by Hasan Aspahani

1.   Is prison only behind walls and iron bars or is it also in a free land that wants to be erased from history and maps?

2. Is killing possible only by the army and with weapons or also from the silence of the person who should speak?

3. What fears are now making you unable to feel the fear of hundreds of thousands of people whose homes burned, as well as mosques and rice fields left behind?

4. Can not you just imagine what they want to do is go home, study, and sit on the edge of the bed waiting for the dying mom?

5. Is it still beautiful that peacock dance when in between the tail feathers prepare army troops opened fire on people who do not understand why they must be expelled or die?

6. Do you want to once again get The Nobel Peace Prize for something you have to do that I should not mention in this question?

1
a singer — he want to go to the moon
and I pinned on his head. he wants
to sing with all the heavenly body
and allege about love to his lover

2
another singer who like to dance
also pinned me on his head. he walks
like a moon — hard to tell the contrast
of black and white from a cubit

3
and again, a singer. I am as cursed
too lazy to go everywhere — to like forever
I want to be pinned on his head — sing along
and dance from a stage to another

4
and I am —
they'll refuse me
if I'm not me
: but do not

in my book-word of sea. the letters blackened
as though a crab carrion — sprawled out
on its slicky lingual waves:

there is a slip to the bottom of a riverbed
submerged, crushed by the froth of time
pilgrimaged by the monsoon

while the fate is a word
aboveboard — sail on my body
rowing its own letters

whichever comes first
an arch or its point
you scratched on

a question mark
can not answer
the question itself

indeed so — even
in languages
which hasn't been created

1
in the beginning was believe
above the fate's monochromatic
on a length of the piano's bar
— : in which colors it will stop?

2
you were more fathom, about
— a poetry-like score
— a syllabic-like tone
likewise — as I am-like me

3
there is a clink that you drag
either from the flat or the sharp
— that's half of my grasp
transformed from the sounds

4
— an untraceable of whom — was
sculpted — aligned on an epitaph
— an untraceable of the sounds
you disguised — with the words

5
how — the shift of chromatic scale
sounds like a ***** of question mark
— is it quite likely its arch was
the origins of an earlobe-shape?

I can't stop thinking about them:

the dead squirrel,

the doves whose droppings
dot my freshly painted fence--a graffiti
in scatological code beyond my ken

the unmarked graves of Sham,
Krishna, and Chauncey--loyal pets
who never got the needle

the Zinnias up from seed who feel ambivalent
about being alive--one day drooping, the next day
appearing to thrive

and the jacuzzi,
empty now except
for her memory,

the daughter whose name
I will not say, who fell asleep in that hot tub
and did not wake up

perhaps seeds sewn so near
don't know what to make of warm water's
perverse powers