I should get up and write.
Write about our present,
And how unlikely is our future.
Write about the scars on her left wrist
Which you saw only because her bracelet slipped.
Write about how she never gave up,
And how you never gave up on asking;
Maybe I should get up and write
About the shackles in our stomachs,
The chains on their chairs,
The change that is so hard to anticipate
When your fainting eyes
Read news of homicide every night;
When your voice fades away in reason,
And not in volume;
You often find yourself talking loudly
Only to realize that the echoes of your sound
Is amplified by the emptiness of what you’re saying
So why speak?
So why speak, when you can’t get her to listen,
When her eyes shift between your glances
To look for someone she actually wants to hang around;
When her fingers do not point at your words,
But at her favorite photos
Which she goes over 10 million times a day.
So why speak?
When your vocal chords
Are replaced with rocks and stones,
So you throw your messages away
Hoping you get them straight to the heads
So why speak?
When words rattle cages
But tyrants
They live in mansions.
But we’re still alive aren’t we?
Our blood runs
Through the wired compartments of our brains,
Like rivers rushing with ideas,
And I fell for the oceans in her eyes.
Our heart still beats
Quicker at winter than it does at spring,
And I guess it gets chilly every time we meet.
Our bodies still believe in music,
We could still challenge the world
By spiraling against it,
By jumping upward
Downing motions of the rain,
By looking at the horizons
And still believe
There’s a lot more for us to see.
Nov 17, 2014
Nov 17, 2014 at 7:53 PM UTC
You forgot your pictures
On forgotten bed side tables
In the back of my brains.
I was supposed to sleep two hours ago,
But I was busy tracing the tracks
You’ve crossed with your fingers on my skin;
And when I reach the end of the map
I don’t find a treasure
Instead I find your dead cells
Lurking on my shoulders
Like dust lurking on my book shelves,
Like tanned blondes stretching on the sea shore,
Like red and blue highlights that you’ve kept for so long.
I found your sea shelled bracelets
And 3 fingered rings exciting,
I found the simplicity of you wearing no necklace soothing,
But I knew that I was at the peak of a roller coaster ride-
When everything slows down,
When that loose feeling of safety
Tingles up your spine
And stays long enough
To amplify the shock of falling suddenly.
I picked up a flower shaped safety pin
And as soon as I brought it close enough to smell
Your grenades exploded in my face.
Instead of shattering,
I blew up into a thousand words
That can make oceans of me ,
And instead of you swimming
You learned how to drown;
Avoid my words,
Swim through the sharks and create jewels out of my sea shells
Till I become just another
Pendant from your arms,
Or glitter on the corners of your backpack
Where you hanged memories you force outside
Because the demons inside are not on good terms,
Because the demons inside of you are screeching
But you don’t want the world to hear;
Yet you left your pictures on my bed site tables,
And you meant to keep a retraceable mark of you on my hands
And you want me to come back,
But your mines were too dangerous.
Your mood swings
Flew me over the bushes,
Your cigarette smoke, filtered in my lungs
Made it hard for me to breath out the words “I love you”,
Your eyes are my only solace
But sometimes,
It takes less effort to exit home
Than to stay in it.
Sep 21, 2014
Sep 21, 2014 at 1:00 PM UTC
Stare at your father,
At the cornered sweat
Zigzagging between the Grey hair
Left on the borders of his skull;
At the spit
Exiting from the white bars
That once kept his words unsaid.
Stare at him,
While he repeats the same sentence
Over and over and over
Until the words curve spaces
At the back of your ears,
Till all you can hear is
“Keep your dreams in the depth of your pockets,
Dreams can float once your pockets are full”.
But my dreams are like plants
They need light to grow,
And my pocket is not exactly
The place I was thinking about.
Stare at your Facebook homepage;
The girls left an imprint.
The imprints were coded
And the codes became a covenant
Of which-
You gave yourself;
And every time before you go to sleep
You repeat the same sentence
“She is not the one.
