Concrete Summer

Concrete the foe.

I stopped after a minute of my walk home. Went into the bookstore because I couldn’t, just couldn’t, bear it any longer. The heat was like creepy guy rubbing my arm.

I blame the concrete. Walking on concrete in 105 degree weather is like pouring gasoline over a fire to put it out. Concrete makes the heat no longer heat. Instead it makes a web of slime, a wall of bad breath, something your body must walk through not in.  And the heat, the texture, the weight, its not air, its something else. Like walking into a blow dryer, or drinking a glass of water somebody used as an ash tray. You just know its not okay, its not normal. Good things are not happening as you inhale and walk through this substance.

You don’t really notice concrete until it’s this hot. It’s like not noticing car pollution until you’re standing in a city stuck in a valley and the sky is black and smoky. Then you start to hate concrete like you hate cars. I mustered my courage and walked out of the bookstore onto the sidewalk. I looked at the concrete as I walked, wondering how, scientifically, it was adding to the equation of wrongness.  And then I thought why do we have this concrete. And my gaze fell upon the cars parallel parked on the street. We have the concrete for the cars. And we have the cars for the people. So we have the concrete for the people. No. The concrete is not for people.

Then I start to conjure up solutions, urban plans, materials that are more natural, to comprise sidewalks, like the stuff they put in playgrounds and around tree roots, flexible, soft, and more able to ingest and cool the heat, like the path in a forest, made of old trees and grass and mud. Mud. Mud is cool. Mud.

And the sun. You could make a videogame out of us pedestrians, trying to dodge the sun like it was a space ship with a missile. The sun becomes a strange radioactive burning laser that makes concrete meaner. And suddenly the lack of trees all around is apparent, like we are in the last phase of hunger games with nowhere to hide.

Death

Death is sitting by the pool
watching the orange light
through the lazy swaying trees
until 9 pm
Everyone I loved was fine
somewhere
being themselves
Knew that I loved them
All the cities in the world were
just being too
There was no where to go
Nothing to seek
No dream to feed
No one to know
Nothing to resolve
No hunger to fill
No one to miss
Nothing wrong to fix

6 AM

Woke up 

To an electric room

My bed and me 

The paintings too

We all sat in a light bulb 

 Like a transparent fabric 

Spread evenly through out the room

reflecting the sun 

My brain lost its rthyms last week

Somehow changing from one side to the other side of the world

Was too much 

Never used to be

My eyes too 

They can't see 

everything is blurry

The beginning of the next

Eleven years begins

A Year After

I walked past her on the sidewalk
While the 2am birds sang their hellos
She was white
a pink light lined her body
Her smile was a wave in the ocean growing in intensity as she came closer to you
Your hands, hers and yours, untwisted under the metal lamp
on the corner of Corcoran and New Hampshire

U would be back

She and I converged this morning
When the sun rose

A blue light in the window
And you weren't there
But he was
Unfamiliar new routine
I wanted ours back
It wasn’t on the shelf
Our way our wake
A memory leeching onto the present
I paused the film of our morning
And returned back to him
He faced me
Distracting me
U never did
There's no show

Here
He doesn't sing and dance

Now she is gone
And it's just me

All that remains
Is this
 a siphon lodged
 Inside my breast
It empties me
You are the ocean I want to embrace and bring home

She tried
Ambition betrayed
She could only swim for so long
Before your tide changed

I stand before the water
Both of you gone
I do not go in
I stay
Watch from the shore

Color Blind

If I found you

W ur abilities to

Cook and clean

Support

And fix

Love and give

Watch and do

If I found you

Id have to give you a 

Flaw

What would it be

Not laziness

Certainly 

Not cruelty

Perhaps

You could be color blind

Yes that'll do

Train to New York

Everytkme the train stops

The lights and sounds inside go dark

Like its a crisis

It slows and the track lights are blink

The aisleway and is not visible 

And darkness descends abruptly

Like something is over

And we must get off

The lights come back

And my head leans against 

The little bit of window I have

The sun is going slow in leaving

So Pink colors the quickly passing 

View

A bridge has been abandoned below it

And unplanned and  adventurous green burst from below it

Abandoned by us filled in by them

Airplane to Beirut

Is the moon full early 

Or is it because we are up here

Not down there

The air grumbles a deep 

Muzzled  complaint

Offended by the plane's intrusive 

Needling into it's space 

The sounds is a wind tunnel we all ignore

Something's changed. 

