Tribal Night

I lost skin and sweat 

in a breeze of golden times

Not much was my thrust

Not pure was my shine

for the lights that struck afar

and flickered where they are

lit from within the flames

to kill a muffled chime.

Myself consumed by fragrant fumes

was a hum from a tale derived

from cribs rocking to dawn

from chirps creeping along

from a past wheeling ahead

reborn from ashes to die.

Stretching along tribal pound

the mass commands a night

from a tomb the shades above reform

to cast along a purple song

of gods reformed by starving thoughts

quivering along the vape,

sizzling before their sight.

No weight lays on truth

None does on flaring delight

No value waves grant my bones

and none does the sea

to slowly stretching tides.

When time consumes

the last of the dark

and light seeps down

to cloak the seemingly stark

my story from ashes to ashes return

and the last of my bones 

will break and burn

to a fate conjoint by a route so frail

that those of nights of moons ago

and nights of those yet to grow

pile up to a summoned plight

Forgotten, diluted, off blown

a gust whiffs to cleanse the shore

so others can serve the light

for yet another tribal night.

Dear Carla

The flowers so pretty

Against the green meadow

Are not a fair truth

In the face of those in shadow.

Life as it is

And as it can ever be

Is never fair, never equal

And so your fate is yours

To deem.  

Do not expect of waters

To slide along your roots

Be ready to extend along 

To walk, a plant, in boots.

Be not afraid to leap

Or let go to catch another 

For the roads that cast ahead

Weigh in balance what you endeavor.

Extend with flex and pride

The parts the winds will bend

And let the cool dew slide

From what the sun will fence.

But never forget who you are

And never give up on you

For the winds will change their blow

The day will have a due

The waters will find their way

And you'll always have your roots.

Ramadan: Thirst, Hunger and Time

          I was already feeling the salty drops quivering on my face and forehead and accumulating slowly before tickling the ridges on the way down. My feet were heavy and full of the blood too wan to climb up back to my deprived brain and eyes. My damp caramel shirt was losing its tuck from under my jeans at its second place now, but I was doubtingly too tired to fix it. Nobody was in the streets anyway. My cracked chipped lips were reluctantly breathing the vapors out into the orange-red street. The last of the yawning blaze was slithering along the glassy breaks of my mouth. The last of the voices was smothered along the door shut, and all I could think of was that my walk took too much time and there wouldn't be enough Fattoush for me for Iftar once I go back home. There was always too much or too little. Never the right amount. So, I had to go back.

          After ignoring my mom vigorously trying to verbally discipline me for being late for food and constantly reminding me that she told me not to, all the sound left was the warm blood turbulent against my inner ear, building pressure along the seconds. My head was heavy and sleepy from all the hypoglycemia and dehydration. It remained so as I shushed my prayers to the glass of water and gulped the first mouthful of the fine refurbishing waters. At that moment, the two bubbles squeezing against the inside of my ears popped, heat slid from my spine up to the skin and sweat burst from every pore and dripped from all curves and angles. Only then, events took course back on their original natural speed again. Spoons hit the ceramic plates licking their toppings louder now, more festively. The drinks spilled on the table sheet. Kids have started playing with the leftover fried potatoes within their range. Sequential events weren't so vivid and fuzzy then. Time has settled.

          The perplexing transition between the fasting hallucinations and the binge eating away from the daylight comes with sugar-associated wisdom. The isthmus crossed at the break of the Athan not only seduces you to the heavenly calories, but also transcends your desires all down to their roots. I pressed one of the pistachios drowning at the sways of the bloody-red Jallab glass, also known as Muslim's wine. I pressed it several times. With each time, I added a little force to the initial press and smiled lethargically at the time it needed to go back up to the surface. I was drunk on satiety perhaps. However, I was awakening to many interrogations along the gurgling journey of the pistachio. I felt my arteries starting to expand with the sugar flushing the jellyfish of my thoughts. So, I pushed the pistachio one more time, and went off to my thoughts.

