The handbook of my heart
Is one
For the birds,
As I am
Because I do
When there simply aren’t words.
So Sunday’s swan song
These little loaves
of love—
                    A bread of pray
                    For a safe journey home
                    My sweet turtle dove.

pale sickness
you're white as a sheet

draining illness
your clammy white skin
rots

deathly light
the diseased white sun will bleach your bones
after the doves pick them clean

sickly white
your cracked teeth clatter out of your skull
dominos in a dead white jar


trembling hands the color of spoiling milk
carefully cradle an almost translucent infant
mother and child
both far too weak to feed

the only thing that grows here is decay
white mold thrives on your hoarded white bread
while outside the safety of the white picket fence
there is not a single soul who does not
recognize the white of an unburied skeleton
under a full moon

Everything draws me to you:
The pulse of a new dawn,
The laughter of the sun,
The aroma of baked bread,
The song of a bird,
The fragrance of a flower,
The magnificent beauty of nature,
The miracle of a baby's birth,
The whisper of hope and humanity.

Everywhere I gaze, I see your beautiful face.
Anywhere I go, I feel the touch of your love.
You are the compass of the hearts
And the Infinite light of the whole universe!

Hussein Dekmak

I imagine the witty hooks
of young ones in love.

He tells her, "aren't you a strawberry
looking like a cherry on top!"

"We're in this jam together,
light of my eye my Sunjam."

And how with a loaf of words,
he'd end with,

"I'll let nothing get in between us;
but be between two slices of bread."

                                              Turning cheeks red and sweet.

The dough is molten at oven spring,
like a prayer to the historicity of things ..

Have we not imagined yesterdays
in the ritual of bread ? While our pasts

lay embezzled, on the tongues of men, the
sentiment of centuries colluded in germ,

echoing through heirloom remembrances
those floury philosophies of change.

While I stretch dough to gaze past
a windowpane, as far back as Khorasan ..

they were other names then, another
elasticity in time. Faith is a memory

of settled people in lands of milk and
honey, where every drought, every flood

spawns a new religion .. and the wheat,
always begs the same old question:

Are we there yet, in the fertile crescent
of opportunity ? The grains haven't changed

in their stolid countenance - long, subtle,
germy, cosseted. In the granaries of kings ..

they are willed by royal decree, never to die
in an eternal future and like humankind,

who score bread in the cuneiform of hearts,
grain is always thirsting to seed the land.

the big easy
is hard lives,
what gives

this rainy city
so sublime,
it's almost a pity

that streets are lined with ****
pests and rats in the alleyways
how did things get so ******

or have they always been?

overpasses with people
lying underneath

so many homeless
it staggers the mind to think

bread bags and coffees
floating in the wake of the ferries

outnumbering 10 to 1
the loads that they carry

all the old growth
coming down

all the gold of their headpieces
tinfoil hats fashioned from crowns

no jazz or blues can save them
from the fate that waits

an engraving reading,
here lies what once was a haven

The corners singed
Smoke rising
It was on too long
So not surprising
Next time I won't read:
The email, the text, or the
Instagram message.
Tomorrow I'll forget
I'll flick the switch
And my mind will drift
Like a balloon sailing out to sea
And once again burnt toast
Will be waiting for me