A beggar I once met
At the port of La Goulette
Greeted me with a nod
But he spoke to me not.

A beggar I once met
At the port of La Goulette
Made me wonder all night:
What's a beggar who beggs not?
c) LazharBouazzi
*La Goulette is a seaport town in the northern suburbs of Tunis.

"I have no quest,
Says the poet,
"I have a struggle."
(c) LazharBouazzi, November 18, 2017

A dark rim hugs an acre of
A zinc ocean - no fish, no birds,
Save a pure body, no soul,
No words, fluttering on a bro-
ken sea, and grimacing
From time to time, from
Wave to wave, in lieu
Of lifting an imploring hand.
©LazharBouazzi (2017)

As I look back into my life
I think to myself:
"I sped when I was a boy. I sped
To out-distance time."

And when I look at the dark-green rocks
In my neighborhood, by the azure docks,
I say to the rocks :
"I go. You stay. You stay for the winds
To breathe upon thee."
(c) LazharBouazzi, November 10th, 2017

In the sandy dunes of words
And the sparkling foams of light
He riots as a snake would do
With his forked tongue - 'tween the Unlet-
Tered stones of a sunny graveyard.

© LazharBouazzi  (14 October, 2017)

i
What is it exactly that we celebrate today?
An oncoming rain or the passage of Time?
ii
Under his feet, the water in the sea
Burned with a cold, liquid flame,
Cold & silver - a transmutation of fire
Fuelled by his mother's tear
In which he sailed to Sicily.
iii
Bayreuth looked like a frozen Sahara,
With the local colors, and a pale-blue train
He had taken in Rome, at the "Stazioni Termini."
vi
What is it exactly that he should celebrate today?
The Passing of August, or the Advent of the Frost
In the Season of Eternity?

© LazharBouazzi, August 30, 2017

My hungry lips started to talk
To your lips in language hungry,
As my tongue began to unlock
The well of  your  language sundry,
Necking your North African mounds;
Halting at your salving shell pink,
To sip and sup your winy words
And faint and wake and rise and sink
In the waking sleep of the tongues
Of your fire
To pen my un–Sufi desire
And die in the dunes of your body.

© LazharBouazzi

Hell hurled and hissed
And clenched her fist
Around the city.

O wind
Dig a pool in my wrist
And in the womb of August
Mark an ode to thunder.

© LazharBouazzi, September 17, 2017

A torrid rumbling in my head
Chants for the making of a poem,
But no words in my head respond
To the hungry, chanting plea.

A brass rim hugs an acre of
A zinc ocean, no fish no birds,
Save an empty body, no soul no words,
Fluttering on a broken sea.

And lifting from time to time,
From wave to wave, a valedictory
Pallid hand in lieu of a grimace.


©LazharBouazzi (August 11, 2017)

I am the quill that marks
The water-walled history
Of the sea as it may -
A swan, be it, or a black-backed
Gull.

I am the pariah who
Failed to posit his load on
A hill that hung low, like a
Sunless moon, but who can still
hark the dark
Rumbling of repetition.

I am the Quixote who took
On the wind who made the mill
Sob like a bronze leaf in grief,
Seared by the passage of
A sluggish summer.

I am the pariah, the
Quixote, and the historian
Of the rainbow runner.

©LazharBouazzi, August 5, 2017

The tongues of fire*
Swollowed the leaves
The trees had uttered
To summon the rain.
(c) LazharBouazzi

“How do I look today, mirror?”
Asked the dandy, sportively.
“How do I know, little fella?”
Answered the mirror, teasingly,
“One chooses only a first color,”
Added the mirror, now seriously,
“And choosing a first color
Is not the business of a mirror.”
(c) LazharBouazzi

I
To the Prophet-ess
who turned fire
into bread,
And taught me
The wreaths of coffee
To read
Into the songs of dawn.
II
And the mason
Who showed me how
To hammer
Form out of chaos,
And love the scent
Of the cement
On new walls.

© LazharBouazzi, August 13, 2017

Is the
Act of giving shape
To chaos -
An affair of alchemy,
Like turning sweat
Into drops of
Silver.
(c) LazharBouazzi

The moon rose up late
Tonight; her face was
Swollen, like a map
Of Africa.
LazharBouazzi, August 8, 2017

I
The tongues of hell
Swallowed the leaves
The trees had uttered
To summon the rain.
II
(“I will not weep,”
Said the poet
To himself,
“I will repeat.”).
© LazharBouazzi, Carthage, TUNISIA, August 3, 2017