          I inquisitively investigated the basis of fasting before. I did so demanding an answer to myself and a justification for cynics. I learned that fasting starts from the basal causes of feeling with the destitute and unprivileged. It all stretches out from an innate desire to achieve a mimic of the equality of Plato's Virtuous City. Ramadan is a chronological departure to an era where the poor and the capable are equally distant from the basic lusts and demands of life. Neither the sexual fulfillment nor the food and water are attainable. At least not for a daily common interval. It pleads a more humanitarian teaching of the human desires. It does not only compel humans to a common reach to materialistic whims, but it leads them to learn control over those flesh-feeding requirements. Thus, it trains them to delay gratitude; if an individual is capable of postponing nutritious supplies, he can learn how to maneuver through the temptation of life without falling into its misguiding labyrinth. It also transcends them to choices beyond the dried dates and fried pastries; it's not about the thirst anymore. It's not about the hunger or fatigue. It makes you think about who you are away from the mundane demands of life. It pushes you to relate to yourself away from the physical aspect. And as you do so, you come to realize that Ramadan aims for a fundamental declaration. It challenges a bigger concept. It teaches the value of time and its relativity. It's not about the presence or absence of the pistachio in the Jallab. It's not about the type of the drink that sits in my glass. However, it's about what happens with what I have. It's all down to the scale along which events take place and the type of events that fall along that equation.

          We have for long emphasized that Ramadan disciplines believers by encouraging them to fight hunger and thirst. So, it puts them in the shoes of those who suffer from a lack of nutrition and deprivation of the basic needs. It then walks them around for a full lunar cycle to teach them to appreciate what they have and feel for those who do not have it. And that is somehow valid. However, there is a major factor often disregarded while tackling this phenomena. The unprivileged cannot attain their proper nutrition, and can never tell when, or if any, they will get to eat. So, their true battle is against their deprivation itself. On the other hand, fasting individuals are certainly aware of when they will reach satiety. All they have to do is march the seconds towards it. So, their true battle is against time. They learn to value the scale along which they breathe. They learn how the relativity of time can be manipulated based on the events that take place. It is in fact our own course of action that creates the manifestation of time. So, all choices of an adept life style help shape the dynamics of existence.

          Along the course of the day, time slows down exponentially. The last few minutes before the Sun sinks are equivalent to the first few hours of the day. And it slows down as it strips from all lusts and events. The road once filled with drinks and people and money slowly loses it content. The focus then diverts away from the content of the road, and all is left is the empty path ahead. It is only then when you get the chance to recreate the settings of the journey. Only then, Ramadan sets food on the table and the call for prayer chants high and proudly. Only then, the hot sweaty foreheads meet the praying mats and everybody savors the first taste of water. Only then, the pistachio earns its buoyancy back to the surface.

The Infinity of Happiness in a Finite Experience

          The rough curls of the wool were starting to be more indeterminately sensed at the mount of my extremities. My full lips were heavy from all the codes sleep has swayed along my breathes throughout the night. My hair was as messy as ever, or maybe just a little more. My core was pampered with more of a vibrant uniformity of heat tranquilizing the layers above and within. My eyes were selecting more of the sneaky white lights from the window to the left. Everything else in the room was already muted and already devoured by what was once a contemplation of intermittent joys and side of laughter. The more lights were trapped on my face and onto my conscious self, the more soothing was the flock of rain penetrating the cement outside. The more savoring was the smell of the dirt peering from the space between the end of the window and its slit. All the stretching and mumbling then took place along the exponential awareness ritual at just another morning of September. All the details made me happy.

 

          Every day, along every event, there comes some little moments. The moment when I put on my shoes, and they fit perfectly. The moment when I see my hair falling into place without even trying. The moment when I walk into a laughing person, and he smilingly and energetically apologizes to me. All those tiny moments mount to why I go on every day. They are the reason I leave my warm bed sheets every morning. They are the reason I'm happy. So, what is happiness really?

 

          I habituated myself to focus more on my mornings. I started giving more attention to the small moments and focused on savoring all the tiny "high" pieces of time. So, I spent more time with the sun rays frizzling on my face, but soon my skin overheated. I tried to spend more time with all those that bump into me along my walks, but they all hurried away. No matter how hard I tried to clutch to those moments, they always found a way to pour through my fingers.

