Two Things

1. My Puki's got his own blog now! It's a photo blog (with snide quips) called I never did have anything to say (http://i-never-did.blogspot.com/)
   
   
2. I will be going to Dubai for a couple of days (to visit a very dear friend, see illustrations for Ten Years, The Memory of Me, Absence Materialized, and Pieces of Me; and Mom is trying to tempt me to move closer).

Later!

Turtle Shell

Retract into self like an amoeba—
don’t touch anything
you may not desire.

Regurgitate old fantasies
when we were young and wicked—
these corners still hold our smells.

Peep into memory like a voyeur
tucking in the corners of today—
flesh is fresher in the mind.

Grow older as I remember
the teddy bear I used to hump
—with a slit where his heart should be—
now dusty and dank—and matted.

Bare my fangs
—dull from grinding—
just for show;
my bite leaves no mark these days.

Try to rattle your demons,
but your gods are just as naked
—and their skin the same green.

Sexualis

Love chafes off my edges
like old brittle paint
falling in pieces of hooker green
on the bathroom floor.

I am devoid of touch,
hollowing at the center;
spank strike me with a spoon
and you can hear me echo.

The dust in the old room settles,
like first lips, gingerly on my skin.
It’s like age materializing,
faces reappearing after the fact.

Lorca dreamt me tonight.
He spread my legs
across the streets of Cordoba
and asked me to call his name.

I yelped until I went hoarse,
tickling the letters with my tongue,
rolling them over like a nipple
on toothless gums.

بوابة الذهاب

(Now that I am in Lebanon, with the appropriate software and keyboard, I will take the opportunity to post a couple of poems in Arabic that I wrote a few weeks ago.)

هناك، على بوابة الذهاب في دمشق، تركتها
أمي تخطف نفَسها كي لا يسيل دمعاً، هناك
خلف الزجاج تغصب بسمتها
لكن العيون لا تغصب الإبتسام
جبارة دوماً، ولكن لم تدر أن
ما من جبّار يخطف الأنفاس أكثر
من جبّار يخطف أنفاسه

بعد حين

بعد حين
تراءى وجهها على الشاشة
عينين كحّلها التعب
بسمة وانت على البعد
بعد حين
تراءى شوقي كما الأيام
شيب و حنين و غضب
بعد حين
لم يبقَ من حياتي
إلاّ مساحات شاحبة
تضمحلّ دون قُبَل يديها
لم يبقَ من الحلم
إلاّ شفافٌ باهتٌ
يودّ الذهاب إليها

عاد الربيع
ماذا أُرسل؟
كلماتٌ و شالاتٌ و حلق؟
و غيابي دوماً أُهديه
بارداً بيْتاً على طبق؟
ماذا أمّي؟
ماذا أقول لك؟
عذراً؟ عفواً؟
كلامٌ فارغٌ و قصص.
لو أمكنني لكنتُ
في كلّ الأماكن
و كلّ الناس و أنا،
لكنتُ جنبك و جنبي
و جنب الريحان و السما
لكنّي، أمّي، لست إلاّ
ولداً هشّاً أضناه اليما

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.