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kublai

zaman — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 06:00:07 +0000

raw cells born
of impulse –
scarlet clouds of arteries
filter memory;

copper-lined veins
remembered fragments welded
coiled promises

death of before,
breath forgotten in waves
broken
divide unto themselves, double
helix tomorrow drawn
as fired chariot

Filed under: ancestry, cosmology/mythology, creative non-fiction, east bay poetics, east indian diaspora, east indies, erotic poetry, experimental, found text, gender, india, life, love poetry, men, pakistan, parapsychology, political truths, psychology, sex, sf, short poems, south asian diaspora, the male species, translations

a beautiful lonely woman

zaman — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 20:58:03 +0000

is lying on the grass a few feet away from where i sit, drawing myself again. the charcoal coats my fingertips, i smear the grains of black carbon along the lines of my face, deepening the shadows within it. written on paper i am more angular, less youthful-looking and with more gray hair, the way i image myself in dreams.

i have a strong urge to pick up my cell phone, scroll down my list of contacts and find someone to talk to. i reach for my bag, then pull my hand back, remembering how this hour, the sixty minutes between 12:53 and 1:53 this Saturday afternoon, is my only time to draw. my three-year-old son is with his mother a few blocks away, she may call at any moment to demand i take him back, to say she’s feeling tired, sick, fragile, who knows what her excuse will be today.

should i draw my eyelashes as they really exist on my face, or less dramatically? they’ve always been too long for my taste, and straight and unruly, crashing together at unpredictable angles. i look over at the woman, she is lying on her back, using her gunmetal gray purse as a pillow for her head, reading a book. on the cover, the name Salman Rushdie, she’s a polemic. her beauty is unsettling, strange–her features are small but intense; the jawline gentle and understating the wide brown eyes, their corners upturned, grave and discerning, the nose a tame enough shape but its endpoint unmistakably Indian. the lips of medium fullness, pink and quiet, mouth relaxed and resolute. she wears a wine-colored dress, an intoxicating burgundy, and a necklace of raw, roughly cut garnets. her hair spirals in tendrils around her face, a blackish copper under the white Berkeley sun.

she knows i am looking; she ignores my gaze, my charcoal, my moving hands. as if a glass wall stands between us, impenetrable to sound or sight.

this woman is alone, why? royal in her red dress and gems, her wind-mussed raven curls, reading a thick volume in the center of a college town, why has no man, no woman joined her Saturday outdoor reverie? the heat rises in me, my hands stop their charcoal dance, i stare at the eyes, the hair, the lips that promise seduction and certain satisfaction of mortal desire. the space around her curvaceous body, trapped in its scarlet dress, is so open, so empty. i am a man, i am subject to this type of musing. weak to the injustice of a woman this whole, this timeless, having only the company of an old Rushdie book on this first Saturday in June. anger buzzes around my head, dizzying and red like the garnets along the curve of the woman’s neck.

my cell phone, sitting beside me on my bench, erupts into its pop-rock ringtone, loudly shattering the moment. the woman glances my way, unaffected, immediately turns back to her reading. it is my ex-wife, calling at 1:29, reminding me not to be late. not to be late, which means, in her language, come early to take our son away. i put my charcoal back in its box, feeling suddenly drained of inspiration.

i look one last time at the Indian woman in red, her eyes blink as she turns the page of her novel. she gives me a small, unencouraging smile. i push my sketch pad back into my bag, get up, turn my body in the direction of my ex-wife’s apartment. as i walk away, i close my eyes and try to recall the stranger’s face, her spiraling hair, her supine posture, the blood red of her necklace and dress. next saturday at 1:53, my hands will have time to bring her back, in charcoal lines, to the People’s Park, lying in the shade of a large poplar tree. alone, so alone.

