A poem about poetry is the worst thing you could possibly do.

Nothing is ever worth writing a poem about.
A poem written about poetry is a poem damaged,
It is a suicidal process, the act of scraping out ones intestines,
All maroonish and bewildered with a kitchen knife,
That was not even that sharp, the same knife you chopped onions with,
Cutting up the pink factorial rubber of you bustling gut,
This universe of potential with the same pair of scissors,
You used to trim your pubic hair.

It is the amusing act of a politician declaring his wish for peace,
In a country piled with the skulls of dead children,
The wonders of the world they don’t talk about, they don’t vote over,
(Behold! The eighth wonder of the world! Hallelujah Amen)
Unlike the Taj Mahal and the Eifel Tower, holy and untouchable,
It is the vulgar act of chiseling lions out of stone upon monuments,
In a country where lions never roamed, to take the lions out of Africa,
And make a badge out of them for the pale faced wanderers of the world.

It is being caught naked in a public toilet by a stranger,
Who sees the pale yellow piss zigzag from your genitals,
Like watching a child watch a wide eyed cat being fucked by another cat,
Twice its size, its body pulsating, grizzly fur clambering over nervous ivory fur,
It is like sitting on someone’s semen at a bus stop, and then getting on the wrong bus,
That takes you the long way home.

It is like waiting for literature to come save you,
The way they thought feminism would save the rape victims,
That communism would protect the laborers,
It’s like touching yourself, and being told that you’re touching yourself the wrong way,
It’s like biting the corner skin of your fingernail that sticks like a plastic thorn,
But peeling away the sandy ridges of your skin instead,
The part where you can feel you epidermis cringing under your gnawed teeth

It is like writing a poem about how horrid it is to write poems about poetry,
Only to realize that you are now one of them,
The freckled boys and girls with divorced parents,
Who sit in their rooms and play bad electric music,
Creating art for art’s sake,
The perfect little boys and girls,
With rivers in their brains and forests in their hearts,
And razorblades clutched in the tender flesh of their hands.

tuesdays

His mustache was perfect,
But for a single gray hair,
Shunned away from the hedge of black grass,
Protecting his thin upper lip,
A burqa for half his mouth.

The silver hair stood alone like a shy albino child,
Fluttering desperately as he exhaled,
The rim of his glasses, shadowing his nose,
Like two finished glasses of wine,
Gloat in the early escape of the sun.

His book of fat fiction sliced in the middle by a bookmark,
Was always on his table,
600 rupees spent almost every week,
To hear him talk about the importance of breakfast,
And a good posture,
And to drink milk every morning before going to school,
With my starched uniform and corroded backpack,
My thumbs looped through the straps out of habit.

His eyes like black Saturn widened,
Like a daft criminal,
Beneath his boyishly curled lashes,
Every time he asked why,
His scholarly fingers gripping his ballpoint out of habit,
As I watch the gray hair jabbing feverishly,
The wayward rascal of his mustache,
Sustaining the urge to reach out and pluck it,
From his fleshy mouth,
Glistening in dry saliva.

Elizabeth

With the dilated pupils of a Siamese cat in concentration,
Over the lingering thread of a spider’s web,
She digs her bitter fingernails into a mouth of vapored nicotine,
Her rustic lips circularly fleshed over the rim of a plastic bottle,
Her name and a 45 ml dosage printed across clinically,
Well-meant and thorough,
She shakes the methadone to her lips till the last drop,
A baby at his bottle,
A lover at a protruding breast,
A junkie on a joint,
Seeing a blurred vision of me through her eyes,
A professional sales girl, pony tail, glasses,
A baby giraffe in the vicinity of an elephant,
She wipes her mouth with the back of her yellowed hand,
As we corrupt eachother with our brief gazes,
And I wash away the last drop she could not obtain,
After sniffing her breath of drugged disappointment,
Over the rim of the reusable plastic bottle.

