Showing posts tagged poetry
“

Some women love
to wait
for life for a ring
in the June light for a touch
of the sun to heal them for another
woman’s voice to make them whole
to untie their hands
put words in their mouths
form to their passages sound
to their screams for some other sleeper
to remember their future their past.

Some women wait for their right
train in the wrong station
in the alleys of morning
for the noon to holler
the night come down.

Some women wait for love
to rise up
the child of their promise
to gather from earth
what they do not plant
to claim pain for labor
to become
the tip of an arrow to aim
at the heart of now
but it never stays.

Some women wait for visions
That do not return
Where they were not welcome
Naked
For invitations to places
They always wanted
To visit
To be repeated.

Some women wait for themselves
Around the next corner
And call the empty spot peace
But the opposite of living
Is only not living
And the stars do not care.

Some women wait for something
To change and nothing
Does change
So they change
Themselves.

Audre Lorde, Stations
Played 249 times

tansheer:

Removal of dogma, erasure of stigma, disposal of supposed shame, incineration of restrictive principles that smother me. My mission to be bluntly passionate and wholly honest runs awry at the very thought of stripping our relationship of its purity.

If the “vulgarity” or “obscenity” lining what I want to say appalls the literary crowd or the people who judge, then so be it. There are things I wish to say to you in front of hoardes of people in the Midan, standing on a bench in front of the Sea in Alexandria, by the statue of Joan of Arc in Malcolm X park. These things need to be said and heard.

Romantic abstractions manifest into actualized phrases,
curls and lines
circles and dots
on ruled sheets
and they are all
so essential to our being

Upon the revelation of the shrouded dimensions and sensual nuances of my love for you would you deem me improper? Would Propriety shun me from her circle of well-mannered and clean-tongued lady-friends?

Who cares, Propriety ain’t never done shit for me.

Since my thoughts perpetually uncensor themselves; constantly getting sent to The Undisciplined Little Savages Corner, adamantly refusing to remain leashed or subdued by the powers that be, the powers that have formulated lists and lists of topics that women should not discuss, I set fire to their lists and let my thoughts run rampant, causing chaos in the confines of my cranium; I will forever be free to say what I feel, relieving thoughts through the tip of my pen after they’ve travelled through my Cartesian pyneal gland, sliding down my tongue and rushing out like exodus from between the padlocked gates of my starved lips:

“Be FREE wild thought!
It’s the dawn of a new day for you!”

Never again will my passion be shackled, let me tell you how I feel.

But concrete language might kill the poetic stance I wish to hide behind lest the well-to-do theists come for my veiled head; let’s go down a different alley for a wink:

Thick unrelenting muscle, cloud-like skin, Sahara hair, sharpened joints, welcoming palms, tinted cheeks, dented heels, deflated abdomens, silhouettes of flickering wicks painting their way onto four naked walls, deeply-melodic soulful hums, subtly sweet scents of supposedly sacrilegious seduction, deliciousness and warmth.
delicious and warm.

My poor little index finger wishes you would grant it permission to slowly trace over each and every plateau, peak and canyon you possess, every trench and ditch, every tree and mountain. Let me be an overzealous novice cartographer mapping out the most magnificent strip of land ever laid eyes on.

Under the stars, beside the Nile, under a palm tree, beside a fictitious corrugated iron shack, under your spell. beside your body, everything’s right, everything’s beautiful.

My confessions travel via whispers in the night. Through your lips you reciprocate muffled bluesy sentiments and the stars blaze and split, showering us; they just couldn’t take it, I suppose. The diminished stars leave holes in the sky and we see heaven through the gaps but concede that our heaven is here on Earth, or precisely, in each other’s vicinity.

In your consistent absence, I yearn and yearn and yearn until I become frenzied, calling out your name in my sleep, like some sort of endearing cliche, staring at the moon, hoping you’d drop from it.

I’d die for you, as nonchalantly and indifferently as ever. “Sure, I’d die for you. Without a thought.”

Just like that.

I breathe so as to function and live so as to love you.

I take refuge in your eyes and seek asylum in your arms. Give me a gaze from those gut-wrenchingly cathartic windows to your soul and I’ll fully reimburse you with poetry galore and maybe a bit more.

