Loose translation of an Al-Hallaj poem

أريدك لا أريدك للثواب
ولكني أريدك للعقاب
و كل مآربي قد نلت منها
سوى ملذوذ وجدي بالعذاب


I want you & don't seek your merit,
but wanting I return for retribution;

all I sought, I earned only from the sweetness
of my hunger for the torture.

A loose translation of a Sumnun al-Muhibb poem

افنى الوجود بشاهد مشهوده
يفني الوجود و كل معنى يحضر
و طرحتني في بحر قديسك سابحا
ابغيك منك بلا وجود يظهر


Extinguished is existence, for that which the witness bears
extinguishes it with the significance it holds:

you have left me, in Your Holiness’s ocean, to swim;
within you, to crave, without a crumb of having been.

The Doorman

“All maps have their martyrs -- their half-sacrifices, stillborn heroes who suffer themselves a lifetime of unrest only to add another wrinkle to the edge of the latest atlas. These unsatisfied explorers believe that they are extending the light of the known world, when they are really just embellishing the edge of some uncrossable nothingness. How many men have lost their minds, or driven themselves to ruin seeking no more than the blank space that buzzes behind their thoughts? These are the truly deranged, for they would eagerly shatter their skulls against a door for one whiff of the exotic air on the other side of it.

"Any room or house is no different, once you evacuate the world from its interior, there's always someone willing to shed their blood upon its doorsteps. Indeed during the course of my tenure as doorman this sturdy cut of oak has been saturated forty times over, no longer resembling a door, but a blood clot. And so wrought it is with that metallic stench, that the many contributing their paint to this laughable mural have begun to believe it made out of impenetrable iron. But even this doesn't stop them from asking for admission. Nor are people so familiar with the intricacies of their anatomy, that they know the purpose of a clot; to the breathless world on the other side of the door they are no better than bacteria, or a superfluous sperm cell.

"Still, they continue to come, droves of them, and my duty gets no easier: as long as you arrive, I remain, as long as there persists your maniac desire to commit horrendous acts of self-immolation before the door just to say 'I was there,' I am here, as long as there remains in your brain some compulsion to contribute more pigment to an ever darkening door, I am here.

"All you interminable inhabitants of the world, all you who leave your humble lives of gentle decay to come here, for God knows what," now wept the doorman, "why? All you mundane explorers who would risk all you hold dear for this insatiable morsel, why? Why when you approach a door do you immediately seek a passage? What grand reprieve awaits you behind that lifeless piece of wood, what new world devoid of unrest beyond that mouth coagulated shut? What are you all after, after all, after what, after all?"

Consecrated by an angelic sense of estrangement before all things worldly, and debased by an inability to carry any idea beyond a dumb, mechanical incantation, I can only imagine such is the lot of those few fully given to the insubstantial -- who, when divested of the prophet's steady brow and sun-gilded cheeks, are no more than twittering machines, energized only by a fear of a world otherwise.

NEW BLOG, though I'll continue to post on this one

There's a link to it on the left-hand side, but here's the address:

http://adhemahmed.blogspot.com/

I've been wanting to embark on a large critical/poetic project for a while now -- this is my first attempt at one, though I'm sure it will only interest a handful of you (which makes it a handful of a handful).