After forty years of snow
Do you remember the watch you gave to me wrapped in a poem?
It is still bound to my soul's meaning
The more time passes
The more the letters jump into my heart artery
My heart is now pumping flirtation
How many times I have wished
That if my city were not surrounded by graves
Then like a little girl  
I would wait for you in a secret garden
Come on!
Take off this thick absence
As thick as a New Jersey coat in the winter time
Melt off the snow that has stacked on the lines of your messages
Mow the grass that has grown on your tongue
Don’t save a sea of tears for me
I am not a mermaid
Make yourself present with words
Woo me
Let me stop demanding my rights
And thrive by the touch of your fingers as they play with my hair
Let me fool myself again
And see you as center of my universe

When I try to write
I sense that millions of readers are
Crowding the paper’s edge,
Kneeling, genuflecting, and lifting their hands
To pray for my poem’s safe arrival.
The moment it looms on my imagination’s horizon,
Gazing at the concept in a diaphanous gown of metaphor,
Young people smack their lips—craving double entendres.
Meanwhile, with piercing glances, the elderly scrutinize
Its juxtapositions and puns.
Then the concept smiles shyly, dazed at seeing them.
On the paper’s lines both young and old meet for a discussion,
But my words resist
And ***** walls of critical theories.
Then the paths of personal confession contract,
Contract,
Contract.
My imagination calmly shuts down,
And the conception retreats inside my head.
At that hour, it afflicts my world with
Bouts of destruction.  
Workers refuse their paychecks.
Farmer let their fields go fallow.
Women stop chatting.
Pregnant mothers refuse to deliver their babies.
Children collect their holiday presents but
Toss them on the interstate.
Our rulers detest their positions.
Kings sell their crowns at yard sales.
Geography teachers rend their world map
And throw it in the waste basket.
Grammar teachers hide vowel marks in the drop ceiling
And break caesura by striking the blackboard.
Flour sacks split themselves open, and the flour mixes with dirt.
Birds smash their wings and stop flying.
Mice swarm into the mouths of hungry cats.
Currency sells itself at public auctions.
The streets carry off their asphalt under their arms
And flee to the nearest desert.
Time forgets to strike the hour.
The sea becomes furious at the wave
And leaves the fish stuck headfirst in the mud.
The shivering moon hides its body in the night’s cloak.
Rainstorms congeal in the womb of the clouds.
The July sun hides in holes in the ozone layer,
Allowing ice to form on its beard and scalp.
Skyscrapers beat their heads against the walls,
Terrified by the calamity.
Cities dwindle in size till they enter the needle’s eye.
Mountains tumble against each other.
My room squeezes in upon me, and
The ceiling conspires against me with
The walls,
The chair,
The table,
The fan,
The floor,
Glass in the frame,
The windows,
Its curtains,
My clothes, and
My breaths.
The world’s clarity is roiled.
Atomic units change.
I vanish into seclusion,
Trailing behind me tattered moans and
Allowing my pen to slay itself on the white paper.

Tonight
When I entered my apartment
The stairs were lying like tired men after a hard day's work
The door a yawning mouth
My TV was listening intently to the sports newscast
And
Like a ******* woman, the couch was sitting on the floor  
Hardly breathing the used air
The curtain tickled the cheek of the window……
Swaying gracefully above
My books slept like babies on the hands of the bookshelves
The dining table was listening to the whispers of her chairs
The lamps were winking at to each other
The fan was busy flailing her arms indifferent
In my apartment
The life looks the same as I left it  
Everything is normal
No,  
It is more than normal
Strange…….
No one missed me?

When longing becomes madness
And everything is silenced but my heart,

I tiptoe in fear that my eyes may see me.
I tiptoe into your clothes
In my anger toward
You I neglected them.

I brush off the dust of desire.
I smell them
Searching for your dew
or a drop of your scent.

I press between the muscles of your shirt
To quiet my pains
And regain the balance of my soul

So free me from my vows
Because I often do this.

The Mother she waves farewell to her son now how getting ready to go to the war,
And the soldier he was running down towards the gate of the war,
And I a little girl watching from my window my grandmother shed tears when she waves farewell to my father and I sigh for them.

Every time my father is late from the front line
Sickness strikes my mother
and I tour with her the hospitals of Najaf.

I write to him ‘come back to us now,
Make your sergeant read my words: I am about to die’.

He returns my letter, laughing:
‘We are the amusement of the blindman’.

Oh, you River of Jasim, you tore my years
Between my father’s assumed victories
And my mother’s wishes in the emergency room;

They used to plant hope in her mind
By sticking on the glass door,
Two notices confirming: (awaiting death certificate).

Her heart ages so fast
And I ***** from hearing the chants.
Every time the presenter says ‘Victory is on the horizon’,

My grandmothers’ eyes rise to the ceiling -
She hides a mocking smile.

With rage I scream at the screen ‘no victory’s coming’.

She whispers: ‘god is generous’.
‘You sound like my father when I asked for new toys’.
She quietens and we contend,
Awaiting his return before a new battle,
Fearing that a last fight may end the life of a dove.

Far from the possibility of my death – like the rest of people –
And the body becomes compost for a tree
Some of it attaches to the wheels of a car
Or a bird feels greed for a piece of meet
So it leaps with its beak toward me…

Or the street cleaners sweep it along
I become as good as abandoned debris

Or the broom could strike me to the pile to burn
I say:
Far from the thoughts grow in the pathways of the head
If I didn’t find you
Would I have survived?