Reynisfjara

Black Sand Beach, Reynisfjara, Iceland (Photo by A.A.K.)

Find me at the dark shore
where volcanic temples crescendo against the sea,
where elves conduct their sad, salt music,
kissing pebbles with quiet magic
in titanic pockets of rock.
The wind peels soul from body,
steals civilization from bones,
and all alone I stand on the universe
and walk the night sky.

North Pole

The captain whistles a wistful tune
on the Neptune blue.
He says to me he controls the sea,
a sort of snake charmer,
watery heads dancing to his hand
as he motions like a cosmic conductor.

He smiles like the moon,
eyes silver as the stars.
He screams, “Here we are!
Here we are!” Gliding like a melody,
going nowhere, positively.

“Eden was not a garden,
but a beautiful, blue sea!”
he tells me. As we near the North pole,
he immediately sets his sight on the South.
He will sweep the whole length
of the world in less than one week.

As if the water were made of ichor,
he hungers with colorful eyes,
dances like rain on the deck,
sings to the eloquent sea.
And for a moment he simply breathes as a man,

perfectly
pathologically
happy.

Frei

The boy’s ribs, birds’ beaks
peeking through skin like a cage.
His eyes are hunger, lips are salt,
and the ocean his mother music
breathing with him in cadences quick
and punishing.

Nearly a century ago he separated
from his mother forever, ill-fated
by syllables drawn from fooled lips,
“ARBEIT MACHT FREI”
We sentence you to die.

Now he rides on a wooden dream,
filled with others like him, sailing to a land
he knows only through fiction.
The boy thinks of Life of Pi,
how he must survive, how the only tiger
on board is synonymous with ‘future.’
His parents reassure him
all storms have sympathy
under the everwatchful sky.

Nearly a century ago messages of escape
bandaged Hope. They blossomed
like the tiny flowers which now blanket
rows and rows of bulldozed barracks,
drinking in the land’s history, changing blood,
bones, and memory into grounded stars.

Now the ocean fingers the little boat,
rocking it like a cradle, taunting.
The boy grabs onto glass dreams,
whispering, الأمور ليست سيئة كما تبدو.
The ocean is kinder than people.

Nearly a century ago he threw
wet blankets over electric fences.
Barbed wire, twisting and turning,
like the cage he wears for ribs.
As he hurled himself over the fence,
sirens cried like his brothers at night,
like the gasping ocean,
like the cold, distant sky.

Freiheit macht frei.

To Dover

for the refugees of Calais

They can see your chalk white whisper

along the shoreline, breathing with the waves.

Your name, foreign, yet sweet on their lips,
contains your dove-like wings, your promise of peace.

They look at you past the saltwater
of the strait, of their eyes,

with a longing to climb your gentle, green back
and let you carry them to safety.

As they stand at the edge of the world,
the night is cold as their bones.

Starlight bleeds through the tents,
revealing shadows of youth.

They dream of crossing the strait,
of having a place in this world,

of the possibility of light

at the end of the tunnel.

“Driver Crashes into a Tree”

All he can feel is red.

Flames lick the walls of his heart’s dark pockets.
They race to his throat, consuming the air,
blooming in there, and then onward to the head,
pouring past thoughts like quicksand slipping
down the minute hand.

He never asked for sound to collapse in his mouth,
for the senseless barrier between foreign skins,
going without another’s touch for countless days,
and leaving behind salt deposits from brown eyes
which somehow look like oceans.

Music rains from his eyes. Kaleidoscopic emotion
as quicksilver as the color of stained glass
saturates his head along with a brood of words unsaid
that leave permanent scratches on old records
of the mind.

A few words would’ve changed his winter face
into cherry blossom cheeks, and eyes
like skies that speak, and rose petal lips that play,
in their silence, with the societal fallacy that being content
should garner contempt.

He stands on the handrail with dreams made of helicopters.
His eyes are smoke after a candle, fixed coldly
on the moonwake which shudders along the river below.
City lights reflect onto ocean eyes with a glow
as ephemeral as midnight.

Silence shivers with anticipation.

He wants to let the river consume time,
let the newspapers read something like,
“Driver Crashes into a Tree.
The driver is innocent.
The road must be guilty.”

Summer

Forgive me, summer,
You’ve been too kind
to call me human
while I’ve been a ghost,
wasting your sunlit seconds
as if they were raindrops
on pavement in England.

Give me, summer,
another week to suckle
your electric colors, flowers
that smell of dreams,
pollen scattered by wishes,
whispering palm trees
never quite captured right
in Hollywood movies.

You will always be
eucalyptus leaves
in campfire memories;
salty deserts along Route 66;
morning skies all the colors
of your ripening figs;
Fourth of July fireworks
dissipating, quiet,
like freedom.

Sandbox

A sandbox is where we learned to play
and think of life outside the box,
dirtying our socks with the spray
of sunrise, ray of some life
before meaningless talks
blurred our eyes, stained our minds,
and clocks and clocks and clocks
turned to leashes from lullabies.