Lyricizes

I will chase your ghosts

on google,

search out your face

in every pixel,

pocket the sparks

your wit threw into the corners.

Crepe paper, your hands
batter your ears with the telephone.
You’ve not heard from her in so long.
Your voice quivering as much as your fingers.
She can hear your years, your frailty
betrayed by nerves dead to connection
by the paranoia in your thoughts,
by the planted pain in your knees and back
and it’s a dark place
a lonely place.
an old place.
And it scares her to know
that the irritation she feels,
the helplessness she grasps,
is only because one day
she will be in that place
dark, lonely
and old.

I could build such a life
on her bone structure.

I’d walk through my home
under those zygomatic arches;
shading me from one
dream to the next.

That hair weaves
winter warm
and curtains fall
when she closes her eyes,
the rooms ambient
with all of her.

Ummi,

softer than stone

and stronger,

has run between

Safa and Marwa

for as long as

I’ve breathed.

At her feet

gush the springs

of home and hereafter.

In this game of

talking to God,

she is careful

to cover her toes

with the cloth

from her mother’s

jilbab.

Her hands pat

away at a tangled fringe

and away she goes;

Up

Down

Touch the ground.

Lips  pursed

in the swiss-swiss-swiss

of beautiful

sweet

pious

gibberish.

In this play of pray,

surely God loves best

the sincerity.

A treat
for Women’s Day;
manicures for all the girls.

How nice to have
one’s hand
wrapped in another’s;
soothing
exfoliating
grooming.

A drive
to the shops after.

And there’s a woman
at the robots,
her baby growing on her back.

Her hands hold out
a plastic bowl.

Window wound down,
buffed and filed fingernails
bounce off sunlight
as coins hit plastic
with the
cadence
of
guilt
and
impotence.