A woman peeled her way out 

Of my skin

To see the world on the other end of this flight through her eyes... 

Internet and buildings

the warm blanket
of nature and people
was slowly replaced by
the internet and buildings

City Life

You wait for me
and I know it
your plastic alarm sunrise
your commuter sunset
your serendipity must be scheduled in

Your humans
plug in and
power out

There's too much to be done
so one day you can have time do nothing
Time pays in dollars and minutes
none of that ever mattered to a seedling

The beach

Your light is blue

And your green is violet

In between you

Your sides

Are yellow and sometimes black

The grains

Bend under my pressure

I make holes that don’t fill

So I can retrace my steps back

And out

You are clear today

Crisp and too transparent

It could frighten those that require

More clouds

I like you all exposed

Fragile protected areas

I warden you off with orange rope

Disrespectful people don’t know

How to care for you

I do

I lay down to get out of your wind

I zip up my coat

Your heat doesn't warm 

I search for my footsteps

Find my way out

Home

In his proud saunter

The thick of his thighs

His playful subversion

His produce department

negotiation

In pots filled with opiates; 

Tart and butter

Crisped sheets of rice

In the blackened room
a digestif of

A quivering voice 

Sway of souls

folk meddling 

In the glisten of morning

and choice chaos on the walls

In her concern for

that day's passing patron

his wet hairline

his uncivilized plastic 

rejected him in public

In his ceaseless story

His sharp dissections 

His sensitivity 

In a stranger's words

my unearthed mother tongue

Shock

I don’t get shocked. I am not sure why and who cares why any way. I just don’t. Loyal couples cheat,  people die, world trade center gets bombed, wars start and end, people are unlawfully incarcerated, bankers get paid a percentage of our GDP while everyone else goes broke, nothing surprises me. I think I turned cynical day two of my life. Just opened my eyes and saw all that wasn’t right or safe and expected it.

Though I never accepted it. I am also deeply idealistic. It doesn’t make sense to most Americans, being idealistic and cynical at the same but it’s completely rational in Iran.  We have the world’s only theocracy. There is so much idealism in that you can’t imagine. One dude is empowered by god to do right by all of us.  No checks, no balances. Utopia. And then he doesn’t and no one does and we go to jail for farting and thus cynicism develops at a very young age. Not that I was born or raised in Iran. I wasn't. 

I felt shock for the first time that night. You stood before me and told me you weren’t coming home with me.  I didn't even know it was an option. She stood behind you while you said it. I asked you 'are you going home with her?' And you didn’t respond.  I looked at you in the eyes. I was shocked.

I thought too much was between us for that to happen.  Right now you would respond ‘but I told you I wanted to be friends, I told you that I don’t fall in love, I told you I was an asshole.’ You did. You also held my hand down the street and back over and over and over again. And it was you who bought me flowers. Twice. You were also the only person who knew how to let me be.

All that was unspoken, all that was unsaid, seemed to me to say the most.  That we were bound to each other in our mutual eccentricity, our mutual understanding of that strangeness inside.  And because of this, we were the most important to each other. And you seemed to say that to me each time you returned, and each day that we passed together. Though it said nothing of the future, of our structure, of our commitment, it said so much to me. It said everything that needed to be said.

But it wasn’t true. I learned that people are not just who they are but what they believe. You might have been my equal in spontaneity and individuality but you weren’t my equal in belief. You didn’t believe in our chance, our luck. You didn’t believe in love.  But most importantly you didn’t believe in yourself to do more. You leaned back into your cowardice, you dug your heels into your selfishness, and you sat back into your indifference. And you let me get shocked and turn around and never see you again.

Inconvenient Love

The bird’s thirst finally quenched of the flower’s nectar

Like luscious fruit born of the bee’s eventual sprinkle

Lashing wind slowed by spinning staying trees

Leaves forced free by passing bitter

Growth’s reliance on spring’s glow

Tree haven for the moss’ mosey over the bark

The fierce wash of the shore by the moon moved ocean

Laid bare and baked in the tide’s inevitable retreat

Fresh and foreign fill canopy chasms

Layers deepen

Trees and moss tuck in the house tight

Misted wooded fence emits its true tint