Song at the End of the World

(for Joe Bolton, and the rest of us watching it burn)

⸻

Say this life,

and let it be enough,

for once.

Say:

I watched the sky turn brass and thought it beautiful.

I kissed someone not because I believed in tomorrow

but because I didn’t.

Say:

We knew the oceans were dying.

We still went swimming.

We knew the war was coming.

We still laid out bread,

and touched each other lightly,

as if the body were not already archive.

Say:

We remembered songs we hadn’t heard in years.

Not for comfort —

but for their silence between the notes.

The way forgetting sounds

right before it happens.

Say:

We woke each day unsure what for

and went on living anyway —

the way ruins hold rainwater

without asking why.

Say:

We were careful not to make sense.

We let the story break,

so the light could get in.

Say:

We saw ourselves, luminous and still,

half in love with what would be lost.

Held there —

like the pause before a falling star

for no one.

And still.

Say this life.

Let it be enough.

Gravesong (First Day of Summer)

for the ones I could not find

I stood at the grave of more than one father.

The sun hung low, swollen with knowing.

The air already thick with heat,

like something waiting to bloom or to break.

A quiet presence beside me.

The others absent —

still holding wounds sharper than stone.

I left my silence with the dead

and turned toward the hill

where my mother’s ghosts sleep.

Forty days after one death, came another.

Grandfather.

The soft pillar behind the louder men.

I used to know the place —

next to her, next to the cypress,

a rusted fence that once framed their resting.

But the last war

tore the cemetery open.

A corner bombed.

A tree felled —

it lay like a broken god across their names.

Today, the tree was gone.

The fence, too.

No sign of them.

I walked in circles,

sweating, swearing, praying,

in that quiet fever

called remembrance.

The land did not answer.

Even memory seemed afraid.

And I, a son of many ghosts,

left the graves to the sky.

To the sun.

To the first fire of summer.

But later, in the hush of evening,

I asked a question —

not with a ring,

but with a tremor of “what if.”

And he said yes.

And somewhere between

the craters and the cicadas,

a door opened.

Not out of joy alone,

but out of shelter.

Out of love that builds

even under sirens.

Out of the long dream

of somewhere else,

where cypresses stand

for peace, not mourning.

For My Mother, on a Day Like Today

You once said

you’d run with us under your arms—

my sister in one, me flailing in the other—

like we were firewood

and you the whole burning house.

You once said

you celebrated thirty a long time ago

and laughed like someone

who knew too well what came after.

But you are still the first door I knock on

when the sky cracks,

when the day folds into itself

like a badly drawn breath.

You are still the only mirror

I trust not to lie.

Today, I bring you no grand gift—

just this stitched-up thing,

this poem with one knee scraped,

the other still learning how to bow.

You, who strung a laundry line for my dreams,

still let them air, even when they sag.

You, who danced the new year

with knees that had long given notice—

you are the rhythm I return to

when I forget how to move.

And maybe this is all I know of grace:

to see you light a cigarette

with the same hand that fed me.

To see you fall silent,

but never give up your voice.

To know that when you say

“I’ll see you in the fall,”

you always mean

“Come home.”

Invocation for My Father, the Doctor of the War

You were broken long before you died,
But you loved us still.

Loved children, animals, the fragile beating things,
Even when your own heart cracked louder than your voice.

I didn’t call you hero then,
I didn’t know how.

You wanted me to be a doctor,
I became something else. But I still heal, I still carry your flame.

I felt your dying once.

It curled into my gut like a knot,

And then I was born again—

Through you, through her, through me.

You never looked like a saint, but you bled like one.

And now, in this cruel world you’re lucky not to see,

I miss your righteous anger,

Your soft hands,
Your absence that still aches like an unspoken prayer.

If you’re listening:

This is me saying it, at last.

I see you. I forgive you. I thank you.

And I miss you, my hero.

The Other Way

I remember you vaguely,
an early story of those days when
the world was expanding still...

I remember your name before
it shed a few letters, back when
the night was dark and
engulfed us, ignorant,
in its silent siren song.

