The Day Defined
Just after waking —
Before gazing at a phone, or a catastrophe.
If the town crier doesn’t wake us,
A ruler surely holds sway,
But doesn’t roam street by street
With a trumpet-gun in hand.

—I know nothing at all.

If blood won’t burst into my palms,
A child comes before the heart.
With signals torn by dreams of resistance,
Sails rip apart
Just after oblivion.
It echoes,
Burns,
And collapses most —
That relentless state of mine,
In the shade of a tranquil conscience.

A capsule of civilization
On a sleepless night,
With wordless tomes under a social moonlight.
My numb body —
Yet I force my restless soul
To take in its tension.
And there,
Azrael, the purest of tales,
Proclaims existence
From eternity to infinity,

“While stories unspoken are more than the dead.”

Why, then,
Do these ashes of dissolution
Carry endlessly on?

Oh Ali!
Since even lions exist in this creation,
Paradise…

Delicate and passive —
Seeping into our marrow.
From strands of hair to the depths of spirit,
A fitting, gentle beneficence.

In the necessity of existence,
Among huris scented with gunpowder —
Ah!
To those who invented the pen of gender bias,
Caught between free will and the ego.

Sometimes goodness.
Sometimes only…

In the sociology of judgment,
Just one station shy of hell,
Perhaps more difficult still.

And with love in the tongue,
Fear most the garden of paradise.

The emotional megastructure of procreation —
If we give life to a soul
In any corner of this universe,
We must look back at what we’ve left,
Weep,
Gasp,
And mourn.

A word of sorrow,
And the state of annexing it —
An endless collapse of lamentation.

Dreams matter.
Their characters remain unknown —
Unfathomable by reason,
Unaided by fear.

Even now,
As life slips away,
Dreams sharpen every idea.
Eyes are not for seeing.
They touch.
They ruin.

Melbourne wears lilac today.

Before the sun rises,
I clench and open my numb left hand,
Donning my shroud —
Remembering you
As I walk toward your presence.

Those who dream nightmares
Cherish their beloved the most.
I had a nightmare, too.

Humanity in its needy state.
Factory flaws,
Seeking truth —
They were executed to the tune of triumph songs.

The inventor of the wheel,
While testing it,
Heard the trumpet of slaughter.

Patriotism?
Shattered —
Flesh, bone, marrow,
All devoured.

And in worship of power,
Equality
Became chained.

Resistance faltered.
Ideals strayed.
And those who sowed rebellion
Watered the soil with blood.

(Excuse me —
That’s the sound of a horn.
I’m in traffic.)

Socialism, humanism, carnivory,
And the oil of olives.
I duel with my soul,
Between joy and sorrow.

Idealism —
Or a father’s simplicity?
A dentist,
Pulling a tooth of symbolism
From the earth’s jaws.

Don’t look like that!
My tobacco smells different.
And my cells —
Not wrapped in silicon.
I know.
Grief is not fate.
Even if society were robotic,
Why would we need Rumi?
We’d just have version 08.
Then version 09.

Obligation, responsibility,
An infinity of variation — mathematically sound.
If harmony is supernatural,
And even nothingness depends on a single 1,
Then —
Even without autumn,
There are always
Three dots…