Chorus (8 page)

My eyes never leave my eyes' reflection.

He says I submit too simply.

My parents say I don't submit enough.

I
feel
the smoothness of his cheek and

Reflect on the sting of my mother's hand if she finds out.

Consequences are of no consequence when I look into his eyes.

During Ramadan, it is said, the devil is locked away in a room in hell,

And here we.

The way he looks at me is forbidden.

His thoughts, my smiles, our touch is all forbidden.

He is my ticket straight to Hell.

This is not entirely our fault, my mom would say.

We submit to
Iblis
: we give in to Lucifer to sin.

He submits to us that this is okay.

Our thoughts, our smiles, our touch:

I refuse to believe that this is sinning.

My mother's voice echoes in my mind

“God is watching; he is always watching you.”

I am a
Quraish
, a scribe: I must submit to write down holy verses.

My goose bumps write in Braille for his fingers.

I read his face like a long-forgotten

Surah
: I never saw a prayer more beautiful.

He calls me angel, as mother used to do.

With me and the falling snow outside the window he sees heaven.

I don't feel this heaven as I submit to someone else's wants.

Tender kisses on my forehead are postscripts in this call to prayer

Ana Behibak
(I love you), he whispers.

During Ramadan, it is said, the devil is locked away in a room in hell,

And here we are.

I submit beneath
the
minarets of faith and family, us, my religion and my self.

In the mosque of my consciousness, I prostrate myself.

I see us in the mirror in his room, and I

Wonder what of me I see reflected back?

My lips move to pray as I kiss.

Grandma taught me how to write in Arabic,

& Papa taught me how to recite my prayers each night.

I submit to pinning my
hijab
, to w
ea
ring an
abaya
.

I submi
t
to praying five times a day.

In the mirror in his room during Ramadan,

I wonder if He will teach me how to fall in love.

I crossed a river of poisonous metal to get to you.

I wanted so much to hold your glory in
the
palm of my hand,

and then rub it on my heels

that I swallowed your
elements
in search of other things.

I wanted to step on your skin

and spread the magnificent shade

thin across my floor,

and drink everything that had ever been

or ever would be washed from your body.

I gave you secrets the size
of
Guezzam,

with dry springs and no
magic
al stairways

to reach the middle of clouds.

I inhaled as you called me sister.

I inhaled keeping time,

waiting to break blow spit fall out of existence.

In spite of my chocolate and your chestnut,

the
pink satin beneath our scabs was the same.

And still, I can't begin to understand how these streets

could have
kiss
ed us in the same places.

We were like ice against fever

and grass between toes in summer.

Always in summer, riding what little wind we could find

and dancing beneath streetlights

and
th
e pe
r
fume of l
o
ss da
ugh
ters.

I had rid myself of extra limbs with ink pens

played in your hair, and daydreamed of growing apart.

I had devoted my mornings to your children,

named them,

fed them my milk.

I waited in cool bathwater of blood and lemon for you to come to me.

I reached as you slipped and pulled from my hip,

already in black,

the veil hiding the shadows of our
language
.

I could not bury you.

I could not dig a hole deep enough to hold us

and I was not ready to leave.

So I wrapped your body in wild silk

and carried you, your weight lovely on my shoulders,

and I built a city, holy enough

round and rising,

and lit the flame.

And sister, not even the ashes could breathe.

babbling to congeal what we haven't written-

the clean fruit,
the
ground-off teeth

& the
trumpet's
miserable blare

a
ceremonious
lisp and stomp

     ((STOMP))

we proposed our bed, said under the mattress

living in the disorder of nature, the ellipses redone

a hundred times, charting

our chickens

meant to be executed

the redundancy of each
phrase

    love,

what was inaudible became actual silence

we are happenings of post-harvest memoirs

It could be
words

do not exist

to make you fall deeper

in love with me.

Or else they do, but I don't know them.

O
r I do, the words,

but
n
ot the order,

the exact proportions of each one

or the secret of how they fit together,

thinking they do as bodies do, like ours.

But maybe nothing

is for you an act of falling,

a hunger, or a hunkering;

like
l
ove, which is for me

a kind of burrowing,

a sinking into ripening,

and
y
et for you is more like flying—

taut wings of
the
hawks overhead,

circling, now closer, now more apart,

haunting
some thermal of the heart.

The crow berates the dove on the wire

side by side in the dark night

the dove is silent; the crow screams

the
caws echo
directly into the farmhouse window

the irate farmer's wife

bursts through the screen door

she lifts a trembling Colt 45 into the sky

squeezes the trigger and ejects a steel bullet

that pierces the skull of the dove

white feathers plummet to the earth

the once angry crow flies away

and cries to God

“take away my fear, take away my fear”

Come to me tip-toeing 'cross

cracked-out

public spaces

collect glass along
the
way

dump the heavy from your eyes

with the
c
h
a
nge that slaps against your palm

like a friendly gest
u
re

fill your pocket
s
with hand

outs

and walk proud, talk loud

stink loud
e
r.