I remember, vaguely, the way
I must have felt about you when
my body was uncharted yet,
and without a compass,
you somehow found a way.

Your voice, in those days before
it learnt its modulations--
when I prayed for it on the hour
and god was immortal still...
Now reaches me,
lilting and laden,
and I forget
to recognize it.

And in the silence between
when you extract yourself from
the loudness of your days and
the reverberation of my name,
we say all that we will ever say:
the love subtle and passing,
memories all but inconsequential,
and the two of us long estranged.

I still ponder, with fresh amazement,
at how it’s come to this...
At the full circle of anonymity,
and such dates that compel us
to reach across the vast divide
that has grown in between,
leaving us looking, always,
the other way...

(Originally posted on June 3, 2007)

Silent Night

Here, where the silence is delicious,
the end is garbled in fragments of song
—repeated, stale, and resounding—
echoing in corners of rooms dimly lit
with bulbs on a string, stars
—dangling and scratched—
like lives spilled into kitchen sinks.

Here, where the drain chokes with leftovers,
a cat snatching a piece of half-chewed meat,
and a voice telling of what should have been,
I fall through the cracks of the silence,
a promise broken at the end of the night
when acquiescence is no more than lack of resistance,
and nods are all there is.

Here, not because it is,
but because the memory of it resides
nestled underneath my breath,
peering from behind my fevered eyes
at the moment as it lapses.
Here, where we persist,
you and I, stumbling eternally,
aimless drifters in a world half-lit.

(Originally posted on December 26, 2007)

Somewhere

Somewhere there’s a revolution, I hear,

Somewhere I used to know...

And here, in a darkening dusk,

In an expanse of grass

Turned purple by the silence,

I turn away...

This is life stripped of excesses:

No one else for days,

Voices all digitized,

The constant hum of a world

Churning itself.

I laugh just because

I miss the sound.

And they come

Seeking life;

They turn them away

Not knowing

It is life they bring.

Tell no one this,

I say it here in confidence,

Throw it to the dustbin of words.

There used to be someone

Who wanted to be great

But forgot—

Where was I?

Ah, yes…

(Originally posted on Sep. 17, 2015)

Back, with a Limp

It wasn’t for love;
that much I know now.
Looking at your face,
an echo of what I was,
my pretenses falter.
The corners of your smile
still wrinkle with the same abandon;
your eyes, holes in my fabric.
It wasn’t…

It was for my defeat in you that I sang,
falling gloriously all the way
and climbing up again.
You were only an excuse for my loss,
a reason for shattering.
The void in me where you nestled
was older than us.
And for being so blind,
I seek forgiveness.
You did not earn
the wrath I sprung on you;
you were not worthy of the venom.

Glitter on, like I never happened.
Soak the life I dreamed in you,
and bask in my absence.
I continue limping,
lifting the shadow that I cast,
unfurling.
I have yet to fill
what I thought you had left.
And I have yet to name it.

(originally posted on July 26, 2008)

Sentences

We kick them out so we can
fill the silence with nonsense;
_____a friendship dwindled
_____into the vestige of a dream.

The hallway stretches ahead
once more like a phone call
lagging a world in between.

Letters scratched off cereal boxes;
a life crammed into
the distance of a scream.

Replay the rhyme
like a country expecting
like the waiting,
____recurring
__________recurring
_____recurring,
__________recurrin'.

Welcome the words back
still dusty from the rubble;
the ones that made it will do.

Those missing, have done their job;
they'll remain somewhere
in a sentence, in a thought.

Incomplete sentences are sentences,
too, in some languages
where the dead have names.

But for now, only hint at them--
you never knew them,
they never knew today.

Stick the alphabet, one after the other,
down the graves
where the soil is supple still.

One day a sentence will begin again
written with characters
they once knew.

They spelled their names
with all the voices of the earth
in a corner where the shadows never heave.

(originally posted on August 24, 2006)

Pretenses

Her letter lay on the table, unopened still, for the third day in a row—
I can always pretend it took a few days longer in the mail.

Peace,
another word to ruminate over,
chew on it like cud, and regurgitate.
No, I won’t tell you what it is;
one of those things you know only when you lose,
like life, like happiness,
like your keys.

