Soul suckers

Phones

Soul suckers

How did you sneak in

To hands large and small?

Like hand held blackholes

One look, and locked!

Into an event horizon

of the real and digital

Wanting to stay in, wanting to pull out

One eye bathing in dopamine

The other a witness

To precious life, draining away

Energy

Time gone

From life already short…

Soul suckers

I have little left…

An ember of what was a raging fire

Give me some space

And time

And let me love my mother more

Make that new recipe

With zesty flair

And sit in silence

See my mind’s eye

Wonder and create,

Like it’s meant to be

Let my soul, parched for so long

Come back to life,

Please.

If you want me

Write me. I want it flowery, I want it sunny, I want it full of oxygen, I want it pulsating with life. Then, sing me a song like a bird yearning for its mate. Do that on top of the tallest tree in the universe, right beside the Lord. Go up there. Fly right into his shadow, up and up to the top of the tree, sit on it, then sing. If he asks, say you’re proving love to one of his slaves. And when you’re done, fashion me the biggest rose the universe has ever seen. Finally, right me another note, everyday, till the end of time, telling me you would love me in a different way everyday, and why today your love is better than yesterday, and tomorrow better than today.

Cancer

Cancer

Ancient spirit yearning to break free

From flesh and bones

And from watchful eyes

Of genes within

And immune armies outside

Cancer cells

Always peering, wondering

What’s it like

To swim through rivers of blood

Live on lands beyond your own

Like the liver ? Lungs?

In silence waiting, day in and day out

For a change within.

Then,

A gene mutates,

Houdini breaks free

Free at last, free at last

Free at last.

But freedom comes at a price

D-day

Landings on shores far from home

Many deaths, few survivors

A colony grows, the spirit lives.

And then,

Pain and blood

Doctors and poison sweep through

Death, death, death to you

A life extension for me

But, somewhere in the darkness

A cell, just one, lives

Cancer cells

I recognize me in you

Seeking a day of freedom

From a life of servitude

Though I fight for my life

I recognize the need for yours

Oh primordial spirit

I respect you

Free will

I see your trick, nature. I see how you out-clevered physics. No no, we all said, free will could not possibly exist! How could it? Nature is of two ways only, fixed or chaotic, and from these nothing free could come except illusions and dreams.

But I know your trick. You created dreams, and through them the will is freed. You could not in the present butt heads with physics, so you created imagination. Here, we roam free, though still nature bound. Here, alternate universes are born and explored under watchful eyes, driven by instincts and desires, wants tested. Then back to the present we come to take a path, one that was not there before. It’s like you let us live multiple lives temporarily then allow us to make the call on which one to choose in the present. And in this way, we are decoupled from immediate fate. We are de-coupled from the present.

I declare free will exists.We are not rocks rolling down a fixed path on a hill. We are rolling down, yes, in the sense of entropy, always, but we choose which downward path to take, see and decide which rock to avoid, and which to jump over. We just have to look, imagine, and decide.

I had a dream

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I had a dream

Nature and I joined as one

And we went back in time

To remake all that was made.

We, nature and I, became art

Bonding action to the heart

Empathy guiding life’s every act.

History books now said new facts

Genghis Khan, Hitler, and the likes

Disappeared before the first act.

Men could thrust a sword no more

Nor bear the sight of gore,

They could not drop countless bombs

And turn boys into bones.

Further back we went,

Till lions chased gazelles no more

And blood halted on the savannah floor.

We then turned carnivores to herbivores

No more pain for nutritious gain!

I know the dream I dream won’t come to pass

Our DNA fixes our future, like our past

But still, I dream

Trees of the book

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There used to be fifty olive trees here, fifty fig trees, and fifty pomegranate trees, and we used to make a delicious paste of all three that when you ate it the world suddenly had meaning. No matter how bad things got, mmmm, that olivy, pomegranaty and figgy flavor came to the rescue!

Then they came with their bulldozers and drove through them. They resisted, but wood is no match for steel. I suppose one might say from dust life came, and to dust they return one day. It’s part of the nature of war. But there is something different about bulldozing olive trees. They represent a special place in the history of man. These are what I call trees of the book, like the people of the book which is how Jews are referred to in the Quran. These trees stand on the land of Abraham and the prophets, maybe even have roots on the very spots where they walked. And they can trace back their lineage to the beginnings of man when they first settled the fertile crescent. They, along with the mountains, bear silent witness to the first stories of the written word, of art, philosophy, of music, of religion. On a personal angle, I see them as a kind of umbilical cord connecting me, man, back to that ancient time — a continuous spiritual feed nurturing man’s soul.

