When my years are
stretched thin like elastic

that is at breaking point
or just past it

I'll be glad that I keep
my best memories deep

in the grooves
of a black slab of plastic.

She's an alphabet artist
she paints in words,

from a palette of adjectives,
nouns and verbs,

the landscape she finds
in the folds of her mind

she exhibits in volumes of verse.

And then I thought that
those big, endless dark spaces
between the stars in the night sky
had to mean Something

besides

how much nothing is in
Nothing.

///

Everything is separated from each other
But when you see silently
It seems all together
The day sleeps in the night as I exist in you

The born,
The death all for thee
Black or white
True or false all for thee

The continents are separated, isolated
As we are alienated from each other
But on the other hand we are all together
Apparently we are  moving toward the different direction

The dark,
The light all for thee
Silence or thunder
Melody or chaos all for thee

Either it’s a stone or an emotion
Even either love or hate,
Neither war nor peace
Neither dialectics nor mystic
All  have bent you and me

There are too many invisible divine strings
On every matter or even every non matter
yet bonded with the heaven and the hell
So, all we move toward the same destination

///
@ Musfiq us shaleheen

my town
where wild flowers grow
between tram tracks.
there was a time when
it was hardly morning,
no bridge into daylight.

walls had ears,
neighbors had eyes
whispering behind the curtains
there was an emptiness in the guts
of the city
and poetry locked in the drawers,
Borges was read under the blankets
while Dostoievski was  a comforter:
demons were embedded.

yeah, people were clapping and smiling
watching the nub of history, numb
they had a life to live,
what can you say?

one day the radio
burst on in the streets
some were shivering in the attic
"we are free", they said
"we are free",
came the echo in trance

"shhhhh"! said others,
let us wipe the blood
don't disturb the sacrificed
so we can sleep
without dreams

it's Thursday in my town
streets are weary
and our souls are
slowly expanding