Lay out like an answer under cardboard

tucked away

newspapers under clothes, saving warmth

against a dying body.

Chase away
the
cold

and question life.

I couldn't even meet your gaze halfway

Your poor

cut into my worth

I spin my
e
arnings around purchases

slurping my earnings
f
rom an hour hand

and

I can't spare nothing

no change.

my part time

can't support your
f
ull time

poverty

you work hard
e
r than me

my lazy oc
c
upies a register

I'm cashed ou
t
, checked out

bi-monthly

numb

Come tip-toeing around cracks

and I'll shake my head

to ward off your words

My eyes can't meet you halfway

and

I'm sorry

Love is

not enough. but.

a practice

we cannot do this love making

in these coffins meant for sleeping

meant for dreaming

let's pull the bedding over it all

forget we are confined

drop the dirt

leave the bodies

where we found them.

When the fiery feathered phoenix serpent God returns

Waging war on Technospheric cataract eyesore

Scenery, we must nye take refuge in
the

Ill-composed stations of metallic vogue

Nor mechanistic time
clock
on-the-job sorrows

HOW
to untrap the caged bars of humanity's heart?

HOW
to unwind years worth of trauma

in this structured reality cube collapsing into chaos?

Popping pills to dull the pain

Pray to God to stop the rain

Nature's loss is humanity's gain

Strike
a deal with the criminally insane

Striped slivers of schizophrenic writing on the wall:

Dying Embryo- Apple of my Eye- Who am I to Curse the Sky?

My synchronistic whirligig prayer wheel of a heart

Has cried enough psycho-iridescent tears for a millennia

I'm a metaphysical muse in a 4th dimensional world.

Such enumeration of swanly songs last sung

To ticking time bombs of terrestrial blues

Struck
chords so Deeply
Dissonant

in my Empty Chamber of a chest

As to render my eyes ears and Octopus

deaf blind and stupefied.

Who was the Man behind the curtains?

And why was
HE
to blame for the whole collapse

Of mankind's cataclysmic name?

E.T.s have become more Human

Than humans-
Soulless
Zombie Denizens

Churning in their Pulsing Womb Tombs

Marching to the Rhythm of

Gregorian C
a
le
nd
rical Farse-

Bitter Catholic Tempest!

To name is to know not

the essence of Absolute

But to pin Illusions Resolute

The
E
nd of Time is the beginning

Of Galactic
R
hyme

The
E
nd of Gregorian Slime

A Venusian moon spooning the sun

C
radling lunar labia and solar cock in my

Rosy tipped, spider-bitten lips

T
ime is fractally, pterodactylly, galactically,

holographically chrysoprased with

iridescent rays of spiderweb decay.

The Sod Iron of Alien Truth Brands

A Hot Electric Cow under a Vedic Moon

The Dominator Paradigm Crumbles

Like Cigarette Ashes on a

Handsome Nazi Mustache

The Warriors Cry, “Valhalla!”

In the lightless water of my
dreaming
,

you are an eyeless totem,

a bagged cadaver papoose, a broken bottle

engineblack and gasoline in water

here is your house, fish in the leafless trees

catfish, barbed, electric and swollen

in tall grass that sways, invisible mover

you do not speak,

and the dead gather in your devil's chapel

on the bottom
of
the muddy lake

how you shook like a puppet last time i saw you

pale and grey as hospitals,

as mornings after terrible things

there are sturgeon, fished for with the hooks of cranes

their bellies filled with glistening black eggs, salt fruit

here are the swollen ditches in the spring,

frogs with pale appendages dangling,
useless
and poisoned

here is foxfire and lantern light

cloudy ice that blocks the sun, the muddy hole

here is your black book of engines, prospero,

that i never learned, here the fire that ate your rotted curtains,

here the broken shells, the fossils in the limestone driveway,

sea bed broken into gravel road, black tar liquid in the heat

here the black, the cars rusted on their axles

dissolving in the mud, here the eyes of mice in the farmhouse

here is a sea-bottom of wheat, a ghost of a pig,

a chickenhouse smell, a flooded field of rotten cornstalks

flying dutchman, saint's fire, jonah

how it comes behind you, your fury

with its chrome teeth

to swallow you down to hell, you spoon, you feather

you rusty hook in worm

how the fungus gathers on the oak of you,

lightning struck and hollow

ripe and rotten for the fire,

you are sick with
prophecy

a scarecrow stuffed with doom

oilslick, poison water

cracked bells ringing in lightless towns on the hour

on the lake bottom, iron ingots strewn on the muddy bottom

shipwreck, worlds' end.

If the world is ending

And you happen to find me

Alone

And dancing

With music-

Shhhh

Just let me.

Don't step up with

Mouth full of manic ideas

Stinking up my finale

None of that

Right Now or

We Must or

This Girl or This Time or

This World Is Ending.

Just don't

Trouble me with words.

I'm a scientist darlin'.

So let this dance

Be my last grand experiment.

The one that proves my theory of man and music.

Don't got time for
hypothetical
sentences

While I'm dissecting