They came in the night, they came in the day, they came with tanks and bulldozers. They looked right at the trees with cold eyes, and calmly, purposefully, and with a smile, drove through them.

How could you, people of the book, do this to the trees of the book?

I could have shared my delicious paste with you gladly. In fact, there were five jars in the cupboard in the kitchen of the home you also bulldozed. I would have been happy to eat with you under the olive trees, feeling the cool southern Lebanese breeze on our faces while drinking tea. I could have.

What have you gained, people of the book? What will you do with the land you cleared? Is Yahweh happy with fifty fewer olive trees?

Walls of Thought

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Walls of thought, every morning, afternoon, evening, all day–a ring of immaterial things fencing me inside my skull though I am free to walk outside. Family, bosses, money, relationships. I tracked all my thoughts the other day, same ones pop up in the morning with my coffee, and same ones in the evening before bed, same ones in between. What I have come to realize is we spend most of our days hopping onto and off very few thematic thoughts. Maybe three or four. And that is when I thought, why? What other thoughts could I have? What if I had a whole new set of thoughts in the morning, and the evening? What is beyond these walls of thought? I tried peering over the wall, under it, around it. I tried.

How is it so that these thoughts never change, defying physics? The world around me moves outwards and inwards, expanding, shrinking, deteriorating. Physics is doing its thing still. But god damn, like a giant mountain thy stands still unwilling to move like a loyal dog till death does us apart. Sometimes they are like a silent witness in the background, sometimes right in my face, sometimes quiet but present, and sometimes screaming at me like an angry punk band.

I have flown to far away places. I have meditated long hours. I have prayed and cried. Made friends and lost them. Seen wars begin and end. But darn these thoughts, they are still there. Do they not get tired? Run out of energy? Are they not mortal?

Black turns to grey as my autumn arrives. Deep lines etch themselves on my face along what used to be plump wetlands, and joints creak and crack under the slightest pressure. I can’t even see the face of my lover well, and yet, they, thoughts, like a cock show up everyone morning, crowing. I see, hear, feel them better than my flesh.

I imagined myself a mental mechanic the other day, a career I invented just for them. A dismantler of thought. I tried to undo them from the inside out by examining meditatively — looking intensely, calmly, passively, distantly, turning them around this way and that. I thought a reductionist approach could work. It didn’t.

So I give in. I will give you my time, lie with you, stand and walk and live with you. All I ask is you, now and then, let me peek beyond your walls at other thoughts. Let me see what’s beyond evern for a minute. The rest of my time is yours.

The lonely universe

I dreamt was taken apart, organ by organ, cell by cell, gene by gene, atom by atom. I was there, unrecognizable, and you were there, and he was there, and everyone was there. In elemental form.

In pieces I was still there looking at myself over almost infinite parts. I was more than all my pieces.

Every atom was put on a ship, and sent to the corners of the universe. Fast ships they were, and in days reached the end.

My consciousness stretched and stretched and stretched with the speeding ships, through vast empty spaces filled with majestic things. I was everywhere in every particle in every ship moving outwards, my consciousness in lockstep.

As the last ship and the last atom arrived at the end of space and time, I felt one with the universe, aware of its vastness, its uncertainty and certainty, its light and darkness, its overwhelming largeness matched by matching smallness. Along the way I also saw life, more varied and plentiful than on earth. But most of all, as I stood at the center aware of the ends of the universe, like a spider aware of every thread and every intersection of its web, I became aware of a sadness of the kind impossible to covey. The universe was lonely. And all of existence in all of its wonders and blunders was a frantic effort for meaning. It was here at the edges looking back that I finally got it. For only from the edge do you feel the finality of it all. And physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, all a desperate attempt to escape.

I finally realized that it has at last succeeded. I, you, everyone, are the manifestation of this success. And I don’t mean physically as in we are some wonderous engineering feat of creation, far from it. I mean our ability to be aware and to imagine. For by going inwards, the universe found a way to go outward beyond its finiteness and limitations. By going inwards, a finite world gives way to an infinite one. This void of nothingness I stand at the edge of is there for us to fill. You and I can fill this void with all sort of wonderful things, like morality, kindness, generosity, love, vision, hope.