Filed under: ancestry, berkeley, creative non-fiction, east bay poetics, east indian diaspora, east indies, erotic poetry, feminism, found text, gender, india, life, long poems, love poetry, men, poetry, prose, psychology, queer poetry, sex, short poems, south asian diaspora, south asian women, the male species, translations, Uncategorized

park blvd.

zaman — Mon, 31 May 2010 02:17:20 +0000

this part of oakland is heavy with memory. to drive down a street my legs have walked a thousand times, ten years imprinted in sidewalk concrete, strange. an outsider in a former home, does it ever matter when we return? the laundromat where one lover and i washed our clothes, the diner by the lake with its famous fried chicken and two kitchens–one for those who can afford to sit down and tip a waitress, the other for those who can’t. dilapidated roadways, their potholes wide enough to swim in, the cafe where i spent hours perfecting my students’ papers with them after long days of classroom teaching. the exhaustion, exhilaration. the years that march by as days gather to form a single energy.

the freeway exit where my sister took her own life last year, park boulevard. i passed it feeling that maybe it didn’t happen. is my body, my soul, capable of such massive forgetting? she returns to me when i cross solano avenue in albany, a place we never walked together. a haze of rage and disbelief shields me from that indescribable death. the truth descends with the gravity of saturn and earth combined, a leaden, muddy burden. before i can realize that i have abandoned my body for a moment while i grieve, i am eating baba ganoush, the meal we shared most often. too much tahini, so much i can hardly taste the eggplant. lemonade speckled with pulverized mint leaves, their aroma purging the pain of remembering.

there is something inescapable about writing, unpredictable as to what words will write themselves next. like memory, a string unbroken by its very brokenness, the pieces of a shattered window, unified in their defiance of unity. the heart is bruised and bent in a rhythm of an ordered disorder, crumbs of past and future bleeding the present of its seeming certainty and wholeness. the body responds to signs cemented into the landscape: a brick wall, patch of grass, the coroner’s office, a stop sign emblazoned with letters of a secret alphabet. what remains is the movement between static elements, wind forcing apart the branches of a tree, buildings in ruin, fresh flowers thrust into a vase in the center of chaos.

Filed under: bipolar disorder, cosmology/mythology, creative non-fiction, death, east bay poetics, experimental, life, long poems, love poetry, mental illness, oakland, parapsychology, poetry, prose, psychology, religion/faith, self-love, short poems, the creative/writing process, translations, Uncategorized, women

things i wanted to keep

zaman — Sat, 29 May 2010 07:33:29 +0000

there was that first saturday together, an hour to drink coffee before the start of the weekend. february 2008. wasn’t i on my way to pray somewhere with a friend and you had nothing to do but receive my call at 9am and come to me. it was our third date by then, still the first week after we met. we walked to a coffee shop near my apartment, sat on a cement bench. i caressed your knee with one hand, my mocha in the other. i wore a hot pink shirt that showed my shoulders, chocolate straps showing from beneath. tiger’s eye earrings you mistook for wood, your favorite vibration. then we came home to my bedroom, sat on my mahogany satin couch. you wore a hat with a bill, i slid it away from me to reach your mouth. i never wanted to stop our lingual dance: warm, passionate, perfectly matched. that kiss, that energy, that chemistry, were things i wanted to keep.

the curiosity of your lips–pink ambassadors to a mouthful of white capricorn teeth, beautifully square and even. your knees beneath my fingers, as if there were no denim between my fingertips and your skin. knowing those joints, the hardness of their bones, would fall victim to my touch. maybe i loved you, after all, for your helplessness against me.

i regret nothing, certainly not the lesson in futility. a hundred lifetimes spent hearing words that stabbed like knives, acid raining into my growing heart. that first saturday, your breath tasted of nothing more bitter than coffee, no pain had yet been delivered from between those white, even teeth. that, like so many other realities, came later.

eight weeks after i leave you, i sit alone in bed under a down blanket, hoping it doesn’t storm tonight. praying sky’s tears don’t drum against the roof. i don’t want another reminder of those nights, last december, when it rained hard for twenty days in a row, a painted wood ceiling above us, making love to the man who lied to me, who said he wanted to live his life by my side and father my children. who convinced me that distance and my own deficiency were the reasons i had never seen his family, his hometown, his true self.

the sky is black and clear, the night cold and the moon new. a light shines in a neighbor’s window; i am not the only insomniac grieving at midnight. it is tomorrow; the sun held back for another five hours, but morning here. keep the darkness still; let the sweetness of loss absorb completely, let those wasted lifetimes coagulate, echoes of a single utterance — one that could not be silenced. speech unable to resist the temptation, the glory, of sound.

