Spilt Ink

Peace be upon you

as the wrinkles drowning in your palms tell the sun a bed time story as you knead dough. 

Peace be upon you

as the timeless voice of your aging God sleep between a cup covered in the blanket of coffee you're pouring over. 

Peace be upon you

as you sketch the smile you once forgot on my face.

Peace be upon you

as you dress a lullaby with a necklace of jasmines from our garden and passed it on to me each night.

Peace be upon you and the generation hiding between the cracks of your lips that kiss my cheek everyday.

Peace be upon you

and the prayer rug your tears danced over when my brother left.

Peace be upon you

and the prayer beads I smell when I miss you.

Peace be upon you

and your tearful eyes longing for the humid air of Bahrain to hit your face once again.

Peace be upon you

and your touch

and your kiss

and your lullaby

and your beads

She is the February morning screams shrouded by the mists of a canary's trembling hymns. 

With each strand of her hair squirrels build huts to store their wintry acorns.   

I promised her to not pick the pearls off the beaches of her eyelids but I found myself choosing which one would best fit for her dowry. 

I pick the swirling lotus flowers off the pond around her hips and make a necklace to give to the polar bear behind her ear's birthday. 

She is the canyon of her smile she tries to hide with shy clouds.

Roaring thunderstorms wake up within her palm from the loud whispers of the silver gales swimming beneath the grooves of her neck. 

Only the rain of words drizzling down the constellations of her bosom would sing a soft lullaby to calm the thunderstorm's upset belly.

Little lady bugs eat the cotton candy of her cheeks and drink from the dew that dances between her eyebrows.  

From the little orchard of her smile I pick up almond almond flowers to decorate my third rib with in celebration of her life.

Within the mountain range that swirls around her waist I lose my soul only to find it tucked between the fluffy soil in her belly. 

The thunderstorms celebrate life. 

The birds celebrate life. 

The almond flowers celebrate life. 

The rain celebrates life. 

I

"Remember, when you approach the temple, approach while you're on your knees. You're not worthy to be standing up."  My mother would say when talking about her old village that time took hostage. The goddess danced naked as she made her way from my mother's timeless lips to the lobes hanging on my ears through the doves of song. Mother told me about the oblations the village people used to offer that goddess: pieces of burnt paper carrying ink disguised as love letters, pieces of old bark scented with the kisses of two insane lovers, flowers that witness the time two people offered each other their body in a sparking moment that had Gabriel sobbing.   

II

On my bed I lay, vacantly looking at the twilight of God's astronomical canvas. Like Mohammadan angels, she comes to me riding the starry dynamos like the golden chariot of Apollo. The breaths of jasmies and honeydew swayed out of her lips and entranced me in a cage of whiteness. I was blinded by the violet touch of her celestial hands. She spoke words of morning clouds and earthly desire. She kissed me. She kissed me and my lips became hers. She kissed me and my lips turned into her afternoon writings and late night readings. With that kiss she flew away like the illuminated heads of Socrates and Plato.

III  

They started as a story born in Eden that sought redemption in the falling from God's grace.

Gliding on the withering wings of Gabriel, it fell down like morning dew to sleep on his eyelashes and her nose tip. 

That story turned into his sun and her moon. 

His stars and his celestial. 

A story written with the ink of his I love you and her I adore you. 

A story that grows a chapter with each glint of her hazel eyes and every vibrate of his throat. 

A story they wrote as they kissed each letter with inked lips and strained hands. 

A story that danced between their eyes like a thousand splendid suns rejoicing as Jesus fed them pomegranates. 

A story that screams to the world with the silent blooming of December orange flowers. 

A story that continues to grow a page each second. 

halfwitted replied to your post: مع قَهوَتي

Oh, my God. Meshari, my Lord, you are brilliant. This is your finest yet. I’m beyond in love. I’m so happy Life happened to you at last. Life is doing you good. Life is your true muse.

From my hands she took the cup of coffee stained with the foot prints of my lips painted on its rim

With oracle eyes, my mother flipped the cup on itself to expose its ebonic nudity

Child, you’ll fall in love with a woman that’ll enthrall your heart in the infinity of cigarette smoke swaying out of her lips and the breath of coffee sleeping alongside her tongue

That’ll shake the peach tree in your eyes to indulge in the ripeness of your soul

Child, your body will be sacrificed on the banks of the Euphrates to the Moloch of her kisses

Child, you’ll reject God and find redemption in the Ten Commandments between her thighs

O, child, I will lose you

I will lose you and find you in the purgatory of her hazel eyes

Don’t forget me, child, my tears will be the Ark that’ll carry you to the covenant of her smile

I

Community, Identity, Stability

Welcome my son, welcome to the machine.

Where have you been? Its alright we know where you been.

My eyes are bifocal.

My hands are sec-jointed.

I am part of a composite. 

What did you dream? Its alright, we told you what to dream. 

You’ve been in the pipeline filling in time.

Everyone belongs to everyone else.

Everyone works for everyone else.

One hundred repetitions three nights a week for four years. 

Stability. No civilization without stability. 

Hooked into machine.

Hooked into machine.

I’m hooked into, hooked into machine.

OH FORD, OH FORD, OH FORD.

Bokanovsky’s process is one of the major instruments of social stability! 

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.

Was and will make me ill.

Everybody’s happy nowadays.

Beauty’s attractive, and we don’t want people to be attracted by old things.

A love of nature keeps no factories busy.

Ending is better than mending.

Everything’s provided

Consumate consumer.

Part of worldly taking

Apart from worldly troubles.

Hooked into machine.

Hooked into machine. 

Hooked into machine.

And the future is here, its bright, its now.

II

Free, free!

Harmlessly passing your time in the grassland away.

Only dimly aware of a certain unease in the air.

