[ when you're ready ]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x52w8txtiQs

Cannot recommend this enough. If nothing else compels you, then perhaps he will.

Daniyal Mueenuddin

hurting heads,
hurting hearts.
playlist for the rudderless:
shush. stop crying.
stop reading.

jo naa janey, haq ki taaqat.



it's lonely and quiet in here baby,
but at least we're together.

I
would know your voice
in a storm, in the rain,
running between streetlamps
and dead cats and dirty trams.

dig me a deep hole,
drive me home, mama:
strawberry feels
like forever.

[ such grief ]

to leave a city forever
is heartbreak.

i wouldn't know such grief.
this is after all,
a poem.
ek ek kar key mein
terey naam likhun,
par iss dard ko kaun naam dey gaa?

[ Birdwings ]

Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.
if it were always a fist or always stretched open,
you would be paralyzed.

Your deepest presence is in every small contracting
and expanding,
The two as beautifully balanced and coordinated
as birdwings.

- JB

[ Wednesday morning, 7 a.m ]

my whole life is not here.
for which i am grateful,
leaving not-home is easy,
thoughtless.
airports are airports,
traffic jams, not wombs.
falling out of touch
simpler
as those we're suddenly in-
touch with smoothly
take over the hours.
i am grateful, un-rooted
un-being in this city.
and now it seems
the whole world could feel the same:
long itineraries of
not-home, sans the
thickness, gnawing desire to
be somewhere.
i could be
not-anywhere at all.

Go up on the roof at night
in this city of the soul:
God picks up the reed-flute world and blows.
Remember the lips,
where the wind-breath originated,
and let your note be clear.
Don't try to end it.
Be your note.

(from Jelaluddin Balkhi, the Roman)

[ stooping to your clemency. ]

the slow month drifts
glacial, this side of the atlantic
two spies on a ship sail
to your kingdom.
which doesn't exist.
five hours later feet
pounding the cold sidewalk
teeth throbbing, this perfect tennis
morning, any goddamn
excuse to forget
last night would do.
but why the great absurdist,
are you not
satisfied with
my voice and flesh, must you
maggot your way into
my memories too?

[ Awwal tu, Aakhir tu ]

when everything you need is
exactly here. low train-siren,
singing softly
beaten boxcar, trash site,
this side of phaatak.

sometimes in my dreams i still
wander through your brick and stone-concrete
i still lose myself at the oily edges
of your iron sky.
smell your smoke dusty noise
i wear your memories out,
house by house, tree
by tree.
leave my bed and this cold, gladly i
slip inside your heat.

wrap myself in your fingers and faces
coarse laughter, thick voice
running beneath dark clouds
running to the endless sea.

Urban Journeys may have inspired this one.

[ happy birthday ]

If hands could free you, heart,
 Where would you fly?
Far, beyond every part
Of earth this running sky
Makes desolate?  Would you cross
City and hill and sea,
 If hands could set you free?

I would not lift the latch;
 For I could run
Through fields, pit-valleys, catch
All beauty under the sun--
Still end in loss:
I should find no bent arm, no bed
 To rest my head.

- Philip Larkin

[ four ]

morning at five, halogen
bright, smoke dusted
lonely streets
you're fast a-sleeping,
the woman whispers
long and dark in my ear
long darkness that twists your hair,
soft mad darkness
slides across
the lake, breaks.
green filigree patchworked
Michigan skies, vines strangle
spindle fingers
witches cry and spin,
giddy-sick in between
green, lime green
fields, forests, factories.
in this other town.
this other life.
that four letter word
i forget we carried, i forget
selfish flesh, from
years gone by -

love is
the writing sickness.
hard and evil,
greedy.
mine.

[ DC ]

the Smithsonian wasn't particularly busy
and neither were we,
miles from DC
where the heat and the cold kill me and I'd
give anything to see a scraper
scrape the sky:
i was so sad when you told me
the old bones were fake.
i know what dinosaurs look like, i want to
feel something that crashed its way beneath the stars,
lonely diplodocus watching a middle-aged milky way.
beady-eyed.

[ Overs II ]

falling apart is easy
cummings would not
capitalize, neither did i.
But you do.
it feels like a glass wall
that big-b.
one i could stand
and scream at
forever, not that
you'd hear me.
who's that madwoman
screaming?
falling apart is easy,
napkins on the table
folded just so,
the gentle scrape
of blunt knives
cutting the meal down to size.
polished wine glass politics,
civil requests for
salt. etc.

