Poetry Session for the Unspeakable. Disclaimer: These words are not shared with the intention to attack, place blame, distress, or play the victim but rather to address the prolonged role of silence. They do however come with a trigger warning. In other words they may offend or upset some listeners. 

Come walk with me in moonlight

feel the pregnant sky

Hear the birth

Just listen.

Disclaimer: Explicit content. Trigger warning. 

(Excerpt) Lyrics coming. 

This comes from my heart. Not a place of anger, but release. Is anger a feeling we should ignore and pretend does not exist? Should we deny it? Should we villanize it? Do past lives exist? What if you're the only one who remembers? Does it make you insane? What do you remember? Do your feelings make you crazy? Do your habits mean you are crazy? I ask these questions not only of myself but all of us. To what extent to our thoughts, words, emotions, behaviors/patterns, memories, actions, and aesthetics define who we are as people? Can you differentiate between them and you? Are they the same thing? 

With Unconditional Love. No despites, no respites, no buts.

M(ad) F(ire). This name is going to take on a number of shorthands. 

All that, the haze you’ve walked in,

The clouds you’ve carried behind you like a red ballon, not knowing it was

Eclipsing sun,

You feel the bodies part,

The waters part,

The invitation.

I walk in exodus,

Down aisle made of ocean floor

And rocky bottoms turned melting sand beneath my soles,

I’m naked,

waves held back on either side like curtains

I’m coming

Fuck the tiptoeing

I’m pounding pavement,

Onto homeland—

The real one.

The Pharaohs, they were never people,

They are never people:

They are phantoms,

Phantasms and projections

That we melt and meld to myth like solid odds and ends inside a cauldron,

Often,

You melt your parents’ wedding rings, gold tooth replacements for what you must remember once was a broken tooth

to crown of gold

upon your head,

Your death right there in throne and scepter,

Receptive to perspectives that don’t belong,

Defector.

If this is what it means to take direction of one’s life,

To be your own Poseidon

And not his servant,

To let your lantern guide you

Through high tides

And stride forward in a fury,

To bury what needs burying

And let the phantoms go their ways,

I hold my arms out to the waves and say

I parted you

Because I was ready.

Passover 2020 style. 

Deer Laith, 

The difference between a written poem and the delivery of said poem is the difference between Judi Dench and Miley Cyrus reading the same set of lines. Tone matters. Makes up for more significance in our day-to-day interactions than we could ever truly comprehend. 

Here's my first go at this one, from my new collection, "Prometheus". If you enjoyed this, feel free to share it. It isn't perfect. In a strange way, I like it better because of it, the fact that it hasn't been practiced to the point of glossy varnish. 

I want to spoon under the rain with you 

I want to spoon under the rain with you

Want to feel our still bodies

lie with closed eyes upon the pavement,

Feel the city rush in sudden chaos all around us

with sodden newspapers tented over dripping heads and wet mascara.

I want to feel the contrast,

Between us in stillness and them in motion

Between us together and them all scattered,

And yet at one,

All in the same storm but

we chose different:

To be still, come hail or hurricane.

I imagine us upon the pavement spooning under one long shower baptism

Finding something holy in each other, in the deluge and darkness,

In changing weather patterns.

In changing times

And changing bodies,

Changing moods and dreams,

Changing ups and changing downs,

Changing tastes and changing everything.

I want to spoon under the rain with you only so that I can turn around

And look upon you,

Hold your face in shitty weather and say I love you

And watch tears stream down your eyes that maybe weren’t even tears at all but I wouldn’t know the difference.

I want to know what it feels like to be hugged when the world is blurry

I want to know what it feels like for another sense to step in with

Something that you cannot sense but know.

I want you to know that I would lie with you in your own storm,

That your dark clouds do not scare me.

Want you to know that I feel the migraine come on long before your rain,

Know what it’s like to look up and be afraid of what’s coming

Know that whatever is coming isn’t permanent

Know that we could get hurt

That there could be some flooding,

a tree on fire,

that we could lose everything.

This is life.

We are not always in control.

This is life:

Smelling

Hearing

Seeing

Tasting

Feeling the touch of skin on skin, of rain on skin, of sun on skin, of cold on skin.

Before you left you asked me what I wanted,

Couldn’t hear my voice over your own thunder

And still my response to you is

This—I signed up for all the seasons.

And i understand you only know one way to take shelter from a storm.

But I will still be waiting here.

wet.

It's Pluto time. 

Come get your ears wet,

let us merge,

Let's have a staring contest,

Let us play in land of familiar unfamiliar

And go spelunking—

F*** the climb.

I’ll tell you time and time again that there is wisdom in descent,

In nascent dreams, 

In scent of skin and skin and

Xray;

Tunnel;

laser,

Focus: you know this without knowing this. 

I need not tell you what 'this' is. 

Limbs look different under moonlight.

Candles cast a different kind of scene: a seen.

A shadow. 

When lights are off

And doors are closed,

We turn on, we open.