Fitna

Eyebrows rose, furrowed into a hesitant pyramid,
A jihad wrinkled across his forehead,
As I offer to shake his hand,
Fingers expanded in confidence,
‘I have never shaken a girl’s hand before’,
He said, his squared fingers dilapidated into a fist,
Like a boy holding a real gun for the first time,
His knuckles crippled into a boulder of coarse beige,
The same coarse beige of my iced hands stretched,
Firm and unshaking,
His religious obligation quivering under the strain of my politeness,
I wrap my palm over the man’s caved hand,
In assurance like a mother teaching an infant to walk,
Balancing his dainty legs haphazardly across the floor,
As I unclasp his bearded knuckles, hoping he won’t collapse,
Under the callous weight of the modern girl’s sinful handshake.

Fitna: an Arabic word with connotations of secession, upheaval, and chaos.

13 inches

Brittle, crusted ammonia dreadlocked into a dainty zipper,
Three years of hair corrupted by cartoonish clouds,
That poured in vast gulps,
Hair that cannot be fully stroked till the end,
That dreamt of having stories to tell,
To show pictures to glazed eyed grandchildren,
Hair that demanded a second glance,
A subtle look over the shoulder from curious men,
Hair that was woven into other hair,
That once had people living inside of it,
In huts of ash and streets of lint,
A blistering river, where people hid their thoughts in,
Folded in careful carpentry,
Buried secretly in my scalp,
Hair that once smelled of old men’s tobacco grins,
of incense melted into mud,
of an orphan baby’s soaped skin,
Hair that was butchered by a kitchen knife,
A dainty plastic joke,
Over the open mouthed bathroom sink,
Before a mirror that makes me look wider than I am,
13 inches of stories to tell,
Chiseled away as a second thought,
To welcome back,
The girl who sometimes looks like a boy.

Prisoner of War

a country shaped like an island,
won as a designated trophy,
a crown of deeper skin,
placed crookedly upon a green nest,
of congealed blood,
is where you went to fight,
separated by an obtuse wheel,
its spokes pricking our flesh,
the three tragic siblings,
of gunpowder,
and the holy jaws that did not bite,
the bullets smeared in pig fat.

When you dispatched eagerly,
Your militant spirit ablaze,
Badged and booted,
To fight for your own country,
Against your own country,
Sideburns perfectly executed,
Your nomadic brows wrinkled,
Over cigarette smoke dusting your peering eyes,
Pictured black and white,
In a journalist’s prized photograph,
Your wife counted the rings of the telephone cord.

Chittagong under chainsaws,
You circulated tediously,
Your image fatigued in minds,
Killed off and reincarnated,
The lazy meaning of life,
Your army chain of serious metal,
Decomposed into turquoise beads,
Imitating Buddha,
For three long months,
Until the jingle of patriotic pistols surrendering,
Clinked into spasmodic dust.

Soldiered into a wheelchair,
Your crew cut dissolved in your coppered scalp.
You were feathered away,
By a measly cigarette butt,
That you smoked with corrupted confidence,
Under your staggering brows,
Twisted in gray barbed wire,
Imitating a Colonel,
Dying in a most militant fashion.

I clamber through sidewalks,
Of a Kingdom that is not mine,
An island shaped like a country,
Like a fettered child in desperation,
Stepping on cigarette butts,
Dismissed by strangers,
In fear that they might,
Kill you still,
As you sleep,
In your paisley patterned tie made of silk.

preference

Dog’s breath soggy in speckled rain water,
That was scooped unwillingly,
In the blunt burrows of leaves,
Feeds his greedy tongue,
Slender grainy muscle orbiting the tip,
Of only one leaf,
String of pollinized saliva,
A parallel universe of mucus,
Communes and collapses,
From his nose of black styrofoam,
Within the hesitant tick of one second,
Into the other,
As though that one leaf,
Was apart from the rest,
Like a baby at his mother’s left breast,
Who does not prefer the milk,
Of her right breast,
Which instead,
bowing in humble acceptance,
sags like a tired tulip,
on a windless day.