Filed under: ancestry, bangladesh, berkeley, bipolar disorder, creative non-fiction, east bay poetics, east indian diaspora, east indies, erotic poetry, experimental, feminism, gender, india, life, long poems, love poetry, men, mental illness, muslim women, oakland, pakistan, parapsychology, poetry, political truths, politics, prose, psychology, self-love, short poems, south asian diaspora, south asian politics, south asian women, the male species, Uncategorized, women

regrets

zaman — Fri, 21 May 2010 06:52:50 +0000

it’s true i wish he would write something. he doesn’t know, all he understands is an apartment empty of my paintings, my poems, my wall decorated in handmade jewelry, books of poetry missing, even the ones i engraved with his name. i wake up at midnight wanting to check for an e-mail, some confession that would help me forgive. that would make this separation real from both ends. but nothing. a few words thrown into the silence, none the ones that needed to be written. no truth, no understanding, no restitution.

there was the one who loved me before him, who walked away only to return two years later to say she made a mistake, you should have been my children’s mother, now there’s no return from exile. clarity came too late, too much had changed. now a lover who lacks that fire, she said, raw passion. the flame that threatened control.

you left so many times i knew the scars would be stubborn to fading. now your silence, your quiet resignation to this bitter outcome, almost drowns away the sounds of your voice denigrating me, a bracelet i built for you hurled and exploding against our bedroom wall, its bloodstone jasper pieces lost in beige carpet. i gathered those bits together, put them in your jewelry box full of my creations, to remind you of your promise to string it back together. then i left the keys on your bar, pulled the door closed behind me.

one day will you remember this: that my love alone could never heal you, could not replace your fear of your father nor compare to your mother’s worship. will you call your error, your reluctance, your regret by name? or will you deny your heart’s logic completely? to whom, if anyone, will you speak those words? in my absence, only Ganesh and Kali remain, inert atop your bureau next to that broken bracelet in its carved wood box. and will you transfer your grief to their forms? or will you stay the same: hold everything within, wondering why you lie apart from the world outside?

Filed under: ancestry, bangladesh, bipolar disorder, creative non-fiction, death, east bay poetics, east indian diaspora, east indies, experimental, feminism, gender, india, life, long poems, love poetry, men, mental illness, oakland, pakistan, parapsychology, poetry, prose, psychology, queer poetry, religion/faith, san francisco, self-love, short poems, south asian diaspora, south asian politics, south asian women, the male species, Uncategorized, women

death and life: a dream

zaman — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 05:07:35 +0000

i find myself walking down maple street, toward the main drag, toward home. i am wearing my red stretch cotton dress, the one with 3/4 sleeves and buttons down the front. the soles of my tan cowboy boots bounce against the pavement. i think of my lover, i think of home, and my step quickens. i open my phone to phone him, my love, to ask him to meet me there. to be there when i reach home.

my key lets me into a huge manor, the heavy oak door swinging inward to welcome me. on my right is a raised living room, walled, with arches cut into it. one of the arches has a cloth hanging, a transparent cloth. once i open the door, i feel someone inside the house. i tense, expecting to see an intruder. rather than removing my boots i wear them into the foyer, dirtying the polished wood floor beneath my feet.

through the first archway, where the cloth hangs, i see the moving silhouette of a woman. her back is to me, dark hair flowing against her long tunic. she is walking away from me. i take a few more steps and look through another archway, open and unclothed. i see a brown woman picking up a prayer mat, a jah namaaz, rolled up after use. it is my mother, my muslim mother who has been dead for almost three years.

she is wearing her glasses, her tunic is a deep gray-blue that reaches the floor. in a moment she is before me and i embrace her, kissing her cheek and descending to my knees. her feet sit in platform sandals, the kind she wore when she was alive because she said she couldn’t walk without a little bit of heel anymore. i kiss each of her toes, starting with her right foot. i don’t know why i start with her second toe.

do i rise and embrace her again after that? i don’t know. the dream stretches on and on, one of my sisters enters the dream, the one i grew up with. the one i was a baby with. there are others around, other women. during one moment in the dream, the three of us are together and i can’t stop crying. my mother, after all this time, is still telling me not to cry, not realizing that the coming together of this world and the next is overwhelming for the living.

i was sleeping next to my lover when my mother visited me in this dream. i had been praying for a visit from her, i had been praying for a beautiful dream to interrupt the obscure, twisted ones that seemed to be filling my mind every night and morning. i had blamed my mother in life and after her death, i had promised when i washed her body before her burial to forgive her, let everything go, and yet some resentment remained. it pushed her spirit away. she stopped her visits during my waking hours because the ghostliness of them scared me. it was like living in a ouija board, like i did when i was younger. fascinated by the power of calling spirits to me. but i prayed for her return, i asked for a peaceful reunion, and i was granted my desire.

i recall the tan cowboy boots against the pavement, the happiness in my step as i heard my lover’s voice on the phone. i turn the key into an unknown mansion, and the dream begins again.