 

          Philosophers have spent ages discussing the secrets to utmost happiness. Some cynical analysts even tried to link it to theological roots; they discussed that the reason many religious networks believe in a heavenly being is out of their desperate desire to reach hypothetical perfection. Of course, the debate rooted and branched into different perspectives and approaches.

 

          Eternity is a very huge concept really. It is the idea of an infinity greater than all infinities and the thrive for a lust bigger than the sum-total of all experiences encountered in a finite world. Can such an infinity exist? Or is it that such a concept is a creation of the human mind that is bound by a pragmatic limit to all sensations and euphoria?

 

          Discussing the dimensions of the matrix into which we fall and the different levels of consciousness is quite enticing indeed. However, the dimensions of happiness, despite being derived from them, are independent from the dimensions of the experiences they come from. The state from which happiness stems is internal and relative. Happiness is relative. It is watered by a sense of content. It is derived from a belief. It is the indefinite infinity that exists in, but independently of, the small moments we share.

 

          Happiness is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. It can be embedded within every experience for those who seek and cherish it as it may never exist for those who mistaken happiness as a quantifiable measure correlated with the intensity of the experience. It is a perspective that is embraced along the journey of the self. Happiness is an illusion of the mind. So, one can be happy from anything really. Happiness is what you want it to be.

she goes

I just lay there above her, peering at the dangling stem the past had to present. I just sat on the puffy leather couch with my hand sloughing the air between her breasts to pamper the skin of her soft brunette neck. She pet the hairs of my arm, swaying her hand to my hand at once, and up to my lips at others. And all I could think of was that it may be too good.

It is quite odd how life can be transient at times. If it is too easy, if it is too good, if it is too compatible, it is a heck of a dream. And an alarm always awaits.

I can still taste the salts of her tears, her moaning misery over the heart she just buried deep down in her breaths. The time she spent holding my shirt and pinching some of my skin with her eyes against my core. I still feel her lips crawling and mumbling against the many many portions of her past. Her head against my shoulder, her smile before my day, her gasps along my details. And I smile. I smiled but we were already overlapping in a thought lap that engulfed her into the bear barrel of my mirror situations. She saw her in me. She stepped in, and I let her. Then, I loved that I did.

After many times together, after numerous boxes of milkshakes and knitting words together, things started to change. She missed me now. She missed me madly. We no longer said " What's up". We spent overnights talking about dreams, food, sex, magic, science and, well, other spooky stuff.

I never expected to find what I had anytime soon. When I did, I thought I did not want to let go. But summer is gone, now. And honey, somethings are just too good to last. She is not ready yet. She cries the same way she laughs because she remembers the same way she anticipates. She knows she wants herself more than anything now.

Summer is over now. Her last of the philosophy books she was reading is in her box next to her shampoo and body lotions. She's packing up her details away but one of her hair pins and a handful of words. She is taking away the last of the hot summer whiffs. She is stacking her life in her backpack. She has to leave now.

Has Risen

When we first met

In silence and in stares

More grew your looks at class

More interested you seemed

More, then me, but with never dares

You glowed a smile to pages

With which I sought a chapter

Never payed attention my book

Was to right itself with your pen

Forever after..

But then words fell in place

And perished at my lips

Complicated grew the odds

But the stares were never chipped

Your details rose more peculiar

More amazing to my thoughts

And I stepped into your heart

Thrilled to savor your depth 

To taste your bits and lots

But pale grew the fact

That hid behind the dreams

That we are too far apart

Never together to be deemed

So just another pint

For us over the night

And maybe we'll just toast

The wrongs to be rights

Or maybe we'll just call

The sun to never rise

To spend the night with you

At the dark that never dies

But the suns and life we have

Can never but reveal the truth

That the night can never last

And the light must have a due.

And the sun has risen.

