Making Her Great
My house was perfect,
Mother told me “Khadijah,
My dear, don’t worry, we’ll be back;
My dear, bring your backpack.
Must know, ‘this storm will pass.’”
Mistake of mine perhaps,
Mine, for only seeing a half empty glass.
The doors keep closing,
Tell me mother, who won’t accept us?
“The Golden King.”
That’s ok, one more day
That we have nowhere to stay.
Thank you so much,
Mr Trump.
As I know how you see us,
As just numbers.
Thank you for your brainless brightness.
We’re numbers,
But we are countless.
I know how you see yourself, as the number 1,
So I’ll be number two,
But I can see your view
Of the red, white and blue.
Not taking the blue of our lives,
Shedding the red of our blood,
And keeping the white;
As “the truth stands out clear from error.”
And with respect Mr Trump,
Can I ask you:
“What is (wrong) with you?
Why do you not help each other?”
But aid the border?
We’re desperate, me and mother.
Accept us and we’ll accept what you say,
“We hear and we obey…”
But you won’t accept us,
And they won’t accept you:
“Not my president.”
كَذَٰلِكَ زَيَّنَّا لِكُلِّ أُمَّةٍ عَمَلَهُمْ
I won’t enter the Freeland.
As America needs to be Great,
Without me.
Election Day 2016
Donald and Hillary, sitting in a tree
Donald trumping ‘LOOK AT ME’
She’s no slacker in this fight
Thinks the job is hers by rights
Both seem bloviating pawns
Backed up by competing cons
Shady dealings seem to clash
With a need for campaign cash
No relief in ranted spate
They’re our final candidates?
Still I’m heading out to vote
Braced for post-election gloat
He said/she said repartee
Sums up Don and Hillary
Melancholy
Melancholy,
I touch you as I would a friend,
in bitterness, regret, and in the wind,
when thinking of love, of the coming end,
what sorrow you sew in me is a delightfully steady thing.
Melancholy,
I weep to see
so many abusing thee.
Use you like a brothel whore,
tossed to and fro and splattered onto
the pages as if you were not an immortal goddess
stretching on and on, lingering blessedly in the ages.
Melancholy,
these folks do not read,
not enough, not clearly, at least.
They do not see your grace or beauty.
They feel you, but they do not listen as I do.
They write about you, between the tears of a child
tossing a tantrum at the throes of life, meant to be a mantra.
Melancholy,
you are misinterpreted.
Your inspiration is forfeited,
wielded like a blade in the hands of
rather dilettante swordsmen and women.
Spun around, clashing, clanking, untrained and unthinking.
Brandishing freely and without meaning, cutting up the same misgivings,
dashing all individuality from the sadness given, ignoring your ceaseless wisdom.
Melancholy,
these poets do you a disservice.
Weeping like infants at a bruised knee,
call their hearts bright, bleeding, burning,
just at the barest hint of you, not daring to look
a little longer, a little closer, at what color you've lent
and strove to give, so endlessly unremitting and forgiving,
after you've been abused countless times, for days, for fortnights.
Melancholy,
I wield you carefully.
Yours is a blade of a double-edge,
and all too often when folks dance, they chance
cutting themselves, then whine when their crimson lie
splattered on the floor in messy, thoughtless arcs, all the while
they continue spinning as if this is some wondrous folly of dreams and dreaming.
Melancholy,
forgive these untrained hands
as they rush to grasp your studded hilt
sticky with the blood of others too nearsighted
to observe beyond the initial wounds inflicted, and dare
to call themselves deep, all the while, just for feeling such things.
Melancholy,
I do not boast to be
a master swordsman.
But, at the very least,
when I wield you,
I do so carefully.
Chouchou. (Butterfly.)
I wore a sparkling white cloth
With magenta lilies and butterflies,
The obi was red,
The childish kind people made fun of me
When I stood in the train
With wooden clogs
That cut through my toes.
I’d never played dress up
In my whole life,
But I did it
Just to have fun.
Then, that guy
He came out and touched my shoulder
And I avoided him
as I always did because
he was the host,
the one everyone wanted to
notice them.
I fluttered around without a word
Until he caught me when
I was about to say goodbye,
Grabbing my hand,
Entwining fingers and
Raising it in the air
As if he’d found a prize,
The same guy who kept on looking
In the mirrors
And winking at me
All afternoon.
waterfall
That’s so like you: to cringe and whinge as soon as things start to get rough.
You’re so weird.
Why do you take the known path instead of making your own? You choose to step back from the cliff, afraid of the drop, but not knowing of the great ocean that lies beyond it. You choose to cover your eyes to block out the “ugly” but miss the beauty you could’ve seen when you do so. You choose to say no because it’s easier, it’s definite and it’s indisputable, but you do so without even thinking yes. You colour within the lines because you’re afraid of messing up the bigger picture, afraid of making something new, original and different. You dare not step outside of the perfect box- just in case you can’t step back in again.
You play it safe because to do otherwise would mean taking a risk and, to you, to risk is to hurt.
I’m so sick of you being so careful.
I was always there to catch you if you fell, but the point was that you were supposed to jump. You were supposed to jump without knowing what could happen, to just jump and trust me to be there to catch you when you did.
Maybe you didn’t jump because you were scared. Maybe it was because you didn’t want to take the risk of being hurt.
Or maybe, you just didn’t trust me.
Well, I guess then now that makes two of us.