al-Tiraih

Slept nearby the thorny birds

Nearby slept the birds
Telling the story
while singing folk sonnets.

Folk sonnets
we’re singing the story

About the city Yafa
when my grandmother was young

She was congealed by history

Guarded by the poor and she’s young

She was picking figs that day

And picked along some months and years and one single day

She saw on his animated face

His face, and some “news” that lacked the face

She looked back at where we were

And the marina looked farther than ever and we were

Like evening stars
but rather started to melt
along with our favorite nights

And the sun was though still coming down hard

I said: “give me the basket and wait for me on the mountain side.” She said: “In your seventh dream that will be,
the basket is full of halls
and doesn’t hold water!”

And Water wouldn’t hold in halls!

When we got to the mountain,

pheasants were awaiting for us and it was the “day,”

a bit before late afternoon.

we hid near the ledges, with dry sore throats and a moon,

peaking and sneaking on us,
and with us
along with the moon.

burned were all the fig trees,

and gone like an easy sap of spring water!

The same water that doesn’t hold any water.

The Library Street

Tree leafs started shaking when I held her hand,
and a wine glass attends to my presence and appearing to have been brought to me by a troubadour!
My consciousness started to seesaw from how much awakening I had in me … from being so blue … and you?

You were praying to the Goddess of Silence, and that’s how Silence slept soundly in your palms,
and upon you,
every evening, the rain falls,

upon you .
You pass through the block just before pheasants wake up,
before the early travelers hit the roads searching for a lost morning, and I seek you while carrying an antique window that is ornamented with ancient pale colors, and my inner lake opens its doors to what remains of my fear and love … and then ….

you leave … you.

In ruins we’ve become, like a wrecked canvas portrait with very little recognizable features …
like old photos of old newspapers in your stuffy attic, in you.

al-Maskubiyyah 5

Sweet on my heart when these old days pass through me, and passes by my house the moment of longing to touching the moment. Pigeons flew over and paused, this time around, and then flew away once more, and few crows stood by me meticulously hunting for an opportunity to capture the best of my innocence,

the one that used to be my own,

and yet again, my own.

al-Maskubiyyah 4

I sprinkle twisted letters and words on the streets, and leave a little critical space for random love words to form … or depart!
It’s then when love becomes mystic,

and roads become theaters to fulfill the vivid visions of emptiness:

“The first thing about love is fear.”

I looked at my home from my home,
and slipped away his looks on me!

Visions were so oblique, and dear:

“Just like when I leave behind the homeland of visions, but at the same time I don’t!
Just like when I “understand” but never realize where my feet need to settle, so I immerse myself in falling …
and become merely a morning radio story that reminds everyone with the warmth of my own “place,” but never my own … it’s then when I would cry flowers on every bokay of suns.”

Would you forgive me my sins when the blue moon overshadows the cypress trees?

I thought I have a place in heaven, my own!!

Should you leave me drifting over the roofs of old houses so I can find a home, that I can call my own? ….

”I thought this home was my own?”

al-Maskubiyyah 3

Crushed by the truth I go on,
chased by death angels who are lost near the grassy stairs that lead to the doors of God’s territory,

I must go on and hold on to nothing.

My foot steps are embedded with magical lanterns and bendir rhythms, and nothingness floats:

“Touching is winter, and you didn’t offer me water after “the water,” and you didn’t say be peaceful within the peacefulness of winter, rather you roamed.”

I stared down at all of the not-my-selves in myself, and at some distorted songs and poems that provoked my childish innocence and left me hanging on the poor electric utility wiring like speechless old clothes and I’ve become so speechless. And you’re watching every move I make and becoming noisier and noisier while playing backgammon! I am dancing with each idea that’s stoned between my fingers and I want to hit every wall that resonates with every attempt to achieve ecstasy.

That’s how I hid my first cigarette, right between the gutters, and I hid along some innocent secrets and an evil-eye from my childhood.

“Secrets are weaknesses, exposing them is strength.”

al-Maskubiyyah 2

That night,
I sat under the utility pole in a misty summer night,

In a night where the pale neon light
gave a consistent impression of loneliness and coldness, and tight …
was the nostalgia that settled beyond me in the front yard,
along with its bewildering silence and
much carefulness and passivity.

The garden didn’t wake up from the cold neons or from the warmth of a moment that emerged from the inner sun and wandered around like dry dust in the middle of the street until it reached the boundaries of fear at the point when it met and touched the edges of darkness:

It woke up from the absence of the immediate truth, my own;
and from ancient fondness in the matters of a heart,

that used to be my own.”

It vanishes, that coarse state of the street, along with its smooth and streamlined particles of light that head towards carrying the last shadows on my little face, and take them towards my moon,

towards a song that took me far,
at a moment when tree leafs just started to know me.

