Caged Lion as Tapestry
Poor king, with your mangy mane,
frayed dull claws, and clouded eyes.
Look here: I’ve brought your favorite,
a deer leg dripping in blood so warm
it steams the cool night air.
Aren’t you hungry?
What happened to your fight,
you terrifying figure,
you dethroned Shah of Shahs?
How sadly you lie there
like a poor reproduction
of your once glorious image
woven into a carpet,
the strands of silken thread
more threatening to boys’ hands
that feed the loom
than your real-life rotting teeth.
“S-N-O-W” Fall in Tehran
A few world travelers might claim
they’ve seen it snow like this before.
So too might scholars of French literature
read Mallarmé into the blizzard of text:
S
………………h
no……….w……..ite
….w
c
l
…….us……..er
…………t…………………………………………………….r.s
………………..o………………………………..a
……………………f…………………….s
p………………………………………..t
….e..r
…………….f
…………….u……med
But the translation into Farsi
belonged entirely to the Persian poet
as did the idea of having Azadeh,
his punk rock girlfriend,
climb Azadi tower
to sprinkle cut up
photocopied bits
from her cold and rough
clenched hands.
Barcode
Barcode the prisoners to better scan
……them into the system.
Barcode the prostitutes to keep track
……of sex trafficking.
Barcode the protestors to let police
……contain movements.
Barcode the soldiers to catch
……those going AWOL.
Barcode the diseased to quarantine
……them from the healthy.
Barcode the Palestinians to store them
……in warehouses of the occupier.
Barcode the artists to commodify
……their talents.
Barcode the bar-coder to encode
……him in his coding.
Poet as Rice Cooker
…………..“[The angels of Allah] are nearer to him than his own jugular
………………….vein.” —Surah 50
He wrote the names of every dinner guest
on precooked grains
with magnifying glass
and fine point pen,
knowing nobody
would notice,
too self-consumed
with carbohydrates
to see themselves
in his creative plan.
Song of the Junky Junk Man
“Kilograms for grams,
bags of aluminum
recycled for a bag!”
Outcast dervish dogs
faithfully follow
their abject murid,
self-appointed king
of junkyard empire.
“Make way make way
for my zombie mule
shuffling his hooves
through gardens of plastic,
nodding off at the river
of used syringes and vials!”
The Artist Husband as Tom Cat
In his free time he tracked mice.
Not as metaphors. The real thing
raked to death in his back yard,
sandwich-bagged in the freezer.
She knew enough not to question,
her reticence a post-expressionist
performance of their marriage
as she herself willingly hung
canvases he painted with bodily fluids.
Ironically, she’d come to understand
he meant to implicate her in the act
of his warped idea of creation,
bio-logical transgressive art crossing
thresholds of domestic space.
Denying him such indulgences
would only cause him to wander
that much further from home.
Reductive Sign-Off on the Ghazal
Unbeknownst to his readers
he radically revised
the convention of the ghazal,
“signing” over the signing
of his name in the final couplet
on each poem in each book
with swabbed saliva from a cheek,
meticulously tracing the letters
arranged as if to define him,
extending the reach
of his DNA.