Crooked for you for the straightest
way leaves my sun lacked I lay

blind for my eyes won't let their lids
close upon your face growing

dark and everywhere as one
lunatic said to another lunatic

Dhikr

Put your mouth on this inch
of wool while I vanish, for the word

is brief, and leaves
nothing but an itch behind.

Find your free hand to that part
of throat that beats and repeat

after me: the heart is a bass
and the blood a hook that pulls

it out; la la. We feel homesick
in our skin; repulsed, as if

there stood some direction towards
which we could go instead.  Al qalb

yaqlab. Dear Lord, we itch, like well
tailored animals, for an inner

cilia, and vomit wool
-strokedly and ecstatic. 

As al Khidr said to Musa: cough it up. 

As a Sufi said to a poet: unlearn your thirst, for it doesn't lead to water.

As an Akhmed said to an Ahmed: understand your tongue is mine.

As the inspect said to the suspect: unclothe your rhetoric & let the sorest parts of our language touch. 

As the Hallaj said the executioner: one demand -- moths.

As the flame said to Allah: wondrous that something you wrote could find itself on someone's skin.

As Allah said to himself: unify. Thus all was all & wahid was wahid.

Iblis didn't bend an inch for that
which wasn't his One; he said uh uh,

so his Love gave him what he brought
upon himself, standing up.

Hallaj:
If you disfigure the outer Sufi, the inner one is freed; a shattered mirror's image severed from the body it reflects.

Adhem:
What a shattered mirror reflects is violence; the body severed from itself. Ya akhi, the surface shatters depth like an air. 

Hallaj:
When you lost depth, you were left with surface. When you lost surface, you were left with sound. God concentrates himself upon all particles, until they play; the Sufi's ear is filled with singing.

Adhem:
Do you hear me?

Hallaj:
I hear the fire that you carry like a rhyme. It speaks on your behalf.

Adhem:
I've marred my outside & become a mirror. I've burned myself in the name of an out, now what?

Hallaj:
Concentrate upon fire until the ghosts of flames dance on your skin. Explode, like a compressed atom of God.

Adhem:
Ahem.

The strangeness this poem exhibits is its music: watch it break to pieces as it shoots towards somewhere like a body spiraling through atmosphere. Or, more grounded: the poem is an air that dangles over earth as if it resided there -- a voice saying "look more like what I speak, " while the earth drifts, stubbornly, by.

Ya Musa, I want to hit you where your blood hasn't reached; a river pain, a rock pain. Strike you so your blood springs towards things like another heart; you who're stranger to my word.

***

Al Khidr says nothing. It's Musa who believes his lesson music. 

He saw no grounding in his lesson, so he called it unfounded. 

He found his lesson unfounded, so he dubbed it music.  

There's a piece of us in words; we bury it in them like the lung we hope will wgrow, will wblow again.

Hallaj:

As the moth once told his sect: "I've got nothing in me but" body; fire for the it I'm not satisfied by. An air resides, therein -- pursued by light like a mirror. To the moth, the space between himself & the flame is a sea of distances, carrying him back to nowhere --

Adhem:

Our Lords trade like for like,
over oceans; in New

England, for example,
where the scent of fire

gives body to the autumn air, one'll
also finds places to disappear

insha' Allah. Praise be to Him who started all
creation, & then repeated it; like someone

on a podium once said: he "who
holds you over a pit," as if upon

a thread, "keeps you from"
terror; fire; ire; err.  O, O.

Mystical writing

Adhem: 

Reality parts before the mystic. In the instant of truth, no characteristic asserts itself more strongly than the artificiality of the experience. For if this experience reveals anything worth while to the mystic, it requires a sense of its own making in order to distinguish itself from the mundane. While the former testifies to the particular aspects of its own made-ness (whether it be pieced together by God or generated by the mystic himself), the latter does not contain any sense of sequence; only accident. The former explains why mystic writers spend so much attention on elaborate systems of signs and letters; these are divine sequences stripped down to the particles of signification. To bow down before an order that has no conceivable truth outside that which the Creator holds secret – this is the first task of the mystic. The second is to do the impossible work of translation; he shares the burden of proof with God. Hallaj differentiates the man who can tell of his experience, with one who is consumed by it. He wrote his book on burning parchment to reveal the difference between the duration of fire and the duration of God. He said to his companions: "Look not to me, but to fire; this body is the shadow of what glows & is destroyed there."

The Lord began creation, then repeated it.