[ consider, for a second, your children ]

Everything I know about parenting I have learned from watching my parents.
We go through life wondering why our kids don't turn out the way we want them to. We conveniently forget that they are painful and honest reminders of ourselves. Why doesn't my son get better grades? Why is my daughter a rebellious slut? Why are they impulsive, angry, abusive, why don't they like us?
Have you looked at yourself lately?
After beating and abusing your kids, comparing them to other kids, fighting like animals with your spouse... you expect your children to be loving and caring individuals? After consistently showing them how to sell yourself short, how to lie, cheat and steal, you expect them to be honest with you?
I'm not saying we were failures. I'm not saying we weren't loving parents, hardworking, considerate... we did the best we could. We did what we thought was right. We struggled to get by in a world that didn't always make sense.
And our children do too. So if we've been less than perfect, lets give them a fucking break, eh?

[ distance ]

as i fell asleep last night
i've already replied to your words, with mine
i ever ignored your restlessness:
these miles have gone on, and on.

i wonder, myself, what it was i went through
what very little about your story i knew
we need, in love, to practice
(only words):
these miles have gone on, and on.

love us like this, or don't
i've nothing to apologize for, perhaps you won't
there is a red origami crane on my bedside table
and your voice lingers.

perhaps its safer in madness, i fear
this time, when you fold your things
another year:
this time, i miss you
and i wish i knew why.
or where it ends.
these miles have gone on, and on.

[ Boston, M.A ]

you wander inside her namesake
careful hands, you
land in the corner of
my captured screen, you lean forward
i can see you smiling.
from three lenses away.

i stare at you throughout the performance
you dont look at me
once.

i thought we'd unlearned these things
i was too big to
play on swings
without hitting
my knees on the ground.

how lovely you sound
in and out of the flesh
in memory, in hindsight,
as if the rest
doesn't register.
my telescopic filter
makes you lovely,

a pattern on tiles,
repeated
Cheshire smile,
a fountain
ive never seen, in cities
i've never been to.

(9-6-9)

This one came up, quite unexpectedly, while searching cities. It's funny because I had not actually read the Namesake when this was written; what's funnier is that I spent all of last weekend reading it. More on the Namesake later. Here's more on cities:

Wikipedia encourages contributors to mimic the basic civility, trust, cultural acceptance and self-organizing qualities familiar to any city dweller. Why don’t people attack each other on the way home? Why do they stay in line at the bank? Why don’t people guffaw at the person with blue hair?

The police may be an obvious answer. But this misses the compact among city dwellers. Since their creation, cities have had to be accepting of strangers — no judgments — and residents learn to be subtly accommodating, outward looking.

Mumford elaborates: “Even before the city is a place of fixed residence, it begins as a meeting place to which people periodically return: the magnet comes before the container, and this ability to attract nonresidents to it for intercourse and spiritual stimulus no less than trade remains one of the essential criteria of the city, a witness to its essential dynamism, as opposed to the more fixed and indrawn form of the village, hostile to the outsider.”

The marvel of Wikipedia — and cities — is that all the intercourse and spiritual stimulus don’t make living there impossible. Rather, they are exactly what makes living there possible.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/weekinreview/29cohen.html

[ Every child needs a Giant Peach ]

I woke up with the evening sky surrounding me, which was enormously comforting and serene. The crisp white rigging of the athletics stadium on one end and the bright concrete of the undergraduate dorms on the other. And I looked over to the Sears tower with it tiny blinking electric lights and wondered, wouldn’t it be wonderful if a peach were to get stuck in it?

I could live my life waking up under my coat, in train stations, airports, and big glass cages that look over Chicago. But yes, the peach. I think James and the Giant Peach was one of the best books ever written because it was so utterly believable. I remember exactly how James lost the magic green crystals the strange man gave him, I remember how neatly there was a Spider and a Silkworm who could provide bedding and ropes and all sorts of useful things. And I remember how simple it was to sail and fly away on a giant peach with perfectly benign giant insects, into shark infested waters (the sharks could do nothing, obviously, the peach was too big for them to eat and besides, their pointy noses got in the way of devouring it) and over cities of beautifully haunting cloud people. And how finally the peach powered by the magical, miraculous, ingenious and totally believable flock of a hundred seagulls deposited them neatly on top of the Empire State Building.

