Life flows through the doors,
Dispersed by the ceiling fan,
A makeover for every patron,
The waitress serves a second chance.

Ex-husband but current parent,
Negotiating with a teenage daughter,
Two untouched lunch plates,
As the gap grows further and further.

Central focus being on a book cover,
Held by an E.R nurse still in her scrubs,
The waitress tries to decipher a meaning,
All while wiping leftovers from table tops.

The calender on the wall says Friday,
And in walks a sundress along with a button down,
Two steaks and a red rose,
Right up comes the waitress with a dinner to astound.

Beginnings and ends in motion,
The clock cues for the 40-something man,
In the far corner he sips his black coffee,
Forlorn eyes of a widow staring at a wedding band.

Wiping beads of sweat from her forehead,
Retying her hair into a secured knot,
Exhaustion slowly kicking in,
As she refills the coffee ***.

The college girl strolling in with her book bag,
Smiles with pity at her as she gives her order,
She thinks of how her minimum wage must look,
But her love for her job makes her smile never falter.

Days are something treasured,
Every hour, a different movie plays,
She collects all those stories,
With the tip left after the customer pays.

Whistles from buses and cabs,
Drivers intimate with their fogs of smoke,
As the ashes of the cigarette
Meet the concrete defeated, devoid of hope.

Today is yesterday, tomorrow is last month,
A chain of promises and complaints,
Necks wearing the chain with devout compassion,
... the fire is smelling faint.

And in the loneliest hour, which is every hour to be exact,
We search for any wavering footprints,
Marching on an array of dead skulls,
To guide us to where the river is. 

We're catching breaths with heads hanging from windows,
But we can't breathe enough, can't grasp much,
So we hang them down ropes of the cheapest material,
Aiming for a free fall to where the silence stretches.

Everyday with red eyes staring holes at the ceiling,
The ringing in our ears comes to life as the devil,
Every night it has a poem of soothing words,
... they sooth every flame, till they turn to lifeless pebbles.

You are no one special

The days make a song out of it, it's just so catchy,
It's the tune played in every commercial,
It makes you believe we are nothing but the dirt we are,
Ideologies are illusions of an anger rebel.

It's every smile plastered on a heavily made up face on television,
The finger pointed in the "right" direction,
It's the words of illiterates that make it on trees' corpses,
It's the thought that gives your mind a detention.

The air is heavy on diseases and illnesses,
It's so saturated that it turned hearts yellow,
It made south north and north south,
It made billboards rules to follow.

I'm sick too, I'm sick of those same words
That I utter at the peak of my revolutionary asthma,
But when I'm good enough to breathe,
I bring acceptance out of my closet and iron it to finish this stanza.

I am the greatest poet alive.

In my body, I am the greatest poet alive,
In my continent, I am the greatest poet alive-
Yesterday, I was…

Today, I am the worst poet alive,
Because I know that yesterday
I was at the peak of my poetic diffusion,
Inspiration stayed the night,
and greatness happened to have occurred,
So yesterday, I was the greatest poet alive,
in my population-of-one continent.

Today I'm just a jealous bitter soul,
Cause I know I wasn't good enough
for inspiration to stay,
Today I know that inspiration fears commitment,
I resembled everything appalling,
I was desperate and needy,
So inspiration left me for another poet
without a second glance.

Because inspiration doesn't want to be
chained down to the grounds of monotony,
A room with four walls is all I could offer,
And it needs a castle where it can trespass
to the wilderness of the sky any time,
It needs the freedom where it can soar
above and look down
in fascination at the array of poets
that it has touched their minds and hearts,
Because that's when inspiration feels alive,
When it can see the power that it has diffused
into their -now- luminescent hearts,
A picture depicting a sky adorned with stars,
An earth adorned by poets that never sleep.

Today, I'm heartbroken because I know inspiration will never be 'mine'.*

It will continue to break hearts, then come back,
And I know that I will continue to accept its apologizes,
Even if they weren't uttered,
I will make one up inspired on spur of the moment,
Because without it I'm nothing but the worst poet alive,
In my body, in my population-of-one continent.

And when the days click and the words rhyme,
The world isn't always forgiving of the greatest poet alive in my population-of-one continent,
Because my poems are me,
And I know that I'm flawed,
I have bad hair days, my nose isn't pretty,
sometimes there are bags under my eyes, and I'm not always the nicest person,
Sometimes my appearance is disheveled,
Just like my poetry,
Then some days I spend the extra ten minutes in front of the mirror,
I care for the details,
And some days people actually like my words,
those are the good days.

And today, I am the worst poet alive,
Because I don't have hope,
Inspiration didn't leave me a note before it left,
It didn't give call me and said I'll be back in a few days,
So today I'm the worst poet alive in my book.

I've cleaned my mind though,
And threw away all the disposal pins
where I burst the bubbles of words that sound ridiculous,
I also folded away all the negative feedback
that my cerebral cinques have given me,
Hopefully inspiration might want to visit the greatest poet alive … tomorrow?

We speak in future tense,
Dreaming of the land of cream,
Where pollution is white,
And we're employed to dream.

If tomorrow had shoulders,
The tendons would be adorned in tears,
From the weight of the expected,
The pushed back promises that are insincere.

We're asking tomorrow
To be the battle wound we've never had,
The battlefield overcome by green,
So we shut our eyes, and turn our backs.

A thought that persists
And deviates too much towards sanity,
That it's in a right angle
With my ever present morality.

Strong sense of grounding
Pulling me towards the roots of gravity,
And whisks my neck,
But I'm too immune to spontaneity.

Am I too right-handed
In my right side brain and my frivolity,
And when I gravitate,
I fall too fast from the towers of insanity.*


●  ●  ●

Shall I dwell in a blob of paint

Something so fickle...

