be anew

my brother, in the prolonged lead-up
to his death, photographed a rose,
a rose my mother planted in a narrow
garden at my parent's house, where
he'd come to live out the remainder
of his days

i would sit with him over nights, to
be a vigilant watchmen of his frail
meanderings, a guard against a sudden
stuttering fall

that morning, the morning of the rose,
we sat together on a bench on a porch,
and he leaned into me to show me his
photograph

"it's a venus flytrap," he said, and
i looked at it once more, thinking
he was being queer with me. even on a
slope toward death he was alive with
mischief

squinting, i tried to see his plant;
i tried to morph the tender pedals of the
rose into the spiny wings of the fly trap,
but failed. my vision was fixed

despite all, i could not
release from my mind the shape of it
being a rose

his brain was on fire, of course,
and i knew this - the cancer was a
restless bulb, while the drugs were
a different kind of thief
and together they had him adrift

i marveled - just briefly, and not
for the first time - at my brother's
reduction at the hands of fortune

how insignificant had the flowers in
gardens or the trees in forests or the shape
of the sound of my children's voices
had become for me

but for a man in the wake of a crushing
wave, he was now cast out and had no power
or time to make it back to everything
he'd easily dismissed in life

"it's beautiful," i assured him and
he put the photo away - it was on his
cell phone - and then told me he
couldn't talk about his daughters
"not right now"

i'd not asked, but his infected mind
had leaped from the photo to some
darker place, which was common,
and he now cried in a slump

why do we arrive at all our different
places anew, demanding that this at last
was the best, and now permanent, station?

for nothing in nature informs us of
this: the sea, the wind, the sands,
they never affix themselves forever
and their flux toward death and into renewal
is how they live

yet we cry out from our fears and
from our loathing of change and
we make blasphemers of our friends
who question our new sacred, firm place

he used to never sleep, in those last months,
from fear that closing his eyes would,
at last, tear him away from us

but after this, after the picture of the rose,
he began to sleep more, and i dismissed
it as the natural progression of the evil
that had consumed his brain

i just now recalled the rose and
how he'd seen something different,
two years since he slipped into
a new night, quiet as a closing curtain

but i see his venus flytrap now, from a new
vision: of a man resisting the solid
place onto which we all insist on staking ourselves;
a man wanting for release

he was - perhaps unconsciously from
his illness - reforming his perspective,
loosening the grasp that allowed him
to float away, renewed

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shidah

destruction,
i see, is how they've mended that
city in the distant blown-up country,
and i think how the sons of abraham
have all made a mess of it and his
daughters are left weeping

i once embraced, with gaiety and without
shame, my brother, who came to live with
us when we both were greater idealists

the muslim and the christian by
the faith of our fathers,
but to hell with that on this day
just for a moment

i must remember that we've all
been fed broken conventions
but were born with the perfect
blood of adam

that what is instilled in us
is opposed to what is born
and what is collected in
time crashes against what is
there at birth

i do not deny the greatness
of certain men, but
i question the truth in any
assertions of superiority

i recall weeping on the day
my brother caught a bus to the airport,
to fly home to his distant asian
country, because he'd impacted me

but from then on we wandered separately
in our own wildernesses,
marrying and making children
in these sheltered, assigned orbits

as the world saw the collisions
of faiths and nations; peoples
in villages perished and history
folded upon itself as it always has

but in our time together we despaired
not once about our wilting differences,
our encouraged ignorance,
but loved instead, for being alive
and full of the ferocity of youth

yet today i think my brother
will agree with me that we're all to blame
for the current calamity, all of us except
shidah and her sisters

the sisters of indra, of confucius, of
lao tzu;

the sisters of the tanakh, the bible,
and the qur'an

the sisters of the primal faiths:
of the maori, of the sioux, of the bushongo,
of the pygmy, and the dayak too;

the sisters of the mythologies of the norse
and celts; the slavs and the greeks

i see them all in the face of shidah,
my brother's wife, star of the malaysian sky,
her eyes the color of the melanistic wolf,
her smile as wide as the deserts across
which our prophets once wandered

in her is the seed of the beginning,
the coursing of the begotten,
the horizons of the generations and the
origins of the spark of truth

i'd rather see her rule, and her sisters
too; and i would see the world of
men know peace at once

for i believe the answers are in the
arms of our mothers, not in the arms of
men

that rules and laws, faiths and borders,
are the constructs of the self-appointed
while the members of our race who nurture
are the true keys to the gates of heaven

my own tribe will dine on these words
of course; make a meal of my
naivete, spitting out my bones
into a chalice made of earthen clay.

after all, what am i, but a small poet in a
village of inert souls who march along
in a cold country going colder on this snowy day

i'm a recipient of good fortune,
to be sure, but the only currency i have to
make change with is word after word

and we all know that the heaviest of words
possess no weight in the hands of
those who hold the scales of power

so i plea to shidah and to her
daughters, her sisters and their
daughters: assume your thrones
and cast out the usurpers and fools

for once claim and use at will, to
correct the blunders of men, what your god
has imbued in you by nature:
the power and the joy of
creation

