as human beings and consumers, we often seek for contentment
as seekers, we search for satisfaction to fill in missing parts of us we think we need
as lovers, we seek for attention, longingness and to be far off from the void
we search for what is relevant enough to be the food of our soul, and as we consume we are never satisfied
so we seek for satisfaction, wanting more
and with hands full, a heart pouring out of selflessness, we destroy ourselves
as we fall in love, we fall apart
giving and offering missing puzzle pieces that exist within us
as we gradually become into nothing, we feed off of others, consuming whatever it is they have left
we accept their love, and they, our flaws
aware that we are only body parts that are reconnecting
as we heal, we occupy their vacancies, filling in missing parts that have been hollow for too long
we become their musings, their vertebrae of support
they become our sanctuary and our hope
they become the memories that look into the future
instead of the mistakes that shaped who we are

n.j.

From formative years
To adulthood serfs-baited
Servants ill-treated
From their means
Of existence alienated,
It is with hatred
From- serfdom- of- every-kind
-the- newly -unshackled heads'
Formatted!

Though their much-lamented land
Has come back to their hand
Tardy,their mind proves not free,
That is why they engage
In a killing spree!
Worse still death to all, allies
Inclusive,they decree!

Although it sounds funny
They pay back gal
For received honey!

Also to cultural norms
And religious ideals blind,
Atavistic they slay
A woman and a child
In a way that is wild.

Oblivious for 9-months
They had a lodging
In a mother's womb
They want to blast it
With a bomb!
They want to shove in it
A spherical thorny wood
As far as they could.

Alive,they grill a man,
For idle or unskilled what
They can't do, he can!

In the name of God
Or religious sects,
Replete at this
Satan-released age,
They behead a man
Made in God's image!///

Oh they pleaded,
women, men
young and old,
'let us pass through that sea'
to a place where we could start all over',
yet their voices fall into deaf ears
of their brothers and sisters
from another mother land,
hopeless they remain drifted
in the treacherous sea
feeling unwanted, unloved
forever rejected,
by the policies of the modern
migration...

the unworthy sea-going boat,
becomes their coffin
and the sea and the seafloor become
their graveyards,
the common fate of boat people - the asylum seekers.

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.

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.