With flailing arms I'll try to swim

in something so little...

Colored and indigenous

My thoughts will trickle...

And in this petty vividness

My eyes shall twinkle...

Till I create a river so infinite

So I never again feel belittled...

Two streets away
I imagine myself walking
Rubbing the sleep out of my eyes

Waking up with the world
As its beauty is still pale
Not yet mixed with the car exhausts

Two streets away
Is the silver wavy water
As it tries to imitate the sky

Bike wheels floating above the roads
Runners racing the sun
Music spilling from that one headphone.

Two streets away
I imagine my blouse fighting the morning breeze
The benches filled with the flowers' happy tears

The streets hinting of awakening,
As the shy face of the peeking sun
Warms the hidden chilliness 

Simplicity is the key
Without man's rough hands
Everything is just being itself

***** feet,
Asleep on yesterday's damage
Not yet awake to indulge in more*

● ● ●

Far behind, where the moon turns its back,
We dream till it becomes prohibited,
We set the sails and watch empty bottles
Swim through rivers, only the dead fish inhabited.

We wake with a scream that gets drowned,
In the rattle made by feet willing to just walk,
Engulfed by the depth of this tunnel,
Where voices fade like words written in chalk.

Hungry eyes watching backs laying in the luxury of their chairs,
Black clouds following every peacemaker,
As if we're doomed to breathe different airs,
Just a penalty for the damage we did to nature.

If it's true, every person is a product of his environment,
Then watch us burn with our hopes accelerating the fire,
And with only ruins surrounding everyone of us,
To exist is to be prisoned, so to die is what we shall aspire.

We're sitting next to a sunset,
The weather says how are you today,
Staring at the blue horizon,
For a moment you thought it'd stay,
But then it leaves like it always does,
And all the blue birds learn to fly,
Fueled by a sinking fear,
That they might disappear into the night,
When was the last time,
That it was okay, to be so juvenile,
A word lost in a closed book,
To judge life by a cover so beautiful.

We sat and talked in the looming warmth,
The sun's not gone, the waters are blue,
Tracing the peaceful tracks in our mind,
Twilight's shadow cast over the greys we drew,
And the dream was looped,
It started from the beginning every few seconds,
Dooming truths as illusions in this world,
Where memories are made from our favorite color palettes,
But oh sleep unlinked our hands,
As it branched into the shades of morning,
Once again your hair covered your face,
And our days went back to their habit of forking.*

● ● ●

Darling, you could only burst
and explode in the perimeters of a cardboard room,

The least collateral damage you could cause,
would be to the neighbors walls in the adjacent tomb.

But here as I stand, the breeze yanking both arms of my jacket,
I'm embracing a volcano and savoring the heat,

Till all of my senses are saturated,
the soles of my feet well acquainted with the earth's crust beneath.

I take this as a sign,
Close the very last eye of mine.

And drink in the untamed air,
And volunteer my lungs with a prayer.

I** could only ricochet,
The familiar ashes of me washed down with the fireworks,

And to your cardboard room, I'll be a new moon,
Disguised as a sun wearing a blazing smirk.

You'll try to keep track of the collateral damage,
And mourn the burnt pieces you found that once shone,

You'll think the big bang was the chaos of the world,
Your bent neck could never show you that bygones shall be bygones.

I will offer my brains on a silver plate,
Well done, medium, or rare, I shall comply,
All I ask is to have a grill of my own,
Or else I'll have no other option than my thoughts to fry.

With a side dish of spaghetti dreams,
We'll skip the pickles for something stronger,
I'll dice up ambition into nice polygons,
Cause maybe then the flavor will last longer.

With the finest of cutlery and napkins,
I'll fold every certificate I've ever been given,
You shall wipe the grease on the paper,
Until the absurdity of the years is driven.

Clink your glasses, devour the best of wine,
An elite of every drop of sweat in the expense of sleepless nights,
Ones spent toppling over determination,
But tonight I'mma wear a chef's hat and cook some peace of mind.

Can the world stop spinning for a second?
For once, can I spend a full day with the moon?
The streets decorated by frozen people,
Emotion stolen from features that were starting to prune.

For every birthday candle that went bare of wishes,
I think now I've found something I'm so adamant to have,
A place where nothingness can echo all around,
And all tomorrow's thoughts can be left as rough drafts.

If only for the night, can I have the world to myself,
To draw the patterns of my dreams across the clouds,
Then when time rains, flooding the whole sky,
Maybe they will be set into motion as we reach reality's whereabouts.

A woman without something she loves 
Is like a river valley devoid of water,
A thirst that runs deep in your throat,
Or coiling autumn leaves devoid of color.

A woman without something she loves
Is a hollow spring that reeks of silence,
Miserably piled ruins of a vast castle,
A new form of living foreign to science.

A woman without something she loves
Is a day when the sun frowns upon the earth,
A lonely journey in the dead of night,
It's when beauty dries to become a curse.

A women without something she loves
Is a world so wrinkled in the after mass of the past,
A blank canvas so sharp in its whiteness,
A rummaged and thrown away draft.

It's when she loses something she loves,
That she turns into a sculptured mannequin,
Two burnt circles for eyes to never see past plastic,
Her heart the broken strings of a violin.

● ● ●

And both covers reunited
With me in between,
For once
it wasn't claustrophobia
that I felt,
It was pure ecstasy,
My mess gathered,
and swept under
the small masses,
That are the yellow colored pages,
Carrying the scent
of something ancient
yet eternal.
Chasing every line,
Like it was my sole purpose in life,
To follow them until I was lost,
Derailed from my walk,
And that's where a far more
fascinating journey begins,
Right under
the brushes of fiction,
Where anything was possible.*

● ● ●