry that reads
like grocery lists and Hallmark cards.
I am done with wisdom about life,
and lack of wisdom about life.
I am done with writing nobody reads.

I am done with readings where nobody listens,
where the only voice anyone wants to hear
is their own.
(But I should have guessed—
they are, after all
called Readings, not Listenings.)

I am done with my cynicism,
and with yours.
I am done with the silences
between my words.
I am done with magazines and journals
nobody reads—not even their publishers,
and I am done with publishers.
I am done with the guilt of not reading
other’s work—Who reads anyhow?
And why should anyone?

Here is to Poetry month! Here is to
Poetry Blogging! Here is to
Laureateships and the New Yorker!
Here is to expectations
that always need to be lowered!
And here is to words nobody reads,
and site nobody visits!

I am going back to wax,
back to baking my mother in the oven.
I am going back to my silence,
and to collecting dust bunnies
where the wall meets the floor.
I am going back to knowing
I am nobody,
and you are nobody,
and nobody’s listening…

"The Four Subjects of Poetry"

1. I went out into the woods today, and it made me feel, you know, sort of religious.
   
   
2. We're not getting any younger.


3. It sure is cold and lonely
   (a) without you, honey, or
   (b) with you, honey.


4. Sadness seems but the other side of the coin of happiness, and vice versa, and in any case the coin is too soon spent, and on what we know not what.

--William Matthews

"How many things have to happen to you
before something occurs to you?"

--Robert Frost

*Excerpted from an NPR interview with Edward Hirsch

Medusas

Here is the silence
fill it with words

out of the shadows falling on this room
capture the day in retrospect

like a lamp that refuses to light
until you touch it


I speak to you
through her these days
and she speaks of her medusa
and how, as always
it wears a familiar face.

I get her the same gift every year
but now my gifts only
collect the shadows on a shelf
She has outgrown them,
but I was away
and now I don't know
what words to get her.

Once more, change the dial:
this time it is the prize
they gave her for her limbs
I wonder if she resents the gesture
or only misses the feeling in her leg.

And now under the covers
where the cold has made a nest
where I have made acquaintance
with the blankness of his back.

Quick, the last thread of light
is dissolving, soon they will fire
the cannon--somewhere,
some other time--
the days all die the same.

Now you can hear the whine
of frigid empty air grazing the floor
It's just you and it now;
don't look; it's not there.

Second Poet Laureate Of The Blogosphere

"National Poetry Month is April and it’s now up to the members of Poetisphere and Poets101.com to decide how the process will be run this year.

In the meantime, let’s get busy nominating. If you know of a blogging poet who meets the following rules then please feel free to leave that poet’s name and complete URL in the comments below. As only Poetisphere members may leave comments, those who are not members may e-mail your submissions to... idleblogs (AT) yahoo.com... [or] e-mail them to another Poetisphere member."
(I'd be happy to relay your nominations.)

Café Lutecia

Here, in this corner, life happens.

Here, beside the dusty faded magazines
of a hundred covers ago,

Here, beneath the posters of a homeland
missed so much it’s been forgotten,

Here, at this table of fading stains
by the naïve declarations of eternity
etched into its face,

Here, did I stop loving you?


Here, where a hundred stories
must’ve begun before,

Here, where a hundred mornings
stumbled across the threshold,

Here, where they draped the mantle
with pictures of what it was used to be,

an etching of a city
that no longer wants to be etched,

Here, in this kitchen where she frowned
over the smell of another place,

where she saw in the face of the eggs
another future gone by,

Did she here ask, Why?
a hundred times before?

Did she, too, stop loving him
a hundred closings ago?

Did she, too, look at those walls
and wonder what else might have been?

What that bridge must have looked like
from the window of another room?

Did she think of why she stopped collecting
mugs, and plates, and figurines?

And how long after that
did it take for the dust to collect?

Did she notice the first time
they looked just like the day before?

And the first time the faces coming in
all looked, like those getting out, alike?

Did she see it like that first wrinkle
that didn’t go with a good night’s sleep?

Like the first time she admitted
it wasn’t the light making that hair look white?

Here, when they turned over the sign,
she must have sat, hands folded in her lap,
like a hundred laps before,

Here, she must have looked out
at the street falling asleep,
at the night gathering
like dirt behind her ears,

Here, she must have wondered
if there’ll be another…

Geography Lessons

To Katy
 
I sat there on the steps
absorbing the rest of the day,
waiting to see you for the first time.
The sun was dissipating with the distance,
turning the sky into a fake purple screen
soon to be erased.
And the cold was seeping in me.

But you were real.
From behind the hill,
huge eyes, and a tweed the color of the sky,
and a silence only the night knows.
How could you live up to your self
when you are so big?
But you do.

Always the night.
That density of the air
when she sang of candles and roses
and voices bouncing off the walls.
You could smell the humidity then
before it collected under your nose.

We were young, and she was young,
and the country was young, too.
The geraniums were blooming from ear to ear,
forced from the ground with too much determination.
I was just starting to know the night.

So how did we get to this?
Sitting each in his couch
on opposite sides of the room,
slicing the silence between us
like a brie,
gathering the distance like dust bunnies
under the coffee table.

When did the night turn so cold?
It was always silent,
but even the silence sounded different then.

Now you're gone
back to words,
silent, but loud,
smoothing away the folds in the distance.
Sometimes it's not a matter of geography.

Reading Excerpt

As much as I hate seeing myself on video, below finally is a video excerpt from Saturday's reading, upon the insistence of my family and friends in Lebanon, featuring "Tired" and "Tell Me". (Happy Mother's Day, Mom!)



The program was picked by my dear friend, Katy, who came all the way from Sandwich, MA! Here it is:

1. Breathe
2. Seasons
3. In the Making
4. Jellyfish
5. Alkaline
6. The Flight of the Swallow
7. Red Light District
8. Cry
9. Life (Unraveled)
10. Life on a Beautiful Day
11. The Smallness of Life
12. Tired
13. Tell Me

(Ryan, thanks for the footage!)

Reading / News

Hello all,

I will be reading this Saturday, March 18 2006 at 7:00pm at Communitas (201 Sabine Ave. Narberth, PA). I hope to see you there!

Also, I was a finalist in the Mad Poets Society contest for my poem "Life on a Beautiful Day" which will be published in the upcoming issue of Mad Poets Review (late summer/early fall).

And three of my artworks will be featured in the most recent issue of Philadelphia Stories (out this week): two wax collages and a water color (below).