I
On the canvas of the sky
Tow figures had been executed:
A rugged boat coming to a halt,
By several dunes of salt
(A verse looming
In the folds of haste
And the sameness of waste).
II
Like the seeds of pine
Tearing a tree line,
Dried, black grains of rain
Riddled our “Peugeot"
Sailing like a flow
Of camels - on the asphalt.
III
In “Peugeots" and grace an expert,
Not in camels & the desert
Where the night no dune can avert,
For it falls at once like a curtain.
© LazharBouazzi, Carthage, TUNISIA, July 30, 2017

In Salammbô
The sun
Looked like a bowl
Of honey, today.
And the sea
Felt like a womb.
LazharBouazzi, Carthage, July 22, 2017

I
When the ant had told,
That December cold
Night, the grasshopper,
Who had spent his summer
Singing in the tree,
To go dance now that
He was hungry & free,
He didn’t show the hurt,
Because he was alert
To the pain
Of winter and language,
So he left the village.
II
When he, thirteen years
Later,
Came back as a baker
(Who worked in the day
And sang in the night)
He went to see the ant,
A blue guitar gift-wrapped -
In his hand.
© LazharBouazzi, TUNISIA

I
In the cold silence of the area
Rose a lonesome cafeteria,
Outside of it hooded forms -
Scaly horns -
Perched on white, plastic chairs
Like fifteen owls on a wire.
II
A grey-green bird in the distance
Sang a three-note song with insistence.
He sang on not to the white folks
But to the cold he tried to coax.
He sang to a spot desolate -
Sure thing, he sang to punctuate it.
©LazharBouazzi, July, 2017

A new Tunisian poetic genre is born.
What is a "Kasserine"?
Structure:
A Kasserine is a new poetic genre created on July 9, 2017. In it all is condensed in two lines with a sum total of thirteen or fourteen syllables. Its first line cannot exceed seven of them.
The title of a Kasserine must be an integral part of the poem in terms of interpretation. The number of its syllables must not exceed seven.
Subject matter:
In a Kasserine nature and imagination perform the same poetic activity. Nature ceases to be a mere mirror reflecting the feelings of the poet, the political or social situation, etc., and becomes symbolic in the very moment it renounces representation as a one-to-one correspondence . Nature in a Kasserine has no existence prior to the pricking into action of the imagination by the self of the poet. For, even though it is groundless (it does not belong to the self), the imagination has no intentionality of its own; this is why it needs the intentionality of the subject in order to be operative.
Samples of a Kasserine

Ruby Sun
Among amethyst silk clouds
She flirts with the sapphire sea
(c) Paula Swenson, USA

Tunisia
A fair island of light
in my imagination
(c) Jeffard Ster, USA

Red Giant
A star inside her implodes
Heavens of chaos unfold
(c) Stefan David Sederscog, Sweden

Voyeurism
The sea kisses the sky
Imagination beholds.
© LazharBouazzi, Tunisia



Note: Friends and acquaintances are cordially invited to start writing sublime (marked by repression of meaning) Kasserines.
(c)Lazhar Bouazzi, 9 July, 2017.

I
I took a walk in La Goulette yesterday,
From the “Bridge of the Casino” to the port.
The things I beheld on my shiny way
So simple they were, here is a report:
II
Sea snakes under a blue bridge did frolic
As hardware stores displayed paint in their windows.
The water snakes performed some dance symbolic
And the paint braved the dark rust from a distance.
III
At a green grocer’s cart a lady in jeans
Sought peas, artichokes, & broccoflower;
Two lovers, each tried to explain,
As a cat miaoed, what love was to the other.
VI
And I, hastening to my liquid address,
Shooting a side look at a man in a dress,
Was hoping the glazing port in the White Sea*
Would wash the bleeding wound in my memory.

© LazharBouazzi, Nov.16, 2016, revised Nov. 17, 2016, elongated July 8, 2017

Your golden dunes
I miss.
But please don’t take it
amiss
If today
I ask you to turn
On the other side
So that I can see
Your hot, burning
Soul I crave
to kiss -
With my fountain pen.
© LazharBouazzi

The rain falling now
In Carthage -
A nectar
Of rainness -
Is like the grains
Of couscous
Made the day of
Celebration.

In Carthage today
The scent of rain
Is like the sound of
Pain
Memory had lost
To imagination.

© LazharBouazzi, Carthage, TUN, june 30, 2017

A crimson boat waives
the flow of the waves
as a blonde figure craves
an infernal sun.

Next to the maiden
and the dandy-fella,
blossoms a vermillion
umbrella
whose role was to play
a timid cellar
for two red apples
and one apricot
the blonde damsel
could have brought
to quench her burning  
want
of the lustful monster.

Closing her ice-blue eyes,
the fair woman,
her sinful inspiration
did summon
to come carve
on her body so sullen
the orange vision
of the new Benzart bridge.