Sea, Swim and Sink

          The water was so satisfying tonight. The temperature of the gentle swerves pet that of the wooden barrel's top at the gaze of a sun's village morning. That warm coldness. The dew has not fully evaporated from the sides where the metal rings still managed to endorse the content half- rusty. Just before the dip of the stainless steel bulk gulped a mundane need of waters to wash the footsteps at the front door and remove the laughs of the drunk last night. Right there, between every echoing sway and another from the barrels top, I fell more into the dream I had last night.

          I spent the entire night swimming. The same viscous water tickling the outside of my palm, triceps, my outer pecks down to my hips and till my toes. With every breaking wave, I gasped one more time. Another breath. Another dip. Another day. I was drowning to that person just in front of me. Everytime I flexed my arms open to push fluid underneath, I figured it was never projected to swim,.

          All I wanted was to reach the perpetual mimic floating the surface just across my fingertips. Everytime I slapped the waves behind me, I became more aware that it was not the desire to move on that has gotten me to swim. It was rather the desperate plead not to drown in place, but drown in her shadow.

          Tonight, and for long long nights that passed, I reeled all the way down my corridor, flipped the light switch just outside my door shut, moved my heavy feet against the childishly knit cartoon mat, and buried my body underneath the two thick sheets of dreams and gently drowned in my bed. Vigorously drowning in my feelings. Peacefully choking with the gurgling fact that I, again, had fallen.

          Every night, I went for a swim. However, tonight was the first of all where I finally managed to see the water, to taste the salt and chlorine squeaking midst my cuspids and some of which that actually slipped a little further. Tonight, I became aware that all the talks and promises that I spent the last year inflating my arm floats and lifeguard jackets with were empty. All the people that volunteered to blow full my path down the very seas were blowing up the waves.
          I actually never needed the arm floats or the lifeguard jacket. All I wanted was to swim. Naked. Stripped from all social constraints and eternal screaming seagulls above the near. All I wanted was to swim.

          The jacket is gone. No more floats are anymore needed. No screams. The floating buzz always in front of my fingertips, never in my reach, does not belong to me anymore. All has been set apart. I stopped my arms. I sloughed my intense rhythmic breaths and was left alone to a short heavy steady breath. I've smiled now, relaxed my corners and gently drowned into the waters. The realm where I for long existed does not exist anymore. It is all gone with another gulp from the barrel, under the cold morning light, just to wash the drunks of last night, just to drown back awake from under my two thick sheets.

The Loner I am

          I'm a loner. I enjoy being with myself sometimes. Even the breaking crisps of light make me feel safe. The cold whites of a sparkly night are all I need to relate to the universe around me. I enjoy being lost sometimes. I enjoy waking up to a new life. To a new self.

          You see, I do believe I was born in a time to which I do not belong. I insist to exist beyond the dimensions of life and death. 

         Above the fourth star to the left, they all gathered in black. It was a morose charcoal day. The oily olive green smell slid off mounting a whiff of nothing. Not a breeze. The spoons and forks were all wrapped in honey yellow plastic bag and scotched with a black tape. I wanted to look down to see but there was no downer than the down I was leaning from. They dressed painfully grey. A crying grey. Words were trapped inside their pink throats and jello minds. Their fingers were tall. Very tall and twiggy they were. It was a house of leaves. A nest of perpetual grief. Their knees were rusty and squeaky. The rust snuck halfway down all the way to just above where the cloth wraps strung the crimson red. They existed on a verge. A tinky winky pinky verge. The event was reeling with the woman's feet. Her white tall meat. Her perky toes and dark blue nail paint. Her very short dress and shorter hair. Her tears were starting to bulge on the surface of her sclera. Her sadness was somehow a gas puffing from her exquisitely drawn pink lips, like a fungus. Her sadness was of such exorbitance that 173 angels were roaming the moons above, sliding along the rings. Reluctantly waiting for her sweet sadness. A forbidden dessert encased and sent away to the world unknown, to that of life and death. It wasn't getting any darker. It simply addressed the fact that my sensations were alienated from my dimensions. My smell could here the void. My sight could feel the crispy dark dark. My love was not mine but the universe's again. I ceased to exist a person. I ceased to try understand. I perished beautifully into the universe I once was. I loved and lived the dust I once was. 

