In the middle of somewhere

 I hated photographs 

The urgency of posing

The quick shuffle, the retakes

To make up for how blurry the present is. 

Trying to live a moment for posterity seems futile.

To what end, then, did I stand next to you,

Not knowing what to do with my hand

Or the heart stuck firmly in the middle of my throat,

My toothy smile trying to stop me from saying

don't leave or

is this okay

are we okay

is this table 

buckling under all the love i

so unceremoniously left there?

Photographs always seem too 

Much in the moment, too 

Little afterwards.

I'm scared of the hunger they bring.

Of the want need must

Of a moment that exists on a whim

On a cloud.

What is better, then, the yearning

Or the poor placemat of the past?

Take terrible pictures and 

Relegate them to a storage file.

Visit them after a year or ten. 

The out of focus sky holds little meaning

But there are two people in the frame

Smiling, laughing, caught midsentence.

Grieve love remember them.

#50: A Ghazal For The Times

So you thought you would tell a joke in my state?

You should know better than to provoke, in my state.

High-flying ideas of freedom and equality don't fly anymore,

You learn to shut up, or you choke in my state.

We are the blood orange sceptre of a study in mediocrity,

But the impotence of brute strength awoke in my state.

The tv and akhbaar have learnt to toe our sacred lines-

Didn't you get the memo before you spoke in my state?

The valley is beautiful, the capital is thriving-

How dare you seek clarity through the smoke in my state?

Give up, kaffir, you have lost your way and the narrative,

You do not know the power of dagger under cloak in my state.

 

#49: Finally A Sonnet

I am not scared of the days or miles, love,

But the perfume of memory fades still-

Or makes itself commonplace, everyday stuff

'til affection makes way for mere goodwill.

Can months of cold hold out some fervent hope

Of warmer lands that don't burn this desire

On a pyre of good sense, nor walk the tightrope

Of frayed threads, afraid of another fire?

Maybe I let hope bear folly forward

Into days of deluded ignorance;

Misread and misspoke and maybe misheard

All that would be better left to mere chance.

Serendipity, kind friend and sour foe,

You should have left us to ourselves long ago. 

#48: The Silly Villanelle

I hope you never ask me to leave

The memory of this night, or your hand on mine,

And the little lies we have dared to believe.

Maybe your words and my faith deceive

The cynicism we work so hard to align,

And the fear that will soon ask me to leave.

Will you feel my absence, I wonder, or grieve

The emptinesses of space and futility of line

In the syntax of the lies we dare to believe.

Concoctions that arms and legs in tandem weave

To stop and slow the sands of passing time

Have now slowed, in time for me to leave.

The distances that separate us may cleave

Desire and halt hope and show us no sign

Of horizons that lie beyond what we believe.

May my hope find its home on the eave

Of possibilities- may your kisses live on my spine

For long enough for me to not leave

All that lies between our breaths to believe. 

#47: Abadan

Somewhere in the day I found two terrible things:

The first, that the word for never and always is

The same, the exact same, in Farsi, in Arabic.

I never/always forgot how your hands felt

This never/always brings memories I didn't know I had

You never/always remembered best

How to forget,

I never/always forgot the lies,

So the truths taste sweeter.

The second, as I played with nothingness and eternity,

Was the word, your word, the sodden,

Silly, splendidly sappy name that

I had lost, because time is kind like that;

I found it today, because I needed to learn another-

Zemblanity, the opposite of serendipity-

To put a name to the inky depths our

Pasts have heavily sunken into.

I have always/never fled from

The deadweight cinderblocks of remembering.

I apologize for my merciful forgetfulness

That blurs your smile in my mind,

And hope you never/always remember

The word that isn't ours anymore.

#46: Insurances

It will happen one of these days.

You will sit at an old table, meant

For more people, bent 

In wrought iron the way she'd liked.

Except that she isn't here,

And you overcooked the eggs 

And your coffee is warmer than blood and bitterer than bile.

And I will sit across from you,

The fruits whose bitter pips you forgot to spit.

Remember when we used to talk about

The end of morality and why capitalism

Always wins and how wars are quieter now?

This house is quieter, now.

You talk of taxes and subsidies and 

Heirless shop closures.

An inheritance of emptinesses

A legacy of voids I have always rushed

To fill, to feel some sense of

Having mattered. We mutter 

Of the hurt we are too tired to take.

Maybe I don't live 

Vicariously anymore, through your stories

About heroin and the 80s and

Eric Clapton singing for his dead kid.

I drive to work and buy milk

And worry about taxes and

Ask you what to do. 

You always know what to do.

And you pick up a paper,

And ask me to sign.

Just in case, you say.

And turn the page. 

#45: Leaving Your City

in the last minutes of the near-done day, 

we tie knots in the strings of borrowed time.

if you'd asked me to fall over the edge

of your words i probably would have.

it's probably why you wouldn't ask.

you wait for our photograph to blur

a little, for a lazier focus, for 

a little less exposure. 

i wait for my crime to be caught, my

stolen minutes to be found, unfurled,

let loose into merciful forgetting.

we wait for the warm flush

of love to leave, to heave

another sigh, then bid goodbye.