© LazharBouazzi, Carthage, TUNISA


*"Benzart" is the Tunisian name for “Biserta” or “Bizerte”- a beach town on the northern coast of Tunisia.

The moon,
A hollow
Saint Jacques
Shell
Whose kernel
Lovers
And language figures
Had wasted through the flow
Of time,
Came
To this eerie pond
A dry vagabond -
Now a dweller
Of the surface deep.
(C) LazharBouazzi

A green pond
In an old park
Clasped his
Stagnant
Equilibrium
Like a mother.

LazharBouazzi

The good thing about a tortoise
Is that he carries time on his
shoulders
and does not have to hide
to cry.
He is like a river
flowing backward,
climbing  the rocks on which her mother
had bitten
to un-feel the pain of origination,
and cast a novel glimpse on her nest
in the mountain.
He is a figure, a language, a sun
whose force is sustained by his own spirit -
unrelated - unlike a star,
a candle, a night.
He is his
own version
of the light,
of the rite,
and the fight
Sisyphean.

© LazharBouazzi

I crossed life
On camelback,
Halting punctually
By the track
To sleep, forget,
And feed
On what was placed
On my steed:
Sun-dried language
For me
And the fruit,
For those
I crossed
On my route.

(c) LazharBouazzi

A cabin that had once been white
Stood, peeled, on the shore of Carthage.
Looking like a tipsy scarfaced knight-
Eyes shut to Dionysian carnage.
A pack of lost dogs roamed around it,
Their pangs of want they sought to manage.

The lone cabin stood on the wrinkled sand,
Like a young tree on Shott el Jerid's* white pale
Whom the white monster forced to speak with the hand:
“Basta, no stubborn resistance from me will avail.”

The fuming sun displayed his festival of fear
Over dogs who could handle their thirst no more;
While the salt has now made its white task clear:
Gnawing the sapling and gnawing evermore
Till the sole mark on the Shott shall disappear.

Now the poet who has only half-chosen the vision
Half not knowing what to do, tried to listen
To the trickle of his one obstinate cheer
Oozing through the new orange laptop,
He had purchased from a japanese peer.

(c) LazharBouazzi

Thank you
For showing up
In my dream
Last night.

But
Try not to wear
This garment white
Next time.

It made you look
Equivocal.

© LazharBouazzi

The moon says the final word tonight -
Casual-recherché and light;
She, in the absence of the sun,
Leafs through the pages of the night
And shoots a side-look at the pond,
As her desire stretches far beyond
His specular contour.

© LazharBouazzi, Carthage, Tunisia

I saw two butterflies in the alley,
'Twixt the new well and the orange tree;
With the shade of the tree they seemed to dally
To tease the sun who, without them cannot be.
I overheard two blackbirds when I looked up:
“Why can’t we tease the shade like the butterflies?”
Said the maid-bird, pretending an orange to sup.

And before she could even realize,
The blackbird spread his long wing over her thighs.
In the throbbing blue flakes of the sky she cries
& she cries & she moans & she moans & she cries -
Unlike a Buddhist.

No matter how often a road is traveled by,
It never tells the same story twice.
(c) LazharBouazzi

Of this verse
The core, the middle,
Is marked on its palm.
No riddle
To be guessed in a lyric
So brittle,
Whose task
Is  to hold in place
The fissured parts
Of a gypsy's fiddle.

LazharBouazzi, April 4, 2017

Across the leaden sky
A gull shooting a cry,
Hastens to his final task
Before the sky puts on his mask.

No one knew what his final task was
Except that his time drew to a pause
And that he had to hasten because
From the open he had to retreat.

This the bird knew, but he was wayward;
He swam in the airy waves, beak forward,
Skating-flying, but always eastward,
Heedless of the dark - like a poet.

©LazharBouazzi, 2017

A crimson boat waives
the flow of the waves
as a blonde damsel craves
an infernal sun.

Next to the maiden
and the dandy-fella,
blossoms a vermillion
umbrella
whose washed out shadow
played the shady cellar
for two green apples
and one apricot
the blonde damsel hungrily
had bought
to quench her own fiery
want
of the lustful monster.

Closing her ice-blue eyes,
the fair woman,
her sinful inspiration
did she summon
to come carve
on her body so sullen
a scarlet picture
of the new Benzart bridge.

© LazharBouazzi, Carthage, TUNISA


*"Benzart" is the Tunisian name for “Biserta” or “Bizerte”- a beach town on the northern coast of Tunisia.

I waited for my son
In the airport today.
It was fun.
It was fun crafting
A poem on the run
As I checked faces and
Metaphors - one by one,
Asking them all: “Is a
Poem a loved one -
Like a son -
Or is it just a pun
'On that which is done'*?”

