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)

Let it burn

Let it all dim a bit 

Let the lights flicker and die 

Let the noise chatter itself soar 

Let this chaos wind itself into the ground 

It all shall be...

Let the words wrestle themselves into oblivion 

Let everything exhaust itself 

Like dogs 

Like street walkers 

Like this city 

The trash shall burn, and we shall choke

Someone cannot breath, this too shall pass 

Taste the char in the air, the remains of what was 

Looking back, what does he miss the most?

Or is he beyond? Beyond missing 

Beyond the yearning, beyond the din 

Is he now only a memory, like so many others 

Fading, receding, but haunting 

Every now and then, in the making of the self 

In the unmasking of life, in the crevices of the everyday 

In me, you live in me, whether I like it 

Or die in you, as I would 

Childish Fears

I have managed to flip my fear inside out.

Now you don't recognize it,

Now it looks like anger:

It ravages everything around me,

And everyone..

Could it all be something else?

All the empathy and the compassion?

Is it only because last century it was me

That was the child in fear?

Of the same terror, rolling its aRs

And mangling our 7as,

Like the flight of death?

I think of the one I love:

Was all his resentment only

Because, a decade or two ago,

He too was the child in fear,

Abandoned like all the children

Now ravaging our screens?

And what becomes of it?

All this fear? All this apathy?

All these angry childish stares?

What remains when the faces are gone?