time and this body

Age is a reference
to the relation you have
with a timely body:
ailing, wailing, slowly failing.

a country of 3adi, normal

Adi', is the way we spell normal
like it doesn't hurt to breathe at times
Adi' is the longest wait before going home
not because the traffic is hell but because
the sea of cars isn't moving. Adi, is the youth
wasting hours of their lives struggling to be
clearheaded enough to take a jump. Adi, is a country of normal
where everything and anything is of itself a story
Adi, is the country where death walks hand in hand
with life, like an old bride and a groom.
Adi is the abnormality, of getting used to normal.

Fear of force

I fear
the force that causes
death by inconveniences.

Freedom is restricted

close your mouth
put tape over its corners

tie your legs together
with a stone, send it down a lake

put your hands to other use
than typing on a keyboard

avert your eyes
from areas marked with "caution"

cut all buddings of feather
growing between your shoulders

this is natural, a redefinition
of you being free to be restricted too.

To ease death we say

to ease death we say, all sorts of things
valid or just left there in the space that has been opened

to ease death we say
the baby was incomplete

the heart couldn't function anymore
fractured around its edges

to ease death we say
it was a disappearance

journey completed
from the East to the West

to ease death we say
the loved ones are gathered

somewhere that's boundless
maybe this is how the verbs break in on us

to ease death
regardless of what we say

waiting in a vacant time, lets us expand
into easier versions of the same death.

hunger

I've seen the orchard
filling with apples yet denied myself
picking the blood you've planted for the season.

sickness strikes steady

you say it swiftly
like a sword it cuts

a sickness strikes steady
unnamed, a little virus

knocks down a fort
that was being built for five years

in limestone and alcohol
in abstracts and foreign words.

a modern array of love

Your hands in mine, laced
you've touched me
but I felt nothing.

solidarity with feeling

The voices that say
you have no space for feeling 

despite having rubble in your lungs
it doesn't matter

this is the truth, no gas
no envy for the shortages 

as if there is enough day
or night to cover the world

bone for bone
a cloud in the day

the voices that chant in marches
you have no space for feeling 

turning a head to me
if only, they read.

14

is the number of day
for the silence
that fills me when I watch the news

another anniversary for the ones gone

for T, twenty years onward 

Soft blue eyes,
pale to the understanding

a little girl
with her hand in yours

jumping over a moving stream
picking up the clothes for toys

because she would not have know
motherhood then, like she does now

soft blue eyes
never letting her cry

because tears are made with our most precious
pain, that reverberates

when she thinks of you
away from your city

your old bones now,
tired to the call of a voice

tender to the fact that you
her protection is the first true father

she's ever had.

Going back

Going back, I find myself walking backwards to the sea

mixing fact and fiction, stirring tears in tea

going back, I dream of potential lives

various definitions of normalcy:

a radio playing a midnight love poem-

music to replace shrieks,

 stories about dancing bunnies

instead of departures for a child's memory

a piece of orange melting in my mouth

 abstracts beget less blossom in using the right verb

 even the church's bell isn't shy from chiming at mid-day

 I count family members and pray in silence

 use verbs like reduce, to tie my blessings together

that I have language,

 that I breath,

that I have stories

 but I know nothing is normal

and I know the verb return

 is a synonym for stay.

on the brink

on the brink of an upcoming death

that swears to not sound so negative

we find ourselves talking about a life

that waits for the decisions of those granting us time

not God, not nature, but others who like us

think they are above nature, above an all-seeing-God

because they hover in their steel planes over the clouds above our cities

Warplanes

I sleep to the sound of a warplane
hovering in the sky above me,
can the loved ones I lost pull it by the wings?

a burial service for the King

Here lies the silent music
of the mourners, piling like rice

waiting for a resurrection
in a wasteland

here like the silent music
of the mourners, with flowers

holding petals, shredded out
yellow, red, pink and gradation of hope

for the King lies in a shroud
made with musk and linen

wrapped, Lord of the universe
maker, human, seeker of peace

here lies the silent music
of the mourners, us among them,

in black and dark blue
roughened and bruised

mourning the tapping
of a morning on the windows of resurrection.

Weariness in the step

This land makes me, this land kills the things I love
dreams dreamed out of the clouds
weaved with the sun, everlasting rain
this land makes me, Za'tar
breaks me bread, whole-wheat engulfed
kills the chance of standing on my two feet
without crutches propelling me upwards
this land kills those who love it,
with its thrones, with its rye
with what makes of it, a boundless emptiness
without borders or barb-wires.

Too valuable, these tributes

They have fallen, young jasmine
it is not yet spring- we say
gone too young, those who die for us to live.

The doe by the river

The gazelle has taken her neck down
ti drink from the river, preceded the sunlight
heart of doe, she became the light
when death tapped her heart

Another way to look at the question

Create opportunities
is what I hear being said, every time someone mentions
another building has effectively fallen.

The Laureate's birthday

This is the day you were born
a quote to celebrate your achievements is dotted over space

your vices, are kept hidden, like the same answer formalation
we give to tyrants and presidents at the same time

they've broken us, but we refused to break
this is something only you would write

only a man would write
only a man with a messy desk would write

only a man with slanting glasses and exiles would write
only a man with torn out passports and detention orders

it only took one man, to cover on a national level
causes that are ours and not ours at the same time

without blanketing but with the written word
the word that had descended first from a mouth holier than yours

having never kissed as many women
from both sides of the equation, yet remained grounded

it will sound sacrilegious if I speak of poets- national- like I would speak
of excuses, long and unbending

there are days where I work in your shadows
there are others where I taper into your spirit

a butterfly effect from a man's heart
crawling lightly on a woman's chest

from a balconey that overlooks
your grave, I will whisper today,

Happy birthday, restful laureate
for in death only you have found your peace.