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No moss nor mottle stains My parents’ unmarked grave; My word on them remains Stouter than stone, you told me. “Martyred to words”, you have thought, Should be your epitaph; At other times you fought My self-reproaches down. Though bitterly once or twice You have reproached me with how Everything ended in words, We both know better now: You understand, I shall not If I survive you care To raise a headstone for You I have carved on air.

Ruffs are optional for trebles in Anglican church choirs. — Wikipedia Bored in the balcony reading your novel hoping it will keep me awake — religion was always a blind spot — with my Sunday headache waiting for the service to finish so I can retrieve my little chorister, no god in us but song, while pale important teenage Sophia in blue head chorister ribbon, face dumpy as a Flemish burgomaster, bosses littler kids and loves leading them expressionless in paired rows from the choir stalls, holding the processional cross high, shushing and huffily eyeing them for babyish disregard of cleanly neatness, my own chorister dripping orts of tissues she stows in her sleeves for sniffles, in the choir room struggles out of her ruff ringed dark brown inside from years of child chorister sweat, hair oil, dead skin. Me:Your other ruff was white and clean! Her:Sophia said it was too big. She gave me this one instead. I showed her it was dirty and tight. She said “deal with it.”

No, I wasn’t meant to love and be loved. If I’d lived longer, I would have waited longer. Knowing you are faithless keeps me alive and hungry. Knowing you faithful would kill me with joy. Delicate are you, and your vows are delicate, too, so easily do they break. You are a laconic marksman. You leave me not dead but perpetually dying. I want my friends to heal me, succor me. Instead, I get analysis. Conflagrations that would make stones drip blood are campfires compared to my anguish. Two-headed, inescapable anguish!— Love’s anguish or the anguish of time. Another dark, severing, incommunicable night. Death would be fine, if I only died once. I would have liked a solitary death, not this lavish funeral, this grave anyone can visit. You are mystical, Ghalib, and, also, you speak beautifully. Are you a saint, or just drunk as usual?

She does not know her beauty, she thinks her brown body has no glory. If she could dance naked under palm trees and see her image in the river, she would know. But there are no palm trees on the street, and dish water gives back no images.

has ever lit up our hearts like this. No king. See Bhutto in Karachi, 1972. His path strewn with rose petals, sprinkled with attar, leads him, not to the sea with its crashing surf and screaming gulls but into the alleys and passageways of a slum. Ferdowsi in Shahnamah tags it for the interim as “the place of worship before any others existed. . . ” No King, no King of Kings, had ever toured a slum before. It opened wide the thrice-locked chamber of mercy in our hearts. The gathering crowds expecting to catch a glimpse of Bhutto, are, instead, treated to a double vision: Alexander the Great, in a red robe, left hand resting on his sword, like in an illustration from Shahnamah , as he watches our own pilgrim, the unsuspecting Bhutto “reach for the door handle of the Ka'ba.” Bhutto’s entourage and PTV news crew push back. The crowd askew, insufflated by this vision, pushes Bhutto towards the hovel of the woman driven half-insane by poverty. Bhutto, aglow, with tears in his eyes, embraces the woman who collapses in his arms. No king, no king of kings, had ever lit up our hearts like this. No king.

It was twilight all day. Sometimes the smallest things weigh us down, small stones that we can't help admiring and palming. Look at the tiny way this lighter vein got inside. Look at the heavy gray dome of its sky. This is no immutable world. We know less than its atoms, rushing through. Light, light. Light as air, to them, for all we know. Trust me on this one, there is happiness at stake. Boulder, grain. Planet, dust: What fills the stones fills us. I remember, or I have a feeling, I could be living somewhere with you, weighted down the way we aren't now. Often the greatest things, those you'd think would be the heaviest, are the very ones that float.

No longer if we’ll get cancer but when, the doctor said. Now questions accrete around the irritant like pearl: Not when but how? Not how but whom? And then why. And then why not. I take a can of ashes to the beach and empty them into the wind. Outside the trash man collects bottles like a miser rattling his jewels, tossing them onto the growing heap.

Or the true feelings of those slaves who say they would not be free. The following shows their feelings when they are free.

No more lines on the luminescence of   light, of   whatever variation. No more elegies of youth or age, no polyglottal ventriloquism. No more songs of raw emotion, forever overcooked. No more the wisdom of   banality, which should stay overlooked. No more verbs of embroidery. No more unintentional phallacy. No more metaphor, no more simile. Let the thing be, concretely. No more politics put politically: let the thing be concretely. No more conditional set conditionally — let the thing be already. No more children pimped out to prove some pouting mortality. No more death without dying —immediately. No more poet-subject speaking into the poem-mirror, watching the mouth move, fixing the thinning hair. No more superiority of the interiority of that unnatural trinity —you,me,we— our teeth touch only our tongues. No more Gobstoppers: an epic isn’t an epic for its fingerprints. No more reversals of grammar if as emphasis. No more nature less natural; no more impiety on bended knee. No more jeu de mot, no more mot juste. No more retinal poetry.

I am a woman. No more and no less I live my life as it is thread by thread and I spin my wool to wear, not to complete Homer’s story, or his sun. And I see what I see as it is, in its shape, though I stare every once in a while in its shade to sense the pulse of defeat, and I write tomorrow on yesterday’s sheets: there’s no sound other than echo. I love the necessary vagueness in what a night traveler says to the absence of birds over the slopes of speech and above the roofs of villages I am a woman, no more and no less The almond blossom sends me flying in March, from my balcony, in longing for what the faraway says: “Touch me and I’ll bring my horses to the water springs.” I cry for no clear reason, and I love you as you are, not as a strut nor in vain and from my shoulders a morning rises onto you and falls into you, when I embrace you, a night. But I am neither one nor the other no, I am not a sun or a moon I am a woman, no more and no less So be the Qyss of longing, if you wish. As for me I like to be loved as I am not as a color photo in the paper, or as an idea composed in a poem amid the stags … I hear Laila’s faraway scream from the bedroom: Do not leave me a prisoner of rhyme in the tribal nights do not leave me to them as news … I am a woman, no more and no less I am who I am, as you are who you are: you live in me and I live in you, to and for you I love the necessary clarity of our mutual puzzle I am yours when I overflow the night but I am not a land or a journey I am a woman, no more and no less And I tire from the moon’s feminine cycle and my guitar falls ill string by string I am a woman, no more and no less!