Posted in ancestry, bangladesh, bengali poetry, cosmology/mythology, creative non-fiction, death, east bay poetics, east indian diaspora, east indies, erotic poetry, experimental, feminism, gender, in progress, india, islam, life, long poems, love poetry, muslim women, oakland, poetry, prose, psychology, religion/faith, self-love, south asian diaspora, south asian women, Uncategorized

brown skin

zaman — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 07:10:31 +0000

my love,

this song makes me miss you so much. how many thousands of miles are you away, traveling, somewhere in the motherland. the place we both got our brown skin. you say that each trip you make to india changes you, reminds you of our imagined hardships here, renews your love of our origins. i hope the tropical dew nourishes you, not like the cold oakland winds this time of year. when you return i’ll make sure to cover you in shea butter, i’ve been practically bathing in it lately, the air is becoming so dry. this weekend felt like summer during the days. it scares me that the seasons switch places.

it’s almost monday. ten more days without you, my love. my heart counts the hours down, i can hear it in my chest. ticking. can you feel the bones of our ancestors holding you up in that homeland? we’ve covered the earth over, it’s true, but we started somewhere close to where you are now. even the thick pollution of mumbai air, i know, can’t keep all the energy in the ground. i hope you are relaxed, dear one, i hope your soul is refreshed by that presence.

when you come home, when you get back to oakland, it will have been more than three weeks since our last kiss. in a sense, time has stopped here without you. there is no one to love without you, no one to whom i can give myself, no one i want to touch. it’s during your absence that i feel this lack i can only celebrate because it means that finally, we have found one another. all the little terrors of everyday life, the dangers of existing are more difficult to bear without you here. i must have been more used to them before i met you. the knowledge that life is temporary, momentary, won’t leave me. what if even a lifetime together isn’t enough? twenty-two days without your hands, your lips, your eyelashes, your touch–the unthinkable has arrived.

it’s nearing midnight and i imagine you waking up from your deep sleep. i make a cup of tea, pull a teabag from the paper bag inside a box with a striped bengal tiger on the front. the body of the tiger is lithe, its black markings slashed over orange and white hair. in the background, the leaves of a palm tree, a brown woman in a sari walking a gourd of water down a dirt road, tall reeds flanking her moving body. in the foreground, huge bowls of the nutmeg and chicory to be ground into the chai. Bengal Spice, that’s the name of the flavor.

my love, i am waiting for your voice, your words, to reach me again.

until then,

your goondi

Posted in ancestry, bangladesh, cosmology/mythology, creative non-fiction, east bay poetics, east indian diaspora, east indies, erotic poetry, experimental, india, inspired by india arie, life, long poems, love poetry, oakland, pakistan, poetry, prose, queer poetry, short poems, south asian diaspora, south asian politics, south asian women, talking back to media, Uncategorized

thanksgiving day in mumbai

zaman — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 02:14:03 +0000

stuck in this city. someone’s stuffing seasoning is bringing my dead mother back to life in a corner of oakland, california, where my neighbors and i are preparing dinner. it takes 40 minutes to mince the stems and leaves of purple and green kale, the rainbow chard to be added to onions and garlic frying in a black wok. the table is set with painted china plates and monogrammed silver, dug out of the attic after ten years of retirement. the candles are lit, the guests arrive, sparkling wine poured. there are six diners in all, none of them you.

you, my love, are trapped in mumbai today, thousands of miles away from the fake turkey meat and pear cranberry sauce in my mouth. you are there for a wedding whose four-day-long grandeur has been shaved down to just a small ceremony and reception at the end of this long weekend. thanksgiving day for you meant seeing the streets, schools, and city buildings shut themselves away beneath a blanket of shock. and, after all, weren’t you supposed to go to that fancy hotel that night, the night they started taking hostages and killing people for being born in the wrong countries? your family was to go there to celebrate someone’s birthday. something got in your way, and you didn’t go.