You love her because she is an image in your head,
She is not the one.
The one reads books
And books have been written about her,
The one plays the right music,
The one creates scenarios in her head
And asks you to act them with he;r
The one loves you back
The one loves you back.”
Stare at the circles you’ve been forming;
The words you’ve said
That you now take back-
Pull strings on your intestines
Till your up chuck reflex
Kicks in and you start
Jotting them on paper;
Who knows?
Maybe one day you’ll even write a poem.
Jul 25, 2014
Jul 25, 2014 at 11:34 PM UTC
My Facebook page is a cluster of
Saturday nights drinking-
And Gaza.
The fusion of blood and alcohol
Created a fierce dichotomy
That shouldn’t exist;
My bed is a crimson clover field,
With big dreams
Attached to every leaf,
Hidden in pockets of brand new shirts
That I bought
Just to grab your attention.
My mind is doing jumping jacks
Over the thoughts
Of rebellion
And fighting for the dead youth
As opposed to-
Enjoying my own.
My head grew muscles,
As their feet
Grew tired-
Of running at night,
When the dark hinders their sight
Till they get confused between
Rocks-
And skulls;
But they run,
And dodge,
And jump,
And crack broken bones
As long as they are still alive.
In Gaza I die.
Every day,
Reading the reports ,
Calculating the number of deaths
Over the number of minutes spent
Surfing web pages
Jumping from one link to the other
Hoping that I would find
Something to hang on to;
In Gaza I die.
When I see mothers
Flustered and desperate,
Trying to cheer up their children
In a hopeless case;
And nothing would cheer a child up
Like a piece of cake,
But they have nothing left-
So they bake them a cake
Out of their broken limbs,
They gather the tears
They’ve cried on white cloth
To make them soup.
They chip a piece of their heart off
Every other night,
Because that heart will hurt
When they call their children
And they seize to answer,
Because that same heart will shatter
Like rockets in a Palestinian sky
When they prepare food for Five
But there would be no one left to eat.
In Gaza I die,
I was once four years old;
In Gaza I die,
I married your mother when I was 16,
I brought you and your sister
Before I was 25
In Gaza I die,
Yesterday he looked at me,
In the shelter,
I smiled
But not the smile that shows that I’m infatuated
But definitely interested!
In Gaza I die,
She is so into me
But
In Gaza
I wish i could just
Live.
Jul 21, 2014
Jul 21, 2014 at 9:38 PM UTC
I watched a movie the other night and a scene reminded me of you ;
There was a lonely sailor on a fluke
That had a lantern on its far end.
The fluke was delving into a heavy night.
The mist veiled the sailor
Till he looked pious enough
To have the faith to fight the sea.
It reminded me of you,
Because when I observed you fading away
It was like observing parts of me
Sailing the same fluke I saw,
Leaving a fiery trail behind
So when I go back in memory
I could remember that those parts were once there.
They were parts of me,
Before the touch of his hand-
Caressing the bumps on your neck
Suffocated,
Till all you can breathe
Filled only the volume of his grip.
Before your glances became stares-
The myth says,
If you look medusa in the eyes
You will turn into stone
And so you did.
I watched him killing you
Slowly,
Dying,
Blacking out…
I extracted pieces of you from my veins;
It took me a while
To clean them
From tight corners in my vertebrate,
But you were doing the same;
You pegged two hooks
Onto your heart,
Attached to a rope that he pulled hard
Only to make sure
That every piece of me vanquishes.
But in the process you lost yourself
And so did I.
Every time I look at you
I try to scan for left overs of my past-
Instead I find his finger prints.
And every time I hear your voice
I think about the songs
That we never sang
But it would’ve been awesome if we did.
I met a sailor the other day
He was and old frail version of me
With tired eyes
That grew land marks on the way,
With a wrinkled face
Like dry land with no signs of water;
On his chest I saw two scars
That bend like a tiger’s claw
And curves like 2 poorly implanted hooks.
I asked him where have you been.