Few shadows of daily truths sneak up on me in the midst of this foggy Ramallah evening, just like the hidden worlds of the Mediterranean valleys just behind our house…

“The inner shadows retreat.”
And too my own …
I catche up with the cold lights and I wait for the sun to rise and hide in a world of sad lights that make the delusion of my own
true skin darker than ever:

“Darkness is enlightenment, and lights are fear.
“A sound is coldness, and silence is luminous.”

I retire at the bottom of darkness; and sleepy in my bed seem to be some secret lights.
The coldness of the trembling cotton sheets feels
like a warm rose, that used to be my own.

I visited myself, down at the narrow streets … my streets,
and once again
I was mesmerized by the migrate birds that flew over a world that has little to offer but my remains.

I then dreamed of a winter that sprinkled on my face its own beginnings and spread its smell all over the concept of place,
and I hugged the dear green leafs of the ceratonia carob tree and I then spent the night on what remains of the dear warmth of the side walk, and I then dissolved,
and dissolved got several verses of folk poetry

that bend its knees.

I bow towards a fate full of obsessions with dissolutions

and I throw myself,
and poetry throws itself on summer flowers and it bends,

I then bend on the ground,

and earth doesn’t remember poetry or names, but walks down the streets at night like a non-behaved river, and a whispering voice runs along chasing the sparkling waters and runs over my melting hunting-net, and right through my crying glass, through my worries about some alleged worlds of one world, and then the whole world
flies away!

al-Maskubiyyah 1

I found the beginning of homelessness in my home,

at the corner of a the drowning mountain-street where

I used to sneak into the smell of the neighborhood

like humid smoke that confiscates all the bedrooms, and

the vintage good old days.

At that moment in time, some rough sketches of my childhood
appear to imply the smell of fate, one that is conceived by memories:

“The moon in me is initiated by memories.”

So I stood in the middle of the intersection,

looking for things to challenge me,
for old collectible coins,

for things that haven’t known me,

and I haven’t yet known.

Things to capture and be captured by,
things that I can leave in my pocket for a whole day in the extended life of Jasmine flowers so I can close my eyes, and listen with my silence to distant cars, and retrieve myself from the edge of the dangerous moment just before I fall:

“Challenge in noise.”

I then place myself on a new corner in the neighborhood,
my own.

A place where I cannot be reached by the curiosity of the passers by, my own.
I am situated right where the watery grass in our backyard meets the cement, in a house maybe I can claim as my own!

“Love is my own.”

And my own are secrets in everything that is my own.

“The neighborhood is my own.”

Introduction

I am seized by the desire to return home,
and for some reason, I just don’t!
Not to the veranda,
nor to the springing of the smell of daisies.

I feel that I am observed by familiar egocentric streets
merely asa little child who is flickering from love and fear;
full of enough instinct to instantly transform anything into tuneless desires;

Honed by the ecstasy of cognition that molds itself and everything else into pain:

“I will die alone,” I thought to myself, and I have!

Streets

We long to the physical places that make us who we are, and to our senses that mature within them. That’s how our view of the world gets to be formed, along with our view of ourselves. But if places establish for us pre-determined forms and approaches to the surrounding world, sometimes we instinctively seek other worlds and places that add to our collective identity a new dynamic and opportunities that pave the road to transformation and openness towards the “other.” The boundaries of the “other” constitute our boundaries, and the identity of the other falls right near the outskirts of our consciousness. Dealing with the “other” based on certain intellectual and physical properties that are attached to a mirror image of the absolute truth makes out us merely experimental-intellectual matters that establishes its own properties apart from the concepts of “time” and its manifestations. So if Streets constitute distorted situations in the context of our memory of what’s considered to be a “place,” “immediate time,” “history,” and “event,” then the effect of these situations was based on our childhood experiences and how our physical senses helped achieving realization and perception. At a time when intellectual properties tend to overwhelm us with how limited they are and how little they have to offer us, every “era” in time that we go through will have a different impact on the “self,” and thus the “self” becomes more and more scattered within itself, and the various contradicting contexts in the concepts of time and place will become scattered among themselves. As places impose on us a centralized and intellectual focal point that forces us to deal with our surroundings based on some rigid criteria, so are the “placiness.” As “time” impose certain aspects of how we determine our relationship with the “other,” and out “other,” so is the concept of timelessness.

This poetry collection attempts to express the spiritual conditions within the concepts of “time” and “place,” and timelessness” and “placiness.” In my opinion, this initiates an alternate role played by our perceptions and standards of what we consider humanity to reconstruct our memory and re-express ourselves while using new tools that go beyond to show the “areas” that already conceptually left behind the traditional tools of inspiration and the traditional creative forms. This poetic prose is an intensive expression of the place of the self, the time of the self within the time of placiness and place of timelessness.