©LazharBouazzi, Carthage, TUN, March 19, 2017

Thank you for
Showing up
In my dream
Last night.

But, next time
Try not to wear
This garment white;

It made you look
So equivocal.

© LazharBouazzi

I
He was intoxicated
by the scent of coffee
dancing in the morning
to his mother’s humming.
II
Then a blacksmith - his father -
taught him how to hammer
form out of chaos
in the muddle of force
and a sweaty anvil.
III
Now if he wished to see
the sunness of the sun
and the greenness of the tree
he would summon the image
of Fatma - an Arab maiden
who was once Berber,
to come write on his face
with her soothing finger:
“Salam, my anguished lover.”
IV
When green-eyed Fatma comes
the wreaths of coffee
Would come with her,
writing in the air;
and all the songs of history
would come marching too,
in battle array,
like an army dressed
in civilian clothing
for a dance in Rio.
V
Fatma’s hair –
a still cascade
of light goldness,
a tide of watery fire,
a flight motionless
of a millon birds who
sing in tongues
and laugh
to the stone unlettered
of his fidgety cenotaph.

© LazharBouazzi, Carthage, TUN

A rugged sidewalk cried hard by the way-side;
Its fissures could not hold their tears anymore.
A puny man pushed a red cart in the tide
Down a darkling, narrow street in Salammbô.*
He mumbled to the waves on his way to the market
As he gasped behind his laden chariot.

His merkabah bore many a lost things
Which he had found buried in the quicksand.
Among them a fountain pen and a helmet,
A pair of eyeglasses, and a trumpet.
I wondered, gazing at the old man’s washed face:
"Will this worn-out scene ever reach the marketplace?"
© LazharBouazzi

"Arab Chickens"* are like
Imaginations:
Indefatigable measurers
Of length and breadth
Where color, choice,
And depth
Are manifestations of the surface.

©LazharBouazzi, Carthage, March1, 2017. Re-revised, March 3, 2017

"Has an Ur-
Tablet
Ever been
Whispered
To a poet -
(Un) like an ancient
Prophet?",

Sang a rubicund
Parrot
Hanging in an apple
Tree.

LazharBouazzi, February 25, 2017

As the shape-all-sun
tore up the curtain
of blood and ululation,
everything in Tunisia,
as stricken by a wand,
came to a standstill,
and slipped away
from the senses -
Even rivers stopped.

Medjerda* froze
halfway
through his descent
to his destination,
as he realized
he’d been making a fatal error:
pouring forth all his passion
into the ocean.

So he stopped,
retracted his course,
re-collected himself,
and started flowing backward,
toward
the source
in the Atlas
that had bidden him
farewell.

In his spear head
there was a design:
start a new chaos
in the valley,
in which there would be
a sweet-water lake
and sailors drunk
with sunbeams, sweat
and pleasure.
Butterflies would flutter
around the scent of mint
and bluegreen rosemary.
Through the flutter
of the midnight hour
Sweet Moon to Sweet Lake
would come, unannounced,
to watch her self shooting
the act of representation.

Now swimming
in his own water,
th river
carried the sky on his shoulder,
while an ant and a grasshopper,
holding a basket together,
watched the new scene.

As the figure-all-sun appeared ,
reason melted;
imagination
her hazel eyes opened.

© LazharBouazzi

*Medjerda is the most important river in Tunisia. Length, 460 km; basin area, 22,000 sq km. It flows out of the Atlas mountains into the Gulf of Tunis.

Is only a name.
But naming is
Like timing,
Spacing,
Teasing
Loving -
A carving
In chaos.

© LazharBouazzi, February 14, 2017

I do miss
Your golden dunes,

But don’t take it amiss
If today
I ask you to turn
On the other side

So that I can see
Your hot, burning
Soul
I crave to kiss
With my fountain pen.

© LazharBouazzi, February 2, 2017

Please,
Forgive
This counterpoint.

For
loving you now
Is off the point.

Now that the wild
Lilies
Halt in the cities

And build their nests
In the asphalt.

LazharBouazzi, February 1, 2017

I don’t run to poetry
To save my skin;
Quite on the contrary.

I conjure the humming bee
On the blue rosemary tree,
I followed as a carefree
Boy in the backyard,
Only 'cause I’m scared
Of the scarred face
Of metaphor.
© LazharBouazzi, January 24, 2017

Across the oozy leaden sky
A seagull with a battle cry
Hurried to his ultimate task
Before the sky puts on his mask.

Nobody knew what his task was
Except that his time drew to a pause
And that he had to hurry because
From the open he had to retreat.

The bird knew that but he was wayward
Swimming in the airy wave beak forward
Skating flying but always eastward
Heedless of the dark like a poet.

LazharBouazzi, January 20, 2017