          Sometimes, I yearn my slightly aged blue jacket and lie down. I'm elusive from the honks and gear shifts down the street. I'm beyond the flickering yellow street lights. I'm not the neighbors. I'm not the street. I'm not the casting quivering shadows and tell tales the suburbs speak. I'm not the love I thought it was and what was sought to always be. I'm not the laughing clusters or the glass that faces the other to declare another cheers. I'm not the people. I'm not myself. What am I? I am what I create. I am the silence and the words I believe. I'm the few I manage speak. I am the past, the present, the future and something before the three. I am the forever now. I am the limited infinity. I exist between 0 and 1; in such small eternity.    

Lebanon Under Perception

"I swear to tell the truth, and nothing but the truth."

Growing up, it was thoroughly emphasized that it was of extreme importance that we relate to others on a basis of common ground. Our parents yelled at us for making information up. God was going to hang people lying; he was going to drop his infinite rope of sins and morose to silence those who fall short from the truth. (Oh mom, you have much to explain). Sometimes, holy punishment was too elusive for youth's perky minds, so chilly would do. Yup. Mom, also known as God's alleged candidate on Earth, would get you to taste some of that hellish red pain melting into your taste buds and squeezing out the salt and waters from your lacrimal glands. We were adhering to a common code of realism. Shocking enough it was to find out that we were only sharing an illusion. It was truly a lie.

You see, what is true is highly overrated. What is considered real is often what we perceive as fact. It is the belief of having a common perception that sets basis for materialism.

Growing up in Lebanon, I was never aware of how socially unaccepted my family's diversity was. It feels eerie acknowledging that midst a commercialism promoting 18 DIFFERENT SECTS sharing only 10,452 km squared of land- a true example for positive heterogeneity. Nonsense! Rising from wreckage the Lebanese parties left behind after the Lebanese Civil War in the late 1900s, it was a taboo to institutionalize a family having its corners from different mindsets. Coupling of different religions, different sects, and different political backgrounds or even from different geographical backgrounds was highly socially prohibited. A big no! Why? Just no. Society said so. (As if it was too complicated to admit that the society is but us, the individuals that make it up. Had we wanted change, then so was what's the society would have underwent.)

Now, it's time to stretch out from between the risky words, so excuse me or don't. Group A still holds the grudge from the unjust that was poured upon them throughout history and can't get over it to fall under order. Group B members still believe that no one knows politics more than they do. Wrong. Group C followers are somehow still convinced that they are the only to know French and wear manicure. D? Well, they just don't give a shit as long as their sect is fine. Talk about alienation. A planet for them to have!

It is quite very definite that corruption has devoured our perception of truth. What we have left is but a common set of man-made system that emphasizes boundaries and limits cohesion. So, by embracing such a system, we may actually establish a new format to share with one another: Lie. Lie! If what we relate to is but an illusion, if what the bonds that knit that fabric of "society" together were once created by a misguided perception, maybe we can create a new one. Maybe, just maybe, we can lie once again to paint over the dying cedars a green fallacy. We can love and live a new illusion. After all, belief was once the foundation for truth. So, lie ahead for only lies shall set you free. 

Oh! And remember that if anyone asks you about the civil war, about interrelationships between sects and religions or about why or how we ended up so divided upon ourselves, just lie.

Fusion

It, if condemned, shall not

shall never debunk

shall never reveal

that the doubts of one

and the acts of he

are fire and water

where opposites are sought to be

but the stance on the stiff underneath

is but an intersection

is but an intertwining beat

is but a perpetually ephemeral flee

apart, the fusion of the two to seek

Or dare I wonder

that hell and heaven will someday meet?

Or dare I wander

down the slopes claiming the treat

of what both have always wanted

of what both have always dreamed

of what once was a statement apart

of what then so we are to deem

So dare the devils within

frolic again

to fulfill an ought to be destiny?

Maybe it's not for us

but for the poles to part again

to someday their past repeat?

I honestly don't even know

Maybe I'll never do

Maybe it's or not meant to be