Meek and obedient you follow the leader.

You better stay home and do as you’re told.

Lo, we shall rise up,

and then we’ll make the bugger’s eye wet.

Don’t you want to be free and men? Don’t you even understand what freedom and manhood is?

Free, free!

I am the downfall of hierarchy. 

I am feared. 

I am hated.

Though my crime is opening of eyes.

I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin. 

I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.

Let me out; and see the world as it could be.

Go on, live.

III

I am a Christ in your love.

I am a Christ crucified in the Jerusalem of your smile.

I am the selfish Christ crucified to not rid the masses from their sins, but to indulge in the sin of your love.

I'd be resurrected to sin.

And I'd be resurrected to sin again.

And again. 

And again.

Perhaps I ate from the palm tree the Virgin gave birth under.

Perhaps I rejected the Holy Spirit to excommunicate myself to you.

Perhaps the Father and Son are not the church I want to dedicate my body to.

Bare me on the cross of your heart and shackle me into the depths of your soul,

On the banks of my chest she danced.

With every sway of the anklet around her bare foot she held me captive.

I escaped civilization to find sanctuary between her eyelashes.

She paints me.

She breaks me. 

She shackles me.

She emancipates me.

She's the fire that burned all the jasmines and the rain that gave birth to them. 

She's the gypsy, half woman half fawn.

I sleep beneath the trees of her hair just to wake up to the eruption of her heart.

She's the gypsy that ripped my heart out to conjure a lotus and plant it between my rib cages.

She's the gypsy that stabbed me and grew a field of peach trees around my neck and blessed them with a kiss.

I took comfort within the gypsy's revolutions in her eyes and the uprisings between her breasts.

She's the gypsy that carried me on her necklace through the northern zephyr to a realm of infinitely passionate cosmos. 

The gypsy is still dancing. She is still breaking me. She is still loving me. 

She is still...still...still.

I poured coffee into my green mug and sat in my room to have a conversation with earth.

Such a wonderful lady, she is.

Four billion years old yet still as graceful as a swan bathing its feathers in a sea of moonlight. 

She's quiet; prefers to listen rather than talk.

She listened intently to me as I talked and paused every once in a while to take a sip of coffee.

Her eyes coursed through my blood and exited as I exhaled my coffee breath.

The clouds approached and asked me

Where do you belong?

I put the green coffee mug on the table and gazed at the clouds.

I belong to a land where Jesus' toes touched water.

Where Romeo scattered stars alongside Juliet's face just to eventually cross and scatter like a star and turn into nothing.

Where a noosed rope kissed a lover's neck.

I belong to a land where the blood of a million Jew screamed for help as it fertilized the soil and gave life to flowers. 

Where the tiny fingers of Palestinian children raised from between the rubble to signal a new life.

I belong to a land where god lived and died between the teeth of people.

Where the smell of my mother's coffee in the morning reminds me that love never dies.

Where Yousra made a jasmine necklace for her sister and read her to sleep afterwards as she was thinking about Nassim.

I am the son of Gaia.

From the first of her womb I'm born and to the dirt of her womb I die.

I belong to a land my grandfather that I never knew once walked on.

I belong to a land where his son will die on.

I belong to a land where I will die on.

She once told me that we are swans with spines of tea cups.

I remember swimming in the cosmos of her eyes, that one time. I drowned on the cliff of her smile.

Twilight made up her eye brows. 

I smelled the jasmine precariously dancing around her soul she she took my hands and traced over my palm lines.

I envied that coffee cup that kissed her lips, that coffee that slept in her mouth.

Her pen spoke of the life that she is and the words she gave birth to.

Daisies sang of life and their yellow cried beauty.

He puffed the smoke sleeping in his mouth and flicked his cigarette's ashes to fall on the snow.

Warm blood dripped along the tree bark's face. 

She sat crisscrossed infront of our dying neighborhood mosque. 

She took a bottle of Jack for a baby and an unlit cigarette dancing between her dried lips for a lover.

Her clothes were ripped, unhealed tattoo crawling out of her neck, and hair recently shaved.

We knew who she was, but didn't want to know what she was like. 

Little kids loved her peppermint gum she gave them, parents hated the words she spoke.

"C'mere." she gestured.

Her eyes filled up with wisdom ready to quench my thirst.

"Wanna know why I'm here?"

She drew closer.

Her lips touched my earlobe. 

I drive an ostrich. 

"You can't part that ostrich here."

This is for those trapped in the tiny prison of letters in their notebooks refusing to come out.

For those walking down the street with a book of poetry sleeping in their palm knowing that whats out there will never be as beautiful. 

For those who fell in love with people that never lived.

For the atheists searching for god in the irony of life.

For the deaf constantly smiling because their lives are one long symphony. 

For the children who hide underneath the bedsheets with a book and a flashlight protecting themselves from adults.

This is for those who find themselves with every strike of the pen.

For those whose spirits wander the cosmos as they lay staring at a god's hidden face.

For those who hide behind a canvas because its through the paint they speak. 

For those who hear the angels cry every time they open their diary.

This is for the clown who sleeps inside his cup of coffee.

For the senile old man reliving his childhood waiting for his death.

For the girl who replaced her eyes with a camera's lens. 

This is for the rapists, sexists, homophobes.

This is for the blue faced women in Afghanistan and the silent mother of Iran.

This is for the family who will never be the Brady bunch and will never have that perfect Christmas.

This is for the misfits, the hyperactive, the rebellious. 

For those whose parents think they'll never be like their siblings.

For those who disappoint just by breathing.

This is for the lover who cannot confess his love to her but writes it in his poems. 

For those who created the Sistine Chapel, Mona Lisa, and Starry Night over and over again and then woke up.

This is for those who took beauty as their god.