She’s underhand throwing words with her mouth
The boy leans in past natural borders, to study the agenda in her eyes
He is built like a bent paperclip,
with bottlebrush forelocks, a barracuda jaw.

Between her bare legs, she gently squeezes
a cup of iced hibiscus tea.
She reaches down and lifting it to her lips,
I feel mine part, in thirsting sympathy…

Her upper thighs blush wet with condensation as
The boys eager fingers click on her knee,
like ice cubes in her sweating berry hibiscus,
floral melt cascades down her throat.

Fairy breath lands on my shoulders - my silk overcoat
It makes me dissolve with memory
of my beloved tea picker,
a cocoa skinned Sudanese girl
traveling the road to market in Al-Junaynah,
swaying in the truck bed under a warm sun,
dreaming of red karkadeh flowers
and a paper clip boy.

If I knew who I’d be
by the last written line of this poem.
If I knew who’d sway, besotted, beside me
to lean in and catch the last word
of our maundering sobhet;
If this, I’d never have left
my Beloved's company to begin with.

I crawled wild-eyed from the depths
of the inexplicable,
cold embers of abandoned age,
To go there.
To go to the tip
where the flame flickers
and breath burns.

The Beloved is the earth,
my awareness, roots.
If this,
then love is the water
flowing through the rock,
drawn up the vine
to fatten the grape.
This drunken dance
is a fruit harvest
We fools are the wine makers.
Who gets who intoxicated?

Bestami Bayazid said,
       "I am the wine drinker and the wine and the cupbearer
I came for from Bayazid-ness as a snake from its skin.
Then I looked and saw that lover and beloved are one
I was the smith of my own self.
I am the throne and the footstool.
Your obedience to me greater than my obedience to you
I am the well-preserved tablet.
I saw the Kaaba walking around me."

I say, I arrived in this place two sunsets back
but I did not have to travel to get here.
The earth makes its way around the sun on my behalf.
My journey is both a somber desert
and a purling rain forest
It is my pause that makes one or the other so.

A hungry sparrow hops cautiously through bread crumbs
strewn around a fat loaf of bread.
The feast is on the table, our hands in our pockets,
our mouths sealed shut,
bellies full of hesitation, we circle the spread.
Empty are the stores of those who
Cannot sate their hunger for truth.

The empty belly of a sparrow
sees the universe in a morsel of bread
So of what use is the whole loaf.

Who we are not, weathers through time
be it by water, wind, will or wine.
Gazing into the talus of our becoming
Amidst the course, drifts the fine.

Our purpose is to bear the breeze
With lips to cup, till weakened knees
Besotted within a life between
Pre-eternal, post eternity.

Thirsting through our body’s gristle
flows the milk beneath the thistle
you, true content sans container
Are pulsing spirit, interstitial.

Beautiful mosaic
Of a fragmented heart
Made of clay and
And broke apart.

Parched by drought
What more brings rain
to remembrance
of the Beloved’s name.

It is in my silence
that You hear
how my burning thirst
mouths a drought of tears.

Hearts pump harder
when we bleed, as
Absence sounds the hollows
Of the waiting reed.

Into enormity of emptiness,
the vastness of the beloved to disclose
The sweetest water ever sipped
– by the lovers parched and longing lip –
is the fragrance of the wine red rose.

I dream
She lies
with her eyes open
flying fish leaping
from two placid oceans
catching moonlight
in their silver scales

I wake
She lies awake, not seeing
that I watch her
talk to God
I can tell from her fathomless gaze
And I am amazed
at how far her eyes
can see

She lies, I lie
woken in each others eyes
My pond, her ocean
I drift – in her devotion
to seek beyond measure,
Yet it’s not the conquest
of her vision
but the silence
in her surrender

She lies awake
dreaming
My eyes opened,
Sleeping.
At sea, it’s
us three,
an angler of stars
the Beloved
And thee