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?”

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?”

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.

She froze;
Not because of the cold weather,
But the stares burnt a hole
In her nervous system
So she froze,
Not because of the lack of blood circulation
In her tightening limbs,
But because the world felt like
It has to stop.
Some believe that,
If you breathe slow enough
You can hinder time;
She stopped time
For she was tired of twisting,
Carrying humans with her hands
Lifting their weights on her shoulder blades;
It was too exhausting
For her to be a carrousel
So she decided to become a rocket ship instead;
She -
Opened her arms wide
Creating sharp edges
To break through the wind,
With feet straight together
Like the rulers she used
To underline her name over every assignment
With little drawn hearts on top of the i’s
And circles over the e’s -
For her tendency to be perfect
Was a result of her fear of failure.
She was ready to be a rocket ship,
But she had no fuel in her gas tank
So she froze.

I’m crucified on the cross roads of doubt;
My heart is in the middle of all this,
My head
Is tilted downwards,
My eyes are shut;
Inverted,
So as to look upon my past
Because some time
Some where
There is a missing link,
That if I find
All this would be clear.
I’m in a Jerusalem of my own
In it,
There is no, wide spaces of sand
And camel-descending romans
Trying to stab me with nails;
Instead,
There’s real people,
With real nails;
There is hope,
Now lighter than sand granules,
And sand castles
Crumbling down,
Leaving enough space
For a flower to emerge
In an Arab spring
Fertilized with corps
And watered with blood;
For Lebanon is running out of water
Like the Lebanese are running out of faith-
Running into walls.
Jumping over obstacles,
Over explosion debris,
Jumping way in over our heads.
I’m in a Jerusalem of my own,
One I call home,
With windows that open
To reshuffle the air particles
In a room that has enclosed upon itself,
With doors that creek
For the scars of the past
Still haunt them,
With walls
Painted with portraits
Protecting the memory
Of the ones I loved,
With walls painted with portraits
Picturing poetic illusions-
Ones that never left my brains,
Ones that tell me,
Every night I lose myself
In her pictures,
That we are getting back together,
One day,
Somehow,
Somewhere,
There is a missing link
That if I find
All this would be clear.
I’m strumming out of tune questions
On guitars that carry my stories,
With strings that need to be changed
And necks that grow long
As the path
I still have in front of me;
And though this is not a problem
For a Hendrix and a joint,
I’m just an ordinary man
With a pen-
I wear ordinary clothes,
I feed up on
Ordinary capitalism,
I ***** up my notes
Of which I never took any;
Jerusalem fell apart,
But my Jerusalem did not fall yet.
On my crucifix,
There’s a writing that says
“There’s always a piece of you in people,
As much as there’s a piece of them in you.”
I’m just a man on a crucifix
But writers can never be tamed,
For they live through the people that learn from them;
And those people,
Maintain they live forever.

We are fighting faceless ghosts.
Our fists fit the image
Of flying rockets
Directed to the unending mist,
To the obscure silence
Seconds after the shock wave of a bomb,
Before you wake up to a world
Screaming over your shoulders
Corpse being carried by corpse to be,
While you lie there,
Voiceless, powerless;
While you lie there,
Realizing that a day’s sweat
Is now mixed with your blood,
And a night’s dream
Is overshadowed by engine steam
Till the image becomes so blurry
You forget why you were working in the first place.
Four people martyred next door-
The neighborhood fell broken,
Four people silenced-
Hundreds have spoken,
Sending their condolences to a country that died
Before it ever lived,
Sending their condolences to cognitive abilities-
To the lack of them,
Sending their condolences to a heart
That was shattered by theory
Before it got shattered by physicality,
To a soul that was lost
In the dark realms of marginalization
And thought of light
As flammable substance;

Sending their condolences to a mother.

A mother of a 16 year old boy,
A mother of a man,
A mother of a woman,
A mother that lost all what’s left of her
In a world
Which once was a heaven
Under her feet,
As she walks
The earth breathed her scent
Until the day the earth became asphalt
And the asphalt was covered with blood;
Until the day our papers got shattered
Our books, torched,
Our thoughts buried
Our mothers worried;
I write this poem
And it might be my last,
All is left of me is paper,
Like water transformed to water vapor-
Droplets of me lingering on the edges
Of the universe,
Until one day I write dense enough
To become rain,
Heavy over our heads
Reviving the grass roots of our thought
Growing flowers
Before wars;
The same flowers we used
To honor our dead.
The same white flowers
They’ll use
To honor us.

A bracelet of blue upon her hand
Made it easier for me to imagine
The way they loved each other;
I saw his eyes in every rock,
In emotions solidified to glistening bits;
I saw his attachment to her soul
Like pendants hanging from her arm
I saw his eyes in every piece of stone,
Now cracked;
In the midst of the serenity in a glittery blue gem
I saw collateral damage.
I saw hope in her eyes
And dry tears accumulated on the side lines
For she decided that, that is where they belong;
She clenched to a cup of tea
Like they were his arms,
Warm as always,
Soothing as usual,
Just the way it was when he was around.
I saw his imprints on her fingers
I saw him fiddling with her words,
Although they weren’t much,
For some words she decided to keep for him
Some words are just between them…
And those were the words that mattered most.
Dear martyr I saw in stone,
They wrote your death sentence
But I wrote you sentences on my bones,
I dreamt of a country for you
I dreamt that you would be in it
But all that’s left of you is stone.
Bracelets cuddling hands;
Hands that wrote on papers
The future of tomorrow.
Dear martyr I saw in her eyes,
You are safe there;
But it is very dangerous in my mind.
You have drowned in her tears
Rested upon her eye lashes,
You swam your way in between
Her wavy hair,
You have held her hands
With mugs of warm tea.
Dear martyr I fumbled on my papers,
My papers will not fade away,
My words will collapse on buildings
Destroying walls they have built to hide the truth
Unwiring bombs they have planted
As they try rewire our minds;
My voice will be ours
And your voice will rest.
For your place is in the vacancies
Between every piece
Of a bracelet
That had you
Written all over.