He answered,
“a true sailor always finds his way back home”
Jul 12, 2014
Jul 12, 2014 at 9:35 PM UTC
I want to come up with amendments,
But my brains cannot function
Because I have spent the last 8 hours
Trying to memorize the 2 “I’s” of Lebanese history
Irony and Ignorance.
I want to fix the world
But I was never the handy man;
I once broke my mother’s phone
Trying to wipe the screen;
And frankly,
I don’t really know what’s wrong with it.
I want to patch my mother’s heart.
The bullet in her son’s temple
Burnt a hole in her arteries,
So every time she inhales
She could taste the lead
Between her husband’s eyes;
Because before the stars collapsed
They were just scanning the shelves for skimmed milk;
His daughter suffered from diabetes,
And before the sun exploded
At the bend of a thumb
She was hanging from his arms,
Jane trying to swing her way
But in this movie
She never meets Tarzan.
His daughter was only 3.
A car bomb
Can conflagrate
From 9,000 up to 27,000 feet per second
Both are multiples of 3.
A wired van
Can carry up to 12,000 pounds
Of explosives
Also a multiple of 3.
On her 3rd birthday
She blew 3 candles,
And 3 candles were lit-
Every night,
In between the white roses-
Over her grave.
I want to breathe
Burning tires,
I want to bask
In blood,
I want to think
In exchange rates,
I want to feel numb;
If this is the only way…
Is this the only way
To survive?
Jun 24, 2014
Jun 24, 2014 at 6:49 AM UTC
She approached me
Tiptoeing from across the room,
Although no one was asleep around us to wake;
I watched her lower lip bleed
From biting too much,
As she deciphers the DNA codes on her hair
With her fingertips,
Stroking the life out of it
Up and down-
And up and down again.
She said don’t get me wrong
But I found myself;
I found myself lurking underneath the light of your words
Bending with your o’s and standing straight with your I’s,
Because I
Got lost;
I got lost in the stories you wrote
About the girls who broke
And they felt just like me-
Dazed
By the love poems you cried down for her,
And I wondered how beautiful she must be.
I got flustered
In the blank spaces
That you chose not to write in,
And it felt like I should cut parts of myself
And add them in the vacancies
But I just don’t know what to add.
For every time I rest my soul
On the tip of a pen
I feel like I’ve said too much,
And every time I scratch my words
Throw away my being
Behind
Unread books and dusty light stands
I believe I haven’t said enough
For I could give more,
Be more,
If only I could start over,
And you
You seem to know me more than I know myself;
You have built bridges
Out of my paper shreds,
Tunnels out of my unexpressed thoughts-
You have created your haven inside my brains
And settled down in my heart.
You’ve managed to make me chew your words
Like breakfast
Was a poetic meal to be served
At all times of the day;
You’re an image,
I re-create you in my mind
Before I sleep
After asleep
And even during I sleep-
The thoughts of you never quit my head
Like a gamer would never quit
A game of Warcraft
In the midst of hunting season”
She took off her glasses,
And I could see the marks of them
Being there for too long.
She closes her eyes
As if she was about to take a leap of faith,
But instead she leaped two steps into my arms
And that was when
I got to ask her
What her name was.
And that was when I realized
It didn’t even matter.
May 26, 2014
May 26, 2014 at 4:43 PM UTC
She asks me “what do you think of me?”
I stop;
Reflect upon what just happened,
When a complexity of a girl
Asks a simple guy
What he thinks about her.
She asks me “what do you like about me?”
I’ll tell you what I hate;
I don’t hate your eyes,
Like round circles we used to make
With our dancing bodies
In preschool playgrounds.
I don’t,
Hate your lips;
They could be traced
From a million miles
And they curve so beautifully.
I don’t hate your smile,
The semi grins you keep
Before the flashes,
Before the posts;
I don’t hate your eyes,
Like bullets entering the soul
With an insertion of dopamine.
She asks me “do you really think I am worth your troubles?”
You are not.