I can’t wait ‘til I’m divinely granted the right to make you comprehend my love. To see you nod with disbelief at the depth and breadth of my obsession. You really don’t know how much I wish to cradle you in my arms which embedded deep within lay veins that through them runs blood which will hopefully coalesce with other beloved cellular entities in both of our bodies and meet-up inside the gut of another who will bear your name with pride and honor, for who wouldn’t more or less give up this world simply to play a part in yours.

(Reblogged from tansheer)

tansheer.: you assumed me a prude,a woman whose sexualitywas negated, blunted...

tansheer:

you assumed me a prude,
a woman whose sexuality
was negated, blunted and
voided the minute she
covered up.

and i got nothing but a 
melodramatic series of
bigoted gasps and 
open eyes lined in
surprise and shock
the minute my natural
human tendencies
were revealed to you
in confidence.

my fabric conservatism,
shrouded shoulders and
straightened slopes of 
the body are not indicative
of asexuality. i am just as,
if not, more capable of
being as alluring as you,
only i need not be 
a slave to my vanity
as you are to yours.

i love just like you, only
i choose to do it in private

(Reblogged from tansheer)

tansheer.: pretty light-skinned African man,denying racism exists in the west...

tansheer:

pretty light-skinned African man,
denying racism exists in the west

how horrific it was
to watch him 
delude

but what am i anyway?
just a pathetic little girl
who understands nothing 
of this world

i have seen nothing in my time;
fired for adorning scarves of attempted
piety, spat at on the sidewalks i owned
via mortgage because of booming 
smoking towers, othered and questioned
in institutes of supposed “higher learning”,
deemed a radical and an oppressed
anti-feminist who was obviously
circumcised before she was even 
named, lest she ALLAH FORBID
desire sex before the age of 20
months, i have obviously seen
nothing:
i have been judged.

so,
how dare i discuss 
discrimination?

he told me to be “open-minded”,
(to the bigotry
and the rampant ignorance)

he said they never tell you
what to do, think, or say—

but they sure as hell can
alienate the fuck out of you
because you live in a way 
they cannot wrap their blessed
heads around

they do not understand you,
so
they condemn you

but i exaggerate,
naturally,

oh,
how horrific it was 
to watch him 
deny

i watched him walk away,
i heard him think “she’s a
close-minded woman who
never learned how to be 
free,
like
the
west”

oh,
how horrific it was
to watch him
confuse

(Reblogged from tansheer)

tansheer.: you will never understandwhat it feels like to be awoman. you tell...

tansheer:

you will never understand
what it feels like to be a
woman. you tell me that
my jeans are too tight
and that my eyes linger
too long and that my 
fingers roam over things
that don’t belong to me,

but if i ever make note
of the harshness in your
words or the tobacco 
in your lungs or the 
self-interest in your eyes
you will slap me with
your self-granted authority
and say “know your place,
woman”

when i tell you that i wish
to simply feel the midnight
reflected in my eyes or have
a few riffs pulsate through
my marrow or maybe even
embrace an ideology
you have frowned upon 
in the past—

before my
requests are heard
you say: “no,
obey me”

“you will never know
how it feels to be a woman”,
and you will think i’m being
my typical womanly self,
melodramatic and wishy-
washy, teary-eyed and 
emotionally vulnerable,
the archetypes you 
fabricated, propogated
and fucked all the way
to the heaven
reserved for you.

you will never know what
it feels like to be controlled
to live in an environment
where your subservience
is expected
even

traditional.

(Reblogged from tansheer)

Turquoise by Yona Harvey

& then the woman who wants
to sleep with my husband
sends him a card with Frida Kahlo’s sepia
face peering through it & he
begins reading the note aloud to me, as if
the words might bring the woman back
across the line she crossed that summer
he mentioned her name for the first time.
Then I think his brush with temptation
isn’t as noble as he’d like to believe, more like
cleaning the house when it gets dirty—he could
mark it on a table of triumphs, but, at the end of the day,
it mostly amounts to what he is supposed to do.

