im tired of trying my best for people who wont for me
im tired of feeling out of place in a place i never asked to be
I have not looked anyone in the eyes for weeks
living isnt living if you're losing

my mother asked me if i wanted to speak
i told her
i never want to have to speak
never wanted to be asked to speak
only statements can be said to me
questions make me seem weak

When the ant had told
that December cold
night the grasshopper,
who had spent Summer
singing in the tree,
to go dance now that
he was hungry but free,
he didn’t show the hurt,
for he was alert
To the discomfort
of Winter and language;
but he left the village.

When he, years later,
Came back as a baker
(who sang in the day
and worked in the night),
the first thing he did
was to go see the ant -
a gift-wrapped guitar
in his hand.

(c) LazharBouazzi

Diaspora
From the Greek

When I heard the word I felt it
And I looked it up
In my old red dictionary

I could have used the Internet,
I suppose

But I like to run my forefinger down pages
Of words

I read the definition
And I felt it
Oh

Oh
We are diaspora.

Am I using it correctly?

We are a diaspora.

Diaspora
From the Greek

From the green valley of Ottawa
From Scotland
From Ireland on wooden boats

From the French village thirteen children
From the mines in the North
From Poland and from Germany

From the churches and
From the Blueberry patches
From the Island Manitoulin

From the dark lake Kagawong
From Kinburn and Arnprior
From Markstay and from Sudbury

From Waterloo
From Kitchener, Michener
From the Suburbs

Oh

From the Suburbs
From the red bricks, red currants
And geraniums
From green island cabins

From the desert

Oh

From the desert
From the potholes and pipes
From the salty wind
Cracked Caspian Sea
From the middle of the east of nowhere.

From the mountains

Oh

From the mountains
From the crystal water fountains
From the tram bells
On the cobblestone streets
From the torrents of the Rhein

From the white cross

Oh

From the white cross
On the green hill
From the river Laurence
From the French and from the English
Plains of Abraham

We are diaspora
We are a diaspora

Diaspora
From the Greek

How did it end up here on my tongue?

It is diaspora.
It is a diaspora
Diaspora is a diaspora

And I wonder if it misses its other pieces
The way that I miss mine

Ours

There is no
Roping us back together now

There is no
Home to go back to

There is no
Point of meeting
Of reunion

No
White steeple in our old town

No
Yellow slide in our backyard

No
Old folks on an old farm

No
Walled house on a hill

No
Luzernerring 93

No
Familiar riverwater

There is no
Ancient Greek anymore
Diaspora

Only fragments of fragments
Of roots of stems of words
In different dialects

There is no
Place for you to belong,
Diaspora

You’ve been sliced to pieces
And scattered
Into the wind

But
When people ask you
Where you are from

You say simply
From the Greek

Oh

From the Greek

And
When people ask me
Where I am from

I say simply
From the diaspora.

This divided society
putting most of us in poverty
but can't do nothing 'bout it
cause the computer cuts us too neatly
Still upholding the divinity of Austrian economic theories
when for the last hundred years
the rise of the dollars been all about
demographics & behavioral science
Capital is nothing more than a natural resource
I don't care that you got there first
The aquifer runs wide
please don't poison mine
Profit is nothing but an unpaid cost of labor
Cause I agreed to a certain pay
I must work the rest of my hours as a Wage Slave
Yeah, you could say it was consensual
but don't have much choice
when I got mouths to feed, a checklist of other needs,
and no extra dough to risk buying
exclusivity rights to plunder a piece of Earth

Human Beings: We call ourselves advanced
when we never been closer to death  

Human Beings: We fear the government
while proprietors with most control grab up more

Human Beings: I get more joy buying things today
than playing with the things I bought yesterday

Human Beings: Millennial pessimists, riding out the apocalypse
instead of promulgating progress

He doesn't know me
Neither do I know him

There's a lake between us
Full of fish

The fish does not belong to him
Neither are they mine

That these fishes belong
to neither him nor me
is a link that connects us

A sky lies fallen in the lake
and through the slopes
of cloud I see
the fishes slink away.
The clouds fallen, still
show movement when nudged
by the fish

Could there be fish
unafraid of birds? Look
at that sky in the lake

Would he be seeing this,
I began to think
and whether he will read my thoughts
I could not imagine
what he saw in the lake, and
there was not enough time

Let him think whatever he likes

There's a cigarette in his hand
The fact that there's one in mine
is another link that connects us

I think the smoke from my cigarette
and the clouds are friends
That's why I mourn the clouds
floating bloated in the lake.

Reading the face you know
His thoughts are unlike
There's no sadness in him

He might be smoking
out of boredom

He's darker than me
That too is a link, but
he doesn't know that I'm white
and that my blackness is an act

He too might have been white
and would have gathered soot
after being left by a mother
who lost all his memories

Can't be, he's black

The lake of clouds
where sky lies fallen
My curls of smoke
in the company of clouds

A me, unblack

Translated by Binu Karunakaran

I won't do this any more
You can't make me want it
You can't make me need it
And the shakes got worse

I might do this some more
If you can make me want it
If you can make me need it
And I'm so terrified

Of what's to come
And how it was
Before you left
And all the voices collapse inside my head

They scream out
"This is your escape"
"This was something you made"
Its tragically beautiful, and clinically insane

But so are you
And you can stop wanting
And you can stop needing
And you can finally be free

What do cigarettes smell like now
They don't smell like the burnt shallows of my heart anymore
They smell like a burning lung breathing in a poets mind