You deserve my delight;
You deserve my green days and blooming flowers,
You deserve my watering mouth
Nourishing the vines underneath your tongue,
You deserve the sunrises in my playlists
And sunsets in the warmth of my jackets;
You are not worthy of my troubles
I am not worthy of my troubles.
She pushes me away,
The walls are too tight
And the stares,
They scrape on our throats.
The girl is lonely,
Her social circle spreads wide enough
To leave a gap;
Her friends walk next to her
And not on her side;
Her smiles-
Electronic cigarettes that look genuine,
But the smoke never rests
On the teeth,
Just a vapor that fades away.
She’s anchored to her reality
Her ships are not meant to sail
Just yet.
She asks me “what do you think of me?”
You’re a concept;
You’re a fusion of vivid elements
Wired with secret buttons
Hidden in your desires.
You’re an emotional rollercoaster
That we ride
You and I,
When I think of you
You’re just a white canvas
That whispers into my soul
The true meaning of art.
She asks me “is this your real answer?”
She ask me “is this your real answer?”
May 7, 2014
May 7, 2014 at 6:44 PM UTC
Dry tears accumulate
On the corners of my sleepless eyes
As my thoughts circulate
In my brains
Like old sweaters in washing machines.
My spirit is knocking on the doors of my mind,
Peeking through windows
Trying to get a signal,
Trying to do something
Screaming
“What the hell are you doing!?You’re going to **** us!”
It’s raining,
Inside me it’s raining;
Droplets of infuriated thoughts
And angry manifestos
Declaring that I’m unpleased with this world,
Unpleased of how it’s too small for my dreams,
Too tight for my overflowing self
And too narrow for my vision.
I’m a social claustrophobic,
Desperately attempting to get out of my social class
That is made out of four walls
Hate, prejudice, fear, and socio-economic dictionaries
That are set to define human beings.
I’m a lost pilgrim;
My compass is lying somewhere
In between the sand castles
Our father’s built for us
In this country on the shore;
In this country that drowns
Every time the moon decides to push away the water to its surface,
That clenches,
To the air that’s given to it
Split seconds after the moon changes its mind.
I can see the sunset;
But when the mind is not clear
One can never find clarity in a cloudless sky,
I can smell all kinds of spring,
But the scent reminds me of what I’m missing
Rather than what I am to find;
I’m busking in a starless sky,
I’m rotating around my words
Trying to avoid the meanings
Jumping over my reflections
Only thinking of one thing
“How the hell do we get out of this labyrinth?”
Apr 6, 2014
Apr 6, 2014 at 1:29 PM UTC
Here’s to the poets;
Here’s to the lives
That started and ended
In short sentences,
Hiding behind the words and the commas,
In between the lines
There is a space;
There is a space for poets
To dream and dissect dreams,to
Examine the heights of their rationale
And the depth of their emotions,
Like teleporting from the tops of Adonis
To the bottom of dark alleys in Hamra.
Here’s to the artists,
Here’s to the works of art
Forgotten on sharp corners
Between the margins in a copybook
And light emerging from their classroom windows;
Here’s to the scribbles
That created life, when living
Seemed impossible.
Here’s to the outcasts,
Here’s to the girls
Who read comics
About super heroes
Hiding behind
Kashmir scarfs and ripped jeans,
Reading 6 words at a time
Because the area of a flashlight
Covers just enough to get her wondering,
To get her to forget how
Her tight jeans left scars on her untouched thighs,
And how her feet were painted red
Before and after
She had to wear twin towers to walk in.
Here’s to the jokers,
Here’s to the unappreciated laughter
To whatever happens after
Here’s to the grand stages you formed
Out of two desks put together
And a pencil/eraser microphone;
Here’s to us,
To our shattered talents and lost souls
Here’s to our oppressed minds
And distorted comprehension of ourselves
Here’s to us
And who ever falls in love with us.
Mar 23, 2014
Mar 23, 2014 at 7:42 PM UTC