what you know bout mr. aristotle mcdonald?

I can’t forgive you. Even if I could, You wouldn’t pardon me for seeing through you. And yet I cannot cure myself of love For what I thought you were before I knew you.

it is we love so much that we can’t stop letting it kill us. If we must die, let it be inside here. If we must.

It’s true I never write, but I would gladly die with you. Gladly lower myself down alone with you into the enormous mouth that waits, beyond youth, beyond every instant of ecstasy, remember: before battle we would do each other’s makeup, comb each other’s                    hair out saying we are unconquerable, we are terrible and splendid— the mouth waiting, patiently waiting. And I will meet you there                    again beyond bleeding thorns, the endless dilation, the fire that alters                    nothing; I am there already past snowy clouds, balding moss, dim swarm of stars even we can step over, it is easier this time, I promise— I am already waiting in your personal heaven, here is my hand, I will help you across. I would gladly die with you still, although I never write   from this gray institution. See they are so busy trying to cure me, I’m condemned—sorry, I have been given the job of vacuuming the desert forever, well, no more than eight hours                    a day. And it’s really just about a thousand miles of cafeteria; a large one in any event. With its miniature plastic knives, its tuna salad and Saran-Wrapped genitalia will somebody                    please get me out of here, sorry. I am happy to say that every method, massive pharmaceuticals, art therapy and edifying films as well as others I would prefer not to mention—I mean, every single technique known to the mouth—sorry!—to our most kindly compassionate science is being employed to restore me to normal well-being and cheerful stability. I go on vacuuming toward a small diamond light burning off in the distance. Remember me. Do you remember me?    In the night’s windowless darkness when I am lying cold and numb and no one’s fiddling with the lock, or shining flashlights in my eyes, although I never write, secretly I long to die with you, does that count?

The night sits wherever you are. Your night is of lilac. Every now and then a gesture escapes from the beam of your dimples, breaks the wineglass and lights up the starlight. And your night is your shadow— a fairy-tale piece of land to make our dreams equal. I am not a traveler or a dweller in your lilac night, I am he who was one day me. Whenever night grew in you I guessed the heart’s rank between two grades: neither the self accepts, nor the soul accepts. But in our bodies a heaven and an earth embrace. And all of you is your night ... radiant night like planet ink. Night is the covenant of night, crawling in my body anesthetized like a fox’s sleepiness. Night diffusing a mystery that illuminates my language, whenever it is clearer I become more fearful of a tomorrow in the fist. Night staring at itself safe and assured in its endlessness, nothing celebrates it except its mirror and the ancient shepherd songs in a summer of emperors who get sick on love. Night that flourished in its Jahili poetry on the whims of Imru’ el-Qyss and others, and widened for the dreamers the milk path to a hungry moon in the remoteness of speech ...

I was a boy and my homework was missing, paper with numbers on it, stacked and lined, I was looking for my piece of paper, proud of this plus that, then multiplied, not remembering if I had left it on the table after showing to my uncle or the shelf after combing my hair but it was still somewhere and I was going to find it and turn it in, make my teacher happy, make her say my name to the whole class, before everything got subtracted in a minute even my uncle even my teacher even the best math student and his baby sister who couldn’t talk yet. And now I would do anything for a problem I could solve.