Naked

after Burroughs

The mouth is parted from the sphincter in name; but to the illiterate, the body is only an extension of either. Mouthly, a man is as good as his word: sphincterly, a tear where're he sits. A man is put together & torn apart each moment.

Sphinx-like, one man bows down before the throne he earned; the other takes his place on it. It is difficult to tell which is led by the mouth, & which by the sphincter.

Diwan

The purpose of this song is to be placed in a file. It has to be -- to be sound. The contents of this song have been made unavailable. Words find their way into its cipher, & leave as names -- no men. To be sound as names, they may be questioned & remembered again.

I speak not of any -glish, but a Day. A day in which the names among you shall gather, like an itch upon your throats. All clots & glots a-sing.

I speak of an Eng. Pardon, an End; time's rhyme with the Begin--

I speak of Angels, men, & the unbecoming way they, who speak solely in names, address us, the purposed nothing.

The story shouldn't be recounted.

In the Qur’an, he’s not given a name – this teacher who allegedly schooled Musa in Patience is simply He Who Dwells Where the Fish Disappears and Waters Meet; a nowhere of intersections & circumstances. Elsewhere, he’s called Al-Khidr, the Green, as if his appearance flashed no longer than the time requisite to observe a single attribute, or as if this greenness swallowed the whole of his appearance. Does such color gain its total appearance from Divine Purity; once touched down upon the Earth, does it just as easily swallow the background with the foreground?

This Green exhibits all the attributes of a stern father or an unsatisfiable teacher – one who asks for unwavering obedience from his student, even while encouraging recklessness. When Musa meets him, Al Khidr already expects impatience from his pupil. He warns him against behaving in the way that’s already been attributed to him. Thus Musa dwells at another intersection – between what he knows and what he’s capable of. The two begin a shadowplay of education, with Musa lagging irrecoverably behind at the start of each practice (each lesson more unexpected than the next). Our Musa’s forced between possession and imitation, and the Khidr between teacher of an unteachable knowledge & the time by which that knowledge comes to reveal itself.

Where the waters meet, he murders me,
this is the first lesson, recorded & to be read again,

We’ve given you lungs unable
to sing, now give us grammar.

We’ve given you violence that you may part
water, now give us sequence.

I left my book behind. Now I am an idiot.
My pen exploded with my name. Now I am a violent man.

Paranoia wants an end it cannot find in any sensible form. Pain for it must be constant, all-encompassing, or else it is the shadow of pain.

Just as fire consumes a person before it puts him to sleep, now that I know I'm not human, I can finally rest.

Sawf

God wool, spun inward, gathers
what it broke off from; unwearable

monochrome where this green
heart flags as if sailed too far out.

Adhem: How does one have patience with a violent man?
 
Hallaj: You die, so you can be patient again.

Islamist parents see their progeny smitten
by CIA eyes that say that it was written

Particles, ya Musa, are indivisible. We breathe them as we sit here speaking of the True; we've a part in them & know not that we do.

They coat our tongues like a womb-left film; left by whom. Ya Musa, our language searches for a whom; O there. We sing the particles in the name of a smother; in the name of a moth air; in the name of ammo -- fire. Whatsoever we sing for aims there.

O, you of water, what can you know of mater; how the undivided open their mouths to say "I'm there."

Dhikr

What’s said’s said Sayedi
what’s aid to my Lord that

said What Is to unsaid what
till it said What Say You

what’s A to U but a vowel of
a love between a lif & a loof

A wave moved through his vertebrae
leaving an ape behind. The animal

blues got him down 'nough
to ponder on the Lord’s great work & wonder

What do fish worship? Being less
upright than him, do they love flotsam

like heavenly equivalent? Or are their thoughts
bent towards some unbreathable

bottom? Adhem's in it deep; can feel
the pressure of it, too; a bit of bone stuck,

like a fin, out his prostrating back, till
CRACK one day he’ll finally be free.

The only fragments are those that do to their creator what he intended for them. The visual equivalent to this is the self-photograph; with the reluctant look of its subject turned creature, before the lens & the laughter of the image, reveling in its resilience over its assembler.

Yet in the moment of the shot, who’s to say the scene isn’t invisibly touched by the hand of its master? A river wrinkled, a staff blurred mid-motion, a light refracted in the lens's eye; all seem signals of a hand that says, “If I’m no god, then let me hold this image up to one.” For this, too, will be remembered on the Day of Judgment.