Men are so clueless sometimes,
which isn’t a revelation, but occasionally needs restating
& brings to mind something I read about
Lenny Kravitz composing penitent lyrics for Lisa Bonet,
for committing particular betrayals
to song, how he believed the pair might reconcile
as soon as Lisa heard the album he’d dedicated to her.
Women are clueless sometimes, too,
like the one who cried to me on a campus bench
that she wanted to be an artist, to travel,
while the others rushed to lunch, to more classes.
& what should she do? Then I thought,

People are always asking questions whose answers
they already know & That’s a great necklace she’s wearing

which I told her, but she recoiled when I said
wearing turquoise jewelry & Frida Kahlo skirts
doesn’t make women artists, which was probably the cruelest
thing
I’d ever said to a young woman, but exactly how I felt
watching her fuss over the ruffles of her long, black skirt.
These days, Frida Kahlo appears like a god to whom I’ve
prayed, like accessories that shake at the bottom of a woman’s
shopping bag, a loose divinity of feel-good postcards &
magnets
rocking on paper handles in the crease of an upright arm.
This is what I think when I ask my lover to stop
reading the note he wants me to render harmless.
Does a woman’s affection for Frida make her
my comrade? Years ago, with my head wrapped & bracelets
jangling, I might have answered yes. But when I ask
Who’s Lupe, Who’s Frida, Who’s Diego? I can’t help but
conclude
someone’s at work on a grand cliché I’m supposed to buy into
& there’s nothing harmless about Frida Kahlo, exquisite painter
of stitches & steel, thorns & wombs & vaginas—something
utterly
misleading about Frida’s face on a 4 x 4 note card, a little
too neat & too square, which makes sense in the American
sense
of matinee love or lust or art or what passes for art, or living
the life of an artist, those heroes & heroines dangling over
the cliffs of vanity, begging for a little more rope.

tansheer.: he hated travelling;told me that in college, he took math,and...

tansheer:

he hated travelling;
told me that in college,
he took math,
and claimed,
that he learned more
in calculus
than he did in cafes;

he didn’t respect the woman
who worshipped him
and convinced her
that it would be just terrific
if he could lose just
lose some weight around
here…

(Reblogged from tansheer)
“

Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand,
As epitaph:
He chucked up everything
And just cleared off,
And always the voice will sound
Certain you approve
This audacious, purifying,
Elemental move.

And they are right, I think.
We all hate home
And having to be there:
I detest my room,
It’s specially-chosen junk,
The good books, the good bed,
And my life, in perfect order:
So to hear it said

He walked out on the whole crowd
Leaves me flushed and stirred,
Like Then she undid her dress
Or Take that you bastard;
Surely I can, if he did?
And that helps me to stay
Sober and industrious.
But I’d go today,

Yes, swagger the nut-strewn roads,
Crouch in the fo’c’sle
Stubbly with goodness, if
It weren’t so artificial,
Such a deliberate step backwards
To create an object:
Books; china; a life
Reprehensibly perfect

 Philip Larkin
“

i.
Love is not a profession
genteel or otherwise

sex is not dentistry
the slick filling of aches and cavities

you are not my doctor
you are not my cure,

nobody has that
power, you are merely a fellow/traveller

Give up this medical concern,
buttoned, attentive,

permit yourself anger
and permit me mine

which needs neither
your approval nor your suprise

which does not need to be made legal
which is not against a disease

but against you,
which does not need to be understood

or washed or cauterized,
which needs instead

to be said and said.
Permit me the present tense.

ii.

I am not a saint or a cripple,
I am not a wound; now I will see
whether I am a coward.


I dispose of my good manners,
you don’t have to kiss my wrists.

This is a journey, not a war,
there is no outcome,
I renounce predictions


and aspirins, I resign the future
as I would resign an expired passport:
picture and signature gone
along with holidays and safe returns.


We’re stuck here
on this side of the border
in this country of thumbed streets and stale buildings


where there is nothing spectacular
to see and the weather is ordinary

where love occurs in its pure form only
on the cheaper of the souvenirs


where we must walk slowly,
where we may not get anywhere


or anything, where we keep going,
fighting our ways, our way
not out but through.

Is/Not - Margaret Atwood
“

How many the black maw has swallowed in its time!
Spirited girls who would not know their place,
Talented girls who found that the disgrace
Of being a woman made genius a crime.

How many others, who would not kiss the rod,
Domestic bullying broke or public shame?
Pagan or Christian, it was much the same:
Husbands, St. Paul declared, rank next to God.

Advice to Young Ladies, A.D. Hope