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Stanley Wilkin Aug 2017
Connecting with the Umma
In space and time,
Prostrate in prayer
Contained and comforted
By the mosque’s sanguine light,
The ordered lines of acolytes
In reverential rows.
All herein was ordered and controlled,
Gender’s appropriately separated,
The air devoid of ****** musk,
All done correctly to dusty text.

Outside, oh outside, is chaos
The kaffir engaged in godless behaviour
Flesh exhibited in defiance of god’s
Thousand clearly expressed rules
Remorselessly recorded within
The rippling shadows of sand.
That unknown form sitting in judgement
In a heavenly court, unseen and oblique,
But remarkably like the courts of men.

Tainted thoughts of the unbeliever-
Intimate touches in the moonlight,
Caresses in the sunlight
Laughing, singing, and drinking,
Unaccustomed to strict religious
Contemplation, the rightful punishments
That occasion neglect.
The serpentine gaiety unravelling his solemn mind.  
He held his throbbing
Head as he released himself from prayer;
Walking outside the women’s exposed flesh
Gave him murderous ideas.
Stanley Wilkin Aug 2017
She left the mosque, glancing back to admire
Its conforming embroidered established beauty, its
Minaret rising skywards in ******* glory, her prayers done
In unprotested segregation. In public
Only her embellished eyes were seen staring outwards
In religious line-toeing from her crow-black shroud
Her breath caught up in its funeral mummery.
All individuality shorn away by garb caught mid-way between
Oppression and conviction. Rejecting sexuality, the flirtatious
Gaze of strangers, but by doing so obsessed by that which she feared-
A world filled only with lust where displayed flesh
Is a siren’s song in a corrupt world and living a gasping lurch
Towards death.
Stanley Wilkin Aug 2017
To prevent men’s gaze, confirming her religious
Conviction, she wore a veil-black as ink, dark as coal-
No man could henceforth lust after her
Driven wild by the sight of her skin. Jump her.
Strip her. **** her! She drifted forever like
A ghost, an object, a hollow shell.

Only her husband saw her beauty.
And after him, another.
The institution of marriage demanded
Cloaks of invisibility, walls of ubiquity, anonymous
Submersion into gender.
Stanley Wilkin Aug 2017
They attacked her in mid exploration
Cutting away her golden thoughts
As they cut away her flesh, destroying
A mind that they couldn’t destroy in
Debate, a sparkling old woman
Whose thoughts were spun from steel.

The screaming mob desecrated her tiny form
Dragging it into the dust, through the *******
And ****. Tearing off her clothes
The Parabalani exposed her to celestial winds crossing
The arora, rubbing
Spoilt Alexandrian soil into her unexplored ******.  
She did not die as a philosopher, calculating and
Learning, but, torn apart, the old woman
Screamed out for her father,
Terrified, in sacrificial pain so much worse
Than beheadings and crucifixion. Her modesty,
Kept for 60 years, mutilated by a 1000 killers in a single
Minute.

Her head bounced in the forum,
Her arms thrown to the 4 corners,
Her soul stamped into the gutter,
As the new religion cried out for tolerance.
In a morning thinking became forbidden
Books burnt, laughs ignored and fires built for heretics.
Hypatia was a female philosopher in Alexandria in the 4th century who was torn apart by a Christian mob, her skin scraped from her bones.
Stanley Wilkin Jul 2017
the road gathers itself like a drained old woman,
hunched over rags, beneath the gloomy crag,
sintering as it nears the beach,
worn out through time, impoverished
it has become reflective in the chittering half-light.
Eviscerated by the pawing waves,
contradictory cracks like entrails, hanging out
crushed into solitude , it redefines its continuous retreat.
In the reductive shade
it circumvents the cove, its tarmac withered,
a battered host to foreign weeds.

Sunrise chides the posturing sky, the sulking universal remnants
vanishing in the fenestrated glare. In the near distance, air unravels,
the moving storm exhaling slips of cloud
rapidly swarming like furious flecks of phlegm-sneezed out in perpetuity
between heat and cold.  
The road lies entombed beneath a scree, tumbledown stones and dust.
Ramblers and cars have sought and found
an alternative route. The moistened rubble creaks
as liquid gathers in its shifting heart, crawling out in rivulets-the rain
descending like spit,
emolliating the countryside, shifting dollops of fetid mud,
enveloping like a furious aneurysm.

Sea and land entrenched in conflict,
a war of attrition always won by seas, unleashing energy
of mindful apocalypse in the manner of a gentle sigh.
The gaping abscess of scarred promontories tottering
like feverish drunks. The mouthed obscenities of carnivorous
birds radiates throughout the cove pinpointing local
drownings encrusted with salt. Sea upon sea impose themselves
enviously on rampant shorelines feasting on sand and rock. Never ending!
Plunging ever forward like a barren plough, receding, only to
re-site its casual fury-implosion upon explosion.

The road in its sullen retreat
stumbles through narrow valleys speckled
with gloom; trees with yellow flowers
blooming in crinkled shadows,
deer leaping through high-standing grass, mincing
between tall thin trees. Loping down
into the cities, it becomes a tousled high street full
of immigrants, all yearning for the sea.
Stanley Wilkin Jul 2017
15 to love, still able to win,
gotta tough it out,
winning is everything. Losing's a sin.
I'll keep trying. I'm still in with a shout.

My backhand slices
the ball to my foe
(Joe's my friend but in a crisis,
I shift where the winds blow)

He parries, sends the ball to the line,
his touch is immaculate,
cleaner than mine.
I leap like a cat

return it with ease
he flicks it back over the net
intending to tease.
I grimace. We made a bet

and now I engage
into higher gear,
my brain fills with rage,
my heart fills with fear.

Advantage to me,
the crowd stands to cheer,
Joe falls to one knee,
buckled, losing a tear.

I volley. It whizzers
past his frozen form
he tries, but misses,
defeated, forelorn.

At last I have won,
the gold cup is mine,
another dream spun,
back to the factory line.
Stanley Wilkin Jul 2017
It’s not usual to feast on snap-dragons in the cold months
Or run naked through un-sketched woods reeking of incense
And gloom, ridiculing the battered men on crudely carved crosses-
Dribble running from their loose-lipped mouths tumbling into rivers.
The soul, recently discoloured, doesn’t stay long in such corrosive
Environments where time runs furiously along a thin elastic band
Springing backwards then stretched to eternity.
It isn’t usual to feast on snap-dragons in the cold months
Keeping warm before the incumbent gates of hell
Afraid to sweep the snow away from the garden and live.
To sweep away the snow, now turning brown, and gild
With shafts of gold the fallen lily.
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