It is pretty to be sweet and full of pardon like a flower perfuming the hands that shred it, but all piety leads to a single point: the same paradise where dead lab rats go. If you live small you’ll be resurrected with the small, a whole planet of minor gods simpering in the weeds. I don’t know anyone who would kill anyone for me. As boys my brother and I would play love, me drawing stars on the soles of his feet, him tickling my back. Then we’d play harm, him cataloging my sins to the air, me throwing him into furniture. The algorithms for living have always been delicious and hollow, like a beetle husk in a spider’s paw. Hafez said fear is the cheapest room in a house, that we ought to live in better conditions. I would happily trade all my knowing for plusher carpet, higher ceilings. Some nights I force my brain to dream me Persian by listening to old home movies as I fall asleep. In the mornings I open my eyes and spoil the séance. Am I forfeiting my mystique? All bodies become sicker bodies. This is a kind of object permanence, a curse bent around our scalps resembling grace only at the tattered edges. It’s so unsettling to feel anything but good. I wish I was only as cruel as the first time I noticed I was cruel, waving my tiny shadow over a pond to scare the copper minnows. Rockabye, now I lay me down, et cetera. The world is what accumulates —  the mouth full of meat, the earth full of meat. My grandfather taught his parrot the ninety-nine holy names of God. Al-Muzil: The Humiliator. Al-Waarith: The Heir. Once, after my grandfather had been dead for a year, I woke from a dream (I was a sultan guzzling flies from a crystal boot) with his walking cane deep in my mouth. I kept sucking until I fell back asleep. There are only two bones in the throat, and that’s if you count the clavicle. This seems unsafe, overdelicate, like I ought to ask for a third. As if anyone living would offer. Corporeal friends are spiritual enemies, said Blake, probably gardening in the nude. Today I’m trying to scowl more, mismatch my lingerie. Nobody seems bothered enough. Some saints spent their whole childhoods biting their teachers’ hands and sprinkling salt into spider- webs, only to be redeemed by a fluke shock of grace just before death. May I feather into such a swan soon. The Book of Things Not to Touch gets longer every day: on one page, the handsome puppy bred only for service. On the next, my mother’s face. It’s not even enough to keep my hands to myself —  there’s a whole chapter about the parts of me that could get me into trouble. In Farsi, we say jaya shomah khallee when a beloved is absent from our table — literally: your place is empty. I don’t know why I waste my time with the imprecision of saying anything else, like using a hacksaw to slice a strawberry when I have a razor in my pocket. To the extent I am necessary at all, I am necessary like a roadside deer —   a thing to drive past, to catch the white of, something to make a person pause, say, look, a deer.

Elizabeth Bishop, from a letter to Anne Stevenson, 8 January 1964

I wander out into the winter. I know what I am.

the darkness is spreading earlier and earlier. I have stopped looking for myself in pictures. I ask my therapist: if I cannot see my hands how will anyone know to love me. he tells me that it is best to not speak of what happens at night. I do not speak in winter. I watch the news. I think about what picture they would use if I died. it is a miracle babies are born at all. I think a baby is what happens when you get tired of leaving notes on someone’s nightstand before they wake up. if men could carry babies we would watch childbirth on ESPN. we would place bets on it. the world is on fire again but I’m not alone this time. I just want to touch someone who thinks of me while their coffee cools. I just want to kiss a mouth that has grown my name inside. I just want to make good use of all this nighttime.  instead I make lists of everything outside that can kill me. the organic market next door is at the top. how much is too much to ask for nourishment. take what is left of my hands. give them back when the sun comes.

paying the price which is asked, which constantly changes. No one knows why.

As a child I had a book with a picture of that scene. I was too young to notice how fear persists, and how the anger that causes fear persists, that its trajectory can’t be changed or broken, only interrupted. My attention was on the fly; that this slight body with its transparent wings and lifespan of one human day still craved its particular share of sweetness, a century later.

Before you came, things were as they should be: the sky was the dead-end of sight, the road was just a road, wine merely wine. Now everything is like my heart, a color at the edge of blood: the grey of your absence, the color of poison, of thorns, the gold when we meet, the season ablaze, the yellow of autumn, the red of flowers, of flames, and the black when you cover the earth with the coal of dead fires. And the sky, the road, the glass of wine? The sky is a shirt wet with tears, the road a vein about to break, and the glass of wine a mirror in which the sky, the road, the world keep changing. Don’t leave now that you’re here— Stay. So the world may become like itself again: so the sky may be the sky, the road a road, and the glass of wine not a mirror, just a glass of wine. Translated by Agha Shahid Ali.

Her dress itched her knees so she crawled in the shadows, stumbling upon this pale eye escaped from some rich woman’s neck. She grabbed it, kept it secret until now, until your face, your body, your special way of looking directly at her when you speak. And she’s about to reveal it to you if you’ll just calm down and reach out to take both of her hands in yours.

I had been told about her. How she would always, always. How she would never, never. I'd watched and listened but I still fell for her, how she always, always. How she never, never. In the small brave night, her lips, butterfly moments. I tried to catch her and she laughed a loud laugh that cracked me in two, but then I had been told about her, how she would always, always. How she would never, never We two listened to the wind. We two galloped a pace. We two, up and away, away, away. And now she's gone, like she said she would go. But then I had been told about her - how she would always, always.

All you who sleep tonight Far from the ones you love, No hand to left or right And emptiness above - Know that you aren't alone The whole world shares your tears, Some for two nights or one, And some for all their years.