i watch the prayers written in arabic on the pages of my holy Qur’an, i imagine they are spelling your name, your family name, the gujurati syllables of your signature. the lucky name your parents gave you. i know you are there, in your bed, somewhere in mumbai away from the rooms where people are hiding and lying about their origins, trying to save their own lives. where lakes of blood and purses litter the lobbies of hotels and the hallways of hospitals, strewn with the bodies of people murdered by men who called themselves muslim. they knew about this yankee holiday, those men who chose to punish those they decided were responsible for what’s wrong in the world.

all this outside your door and yet i know you are safe, in bed, your hands searching for me, invoking me across a thousand national borders, across the ten hours of dragged time between us. feeling my body cover yours, breathing my flesh around you. i know you are listening, looking for an opening into peace, into hope, gripping yourself against all your memories of me, wanting me. your desire brings me into your room. you touch me, finding my face against yours, breasts pressing into you, my hands reaching for the parts of you that miss me most.

“on monday,” you say, “only ten more days.” until you are home. until the space between us dissolves into one long memory of separation, recalling the miles of telephone wire that bring your voice to me, these nights alone in a bed that’s grown too big without you. the single line that connects yesterday to today is a gash through which you will slip back to me. this leaving and returning a rhythm of loving, the illusion of separation to be disproven one more time.

Posted in ancestry, bangladesh, bengali poetry, cosmology/mythology, creative non-fiction, death, east bay poetics, east indian diaspora, east indies, erotic poetry, experimental, gender, india, islam, life, long poems, love poetry, men, muslim women, oakland, pakistan, poetry, political truths, politics, prose, psychology, religion/faith, sex, short poems, south asian diaspora, south asian politics, south asian women, talking back to media, Uncategorized

notes on the creative/ writing process

zaman — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 05:14:41 +0000

my writings this summer are unpredictable and scattered. some days the pen never touches paper. it seems i won’t write as long as i have money to distract myself from the writing. it’s leo–a social four weeks–and i’d rather be kickin it, making love, perfecting my bengali recipes, designing and creating jewelry, reading psychology of the erotic, researching astrological data, and indulging my body in movement. all the years of work and study nonstop have brought me to this moment, full of space and time in which to fit all my competing desires. leaving the old habits and impulses behind me. redesigning my home to accommodate a new lounge area and home office. belly dance and salsa–my hips are waking up to the truth of joy as they separate, isolate, undulate. open. new beats against which to mold myself. falling in love with hip hop again. i’ve written a flow or two, a joke or two, a hundred short poems i won’t show anyone yet. i read ten novels this summer and started wheels of life, continuing the chakra work i started who knows when, concentrating on the orange of sexual desire and the green of cultivating heart consciousness. learning (again) that romance and sex aren’t just part of a high-pressure love affair but can exist outside of convention, like anything else. moving toward my true desire and adjusting my entire universe to accommodate this new knowledge. wisdom wasn’t enough until there was this release, this acceptance of my limits, this departure from outdated norms. how long has it been since my last onstage performance? a showcase of my work in san francisco next month and minimal preparation so far. time to call up the grounded rhythms that drive my writings. the subtle heft of my words, the gravity and comedy of my message. mantras and curses and songs in praise of all the workings of the universe. an unexpected manifestation of lust threw me off for a moment but then i let it in. to see where it could take me. leaving all fear behind to welcome the ecstasy for which i’m destined. sleeping in each morning and giving thanks for the rest of these summer months. showing gratitude for the emotional intensity, intellectual fire, and devotion to my spiritual path for making this arrival possible. embracing the realities of saturn as i near my 28th year of life. i walk into this test of my strength, flexibility, and consciousness with eyes open, palms facing upward, beckoning the serpentine waves of kundalini through my bones and toward the sky. i feel her power penetrating my roots, deepening my vision into ancestry, into history and the continuity between every moment before and after this one. i’ve recognized my teaching career as an exercise into demonstrating the interconnectedness of everything, even as i find i must remove the veil of illusion over and over to uncover the myth of separateness between things. between people. between one place and another. one era and another. reconciliation is a state of being. transparency. communication. divinity and the thousand facets that reflect each living thing. and next? the leaden adventure of reality. an inner revision of sorts. an evolution of the spirit through the toil of growth. continuing the slow journey toward myself. the book. the show. the music.

oaktown never promised

zaman — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 07:03:11 +0000

oaktown never promised
not to rob me
never gave me nothing
for free

oaktown never guaranteed
nothing but
oak trees