I could live like that forever, waking up under the great warm blanket of blue skies and falling in love with the way the sun sets the entire western surface of a tall tower ablaze. Forever being until it’s suddenly dark and cold and our hearts crave small things – familiar smells, warm food and soft brown hands. Forever being until I stumble upon moments of great joy and wish I had the courage to ask you to share them with me without being afraid of you saying “no.”

In large cities, miles and months away from home the sky can be a wonderfully comforting thing.

[ A "Thank You" Note ]

Wislawa Szymborska

There is much I owe
to those I do not love.
The relief in accepting
they are closer to another.
Joy that I am not
the wolf to their sheep.

My peace be with them
for with them I am free,
and this, love can neither give,
nor know how to take.
I don't wait for them
from window to door.

Almost as patient
as a sun dial,
I understand
what love does not understand.
I forgive
what love would never have forgiven.

Between rendezvous and letter
no eternity passes,
only a few days or weeks.

My trips with them always turn out well.
Concerts are heard.
Cathedrals are toured.
Landscapes are distinct.

And when seven rivers and mountains
come between us,
they are rivers and mountains
well known from any map.

It is thanks to them
that I live in three dimensions,
in a non-lyrical and non-rhetorical space,
with a shifting, thus real, horizon.
They don't even know
how much they carry in their empty hands.

"I don't owe them anything",
love would have said
on this open topic.

Translated from Polish by: Joanna Maria Trzeciak

and for those we love,
Wislawa? rooms of
open books,
gnawing, unfinished poems
no peace
no relief
and endless waiting
by windows.

[ i do not know what it is ]

It's raining in Madison. Poetry is easier to get away with these days, it doesn't require explanations or evoke criticism in the same way that prose does. M read two passages from Kundera last night, I thought of Szymborska and worried about the recurrence of experience and realised that she was alseep.

The Premise.

At about the same time, he had the following experience: He had been meeting a young woman in a room that an old friend put at his disposal every day until midnight. After a month or two, she reminded him of one of their earlier encounters: they had made love on a rug under the window while it was thundering and lightning outside; they had made love for the length of the storm; it had been unforgettably beautiful!
Tomas was appalled. Yes, he remembered making love to her on the rug (his friend slept on a narrow couch that Tomas found uncomfortable), but he had completely forgotten the storm! It was odd. He could recall each of their times together; he had even kept close track of the ways they made love (she refused to be entered from behind); he remembered several of the things she had said during intercourse (she would ask him to squeeze her hips and stop looking at her all the time); he even remembered the cut of her lingerie; but the storm had left no trace.
Of each erotic experience his memory recorded only the steep and narrow of sexual conquest: the first piece of verbal aggression, the first touch, the first obscenity he said to her and she to him, the minor perversions he could make her acquiesce in and the ones she held out against. All else he excluded (almost pedantically) from his memory. He even forgot where he had first seen one or another woman, if that event occurred before his sexual offensive began.
The young woman smiled dreamily as she went on about the storm, and he looked at her in amazement and something akin to shame: she had experienced something beautiful, and he had failed to experience it with her. The two ways in which their memories reacted to the evening storm sharply delimit love and non-love.
By the word “non-love” I do not wish to imply that he took a cynical attitude to the young woman, that, as present-day parlance has it, he looked upon her as a sex object; on the contrary, he was quite fond of her, valued her character and intelligence, and was willing to come to her aid if ever she needed him. He was not the one who behaved shamefully towards her; it was him memory, for it was his memory that, unbeknownst to him, had excluded her from the sphere of love.

The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful. From the time he met Tereza, no woman had the right to leave the slightest impression on that part of his brain.
Tereza occupied his poetic memory like a despot and exterminated all trace of other women.

Finally,

I have said before that metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a (wo)man enters her first word into our poetic memory.

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

..or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

Such small hands, in the rain, in thunderstorms, that experience. Of flesh, friendship, idiocy. Those mistake(s), the ones that gnaw deep inside your belly, hound you with shame and regret. And then I emerge from this dream, look at the piles of letters and articles and multiple regressions around me and remark that the rain has frozen, M, shouldn't we...
Nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals the intense fragile stupidity of love. Of children, lying in bed, tumbling naked and flushed with enough poetry that when he touches her, when her mouth whispers close to his neck she says the voice of your eyes is... of course, wonderful and stupid.