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my passion

i tried to be as cold as the
church wanted me to be when i was
much younger and they said i
must remove the bellows that fired
the passions of the flesh

in me dwelleth no good thing,
they said, and for years i
flogged my inner yearnings
down into a loathsome pulp

and the homosexuals i knew became
stock characters, with their lisps
and flexed wrists and flash and
bright arrogances

and the girls who unfolded into flower
before me at every turn, in halls
and classrooms and on beaches,
became plastic pieces on a board

and the men and women of the
motion pictures and
the television programs who
joined the flesh of lovers
became unartful and flat

and while what was said by the church
against them was intended to brand
into my heart an impression of the
vileness of their stations
i instead made them all a craved thing

so that emerging from youth
i was something of a submerged brooder,
skulking in a corner, fearful of my mind
making offenses against my truth
and against the people of my life

my best friend, he died alone in a hotel
room, years after confiding in me that
he was gay and that he hurt from being in
the shadow of it, cast by familiar men

and my brother, he died from a tumor that
consumed his brain, months after confiding
in me that he felt he was unfairly
judged for being in life what everyone wished they
could be: unashamedly alive

free and boundless in his passions,
open and groundless in his flights
against the headwinds that buffeted me
for so long and made me hate love
and myself for wanting both

i was once overruled in every way
- as constantly as our revolution
around the sun - by the opinions
of those who had no real investment in me

i've lived a life accepting the
rejections of some and rejecting
the acceptances of others to
the disservice of my inner self

i used to believe that there was no
precision in passion, because it
held no good aim and struck at random
and was not a controllable thing

it was a trifle, something
like waiting for inspiration to
make one's mark on the page, so
therefore not to be taken seriously

wanting and expressing want of the
flesh was cast as a villain; that
desire was subservient to a higher
good, and therefore a dog in the gutter

but since meeting you, i understand the folly
of that: passion is received and spent
as vibrantly as allowed, when people
become people and the scripts of men are burned

and passion is where life flows
best, passion is where life loves
most, passion is where life lances
the boils of the callous cynics

i knew a man with passion who embraced
the essence of what made him feel at
peace, who shunned the preachment of
the fools whose desire was to control

they want nuance and implication when
i write about the act of lovemaking, when
neither exists in the thing itself; they want
that i be quiet with my dark thoughts

but the cock and the labia
nipple and lips are explicit
in the throes and the demand of implication
is just another forced march to church

so close your doors and click
off those lights; draw the blinds and
disrobe in your darkness with an
object-of-affection, your trapped lover

shun those who dare expose themselves
to the true natures of their beings;
tell the world how it is them
against us on our way to salvation

but i will not: my passion is naked
and raw and alive and truthful and
unashamedly in flight, accepting
of what i was naturally imbued with

because in me dwelleth all good
and in my friend
and brother
and you

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light

a descent of the mind to gloom
is that slow wind-down of a senile clock,
that dull drip in a country sink,
that gray water in a pasture puddle

it tightens the jowls
and draws the heart into the stomach
and aches the legs toward a bed
where relief-in-sleep is a fool's illusion.

winter, it does not consume,
it extinguishes by bloat,
crowding my primal inner space,
suffocating it by a crawling expansion.

observe the fester of a sore,
how it begins in a spot
and advances, by dint of invasion,
overspreading with a brute passion.

that is the assault on my
primal inner space
that can come most any time
but particularly in winter.

with the bowing of the sun
to the earth's roll,
when her light ebbs away
and becomes an ineffectual flirt.

the assault
can get hold of me, and i
play the part of a mortal pulled
down by the hands of Hades himself.

i felt it for the first
time when i was old enough
to distinguish reason from the mind
and draw romance from the heart,

when associations first formed between
the material world and the
spiritual, when pain could be felt
somewhere other than the flesh.

there was a click in a moment
and i was no longer inside
myself but had stepped out
and into the sphere of others

and everything after that was
pointed to knowing, and pointed to
feeling, and pointed to the muscular
act of believing in a thing without proof.

how the descent of the sun
in the fall made the shadows of
the world something that now breathed
and made darkness a stalking menace.

it was at this same time - a time of revelation
and the bridging between the solid and the
fluid of life- when the darkness had seeped in
and begun its strangulation,

that i rode, in this gloom, in my parent's car
down main street in december, staring out
the window, feeling the breathlessness
of that choking of the soul,

when above us there passed lights on a string,
like the pulse of a beacon,
then a second, then a third, and i looked
up finally and began to count the strings

that had been strung 'cross the street
between the light posts, fat white bulbs
beaming in their fat white way hung upside
down like glowing acrobats on the circus wire.

the entire street, down its straight
way, was uniformly lit, equally and
of a perfect imperfection, a supine ladder
of lights suspended on rungs between those posts.

the town was of tall brick and short wooden businesses
shouldered together in two sentry lines on
either side of our car, the storefronts
likewise glowing, and with the lights of the cars

the scene became something of a jewel
afire, alive with an untouchable and reverent
warmth that had me sitting forward and
spectating on a brilliant miracle.

it had for me the effect
of being buoyed to a surface
after a long descent, the feeling
of a palpating heart and breath-hitch

and from that moment till now
and after now i look to the lights
at christmas as a favored thing,
a thing that holds the best of it.

the lights on trees, in lamps,
in the tall windows of shops
on the roofs and doors of homes
and strung across streets

what i think i dream of christmas,
when i do dream of that particular time,
is not of the meal, of the gifts
or of the family who partook

traditions count for something:
as markers along the short line
of our histories, fragile slips
frayed by the winds of memory

they are something enamored
and reused in a romantic way,
valuable in how they
keep us tethered to contentment,

but light acts a different part
in this primitive play;
it stands not as a marker
but as a thread of currency;

a thin potency coursing through,
pulsating within the conduit
of life, unbroken in the way
it knows how to find you wanting.

time and time over and time and again
light grows in that darkness
like searching irises and
their glow expands the inner space anew

for christmas is a time of
tradition, to be sure, but
the songs, they fall away;
the vacations from school,

the movies, the shows,
the family and the friend
the eve and the morning
and the unwrappings.

they all fall away and are hung
as markers on a line of histories
important in that form, in that
station, but different than the lights

the lights come before and remain
afterward, well after, and
have no histories or fading
inequalities, they simply remain

and in their place
come as a friendly force
to liberate that primal
place of the occupying darkness

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