Bismillah ir Rahman ir Raheem (In the Name of God the Most Gracious the Most Merciful)

Assalam alaikum and welcome WordPress peeps!

It’s funny, really. I don’t know if I’ve ever been in love but I’ve only ever written love poems.

Today I was sifting through my notes today and I found this. A poem about my poems. Self-reflexive, too-clever-by-half, but true.

A LOVE POEM TO MY LOVE POEMS
I’m too old for this nonsense.
Of being besotted and unbesotted.
Of loving and unloving.
He himself is eager and seeking like a hamster.
Eager seeking the love of others
and burrowing down in fear storing little nuggets of wisdom and love in places
where no one else can find them.

Though now when you sift
you can see them rising to the surface like lifebuoys.

He is like me,
and not.
I give him chances and he does not take them.

I have imagined this countless times in a million different ways.
I have waited and given.
I have known in the pit of my stomach, beyond the shadow of a doubt.

I have had living-room conversations with him
the sunlight streaming in, beckoning for a walk in the park hand-in-hand.
I have waited warm and then tepid
wondering whether things would ever heat up between us.

I am now like a soggy crumpet and I’m not waiting anymore.
I’m having that last cuppa tea, you ass.
And in all things bright and beautiful, you were nowhere to be found.

I should stop writing these miserable chaotic lovelorn poems they’ve never done me any good.

I should write those poems that never walk away from the burning house
that run inside
and grab hold of the golden-haired child of sentiment and erudition
and emerge victorious!
As other poets bow and kneel before my heroism.

No
Those works are not here nor there.

My heroism is contingent and daily.

I wake up in the morning
and I take my first breath
and I decide to take the next.
This is bravery.

I wake up in the morning
and I get through the day without needing to pop a pill.
This is courage.

I wake up in the morning
and I look my parents in the face
and I accept their disappointment.
This is God-loved mercy!

And I haven’t waited this long to be silent.
No
I haven’t waited this long to speak empty words
that caress your ears and soothe your spirits.

No this isn’t one of those poems
that speaks of empty rooms and the wind whistling down the corridors.

No
this isn’t one of those poems or passages or rites of passage.

This is some miserable chaotic half understood version of a dream I had.

Of you and I creeping on the tips of our toes down a quiet corridor.
The windows are high, the halls are long
and covered with stern-framed portraits of white people in stiff collars.

We peer through a little plastic window
and we see her, you see,
pigtails dipped in ink because the boys like her.

Yep, that’s our daughter,
agog with fascination at the exploits of Caesar.

And a little way down,
though plastic and walls separate them,
is her brother
bored and restless because he hates algebra.

And I have waited long years to hold your hand.
And watch as they grow into beings so beautiful only God could have made them.
I will stop apologizing for wanting you now.
It is not wrong.