We were walking 'round the neighborhood when the weather started to shiver,
looking inside houses, cloaked in the night—
if people knew how much their chandeliers told about them, they’d lose them.
I was savoring the cold like I do my sadness—
silently, with nostrils open, and a smirk on the inside of my mouth.
I was pretending, when we buy a house, I can invite my family over some time.
But the thought got stuck, there, on a wooden bench near the back entrance,
damp with the evening’s breath, fibers gaping, ready for the frost.

Peace.
Should the peaceful even be allowed to talk about it?
If we could only will it, we wouldn’t be here.
Yes, let’s pretend.

Pretense,
that’s how people wait for peace, pretending that it was there.
And in the meantime, there are fridges to be cleaned.

We celebrated our seventh anniversary in front of the TV—no sex, just apple pie.
Our faces were beaming in the glow of having said it all,
or just enough—the rest is too boring anyhow.
These days I can pretend to devour him—he doesn’t even need to know.

Peace.
It’s like nothing, the anticipation of pain—
is good the absence of evil?
Abundance, time, they cost.
One of those things you forget about.

(Originally posted on October 20, 2006)

Yoke (Concept of a Nation)

(To the Lebanese Bloggers of the War)

Hunched
in our corners of the earth,
holding down the fort,
pretending to do something.

Garbling
a code of song,
of longings of ten years ago,
and of love

to this concept of a nation,
this bowl of fire
in the guts.

This resonance of a woman’s voice
reverberating in the heat;
this prayer of desperation
that shudders under the familiarity of death;
this face, grown weary from
this concept of a nation.

The rhythm of days
has grown syncopated
in the largesse of your breath.

You, inhabiting the rubble,
the ghost streets and the night,
the night pregnant with the silence
of those who weren’t there.

You, parting the weight of the air
laden with age,
with truncated years.

You, carrying the clot of a promise
between your teeth
like a mother cat carries her young.

Lift the yoke of what remains
and trudge
_____forward, somewhere
the earth will exhale
and flatten her bust for you.

(Originally posted on August 29, 2006)

Cats

And then there was a gap
where my life used to be.
A continuum of tedium,
stopped in its tracks,
a cavity blown
where the banality once was.

Now my life is much too serious,
and yet the world around me isn’t.

The light on Chestnut Hill never dims.
I hesitate to tell the people there
that somewhere else
the sun is broken.
That somewhere else
my dad tells me
--so earnestly he could almost believe it--
that it will be alright.
That, miraculously, our building still stands,
and that he ventures home still,
every once in while,
to feed my sister's cats.

I don’t tell him it’s the cats
that make me cry.
That the thought of them cowered
in the stairwell,
not even meowing,
as the world’s face is peeled
is all I can handle.
My aunt cowering in the emergency room,
I can’t.
Whatever lies next to her,
behind the curtains,
I don’t want to think.

It thunders here,
my cat is behind the toilet bowl,
inside the couch,
and underneath the bed--
all at once.
I don’t even want to think of those cats.

A cat wounded in air raids on Al-Ouza'i

(originally posted on Jul 29, 2006)

Looking Through Your Eyes

I remember seeing it through your eyes,
my country,
as for the first time.

The tight colorless street
where I grew up
choking with people,
_____now covered with a dust
_____sinful as only humanity is.

I remember looking up
as you raised your head
at buildings that resembled
pockmarks on the face of God.
_____They now rest in pieces
_____on the streets
_____and the face of God
_____is nowhere to be seen.

I remember meeting my family
in you,
sprawling, loud and insuppressible,
spreading over the table like a headache
that shouldn’t be cured.
_____Now the table lies naked,
_____all the colors of the vegetables
_____turned black.
_____Even the flies recoil.

I remember climbing the shoulders of the mountain,
the plain spreading behind us,
patchy and still,
and the valley round the corner,
yawning wide,
like the mouth of heaven.
_____Now it doesn’t shed a tear for us.
_____It had been there when it all began,
_____when men fell from grace
_____and ate each other.

(Originally posted on July 28, 2006)