Come Find Me

Wrote you a nameless note, said I love you.
Is that enough
for you to come find me?
Perfumed it with the scent of freshly picked
weeds and stale tears. I'm hiding,
will you one day soon come and find me?
Never sent you the letter. It'd said I'm lonely.
Crossed out very and always. Crossed out I. Then
Tore it. Burned it. Spread the ashes. I feel—
Won't you come and find me?
Was always good at hide-and-seek.
Once I hid myself so well even
I gave up trying to find me.
Like a shadow that has lost the sun,
a dream with the dreamer dead, an echo, a memory,
a place gone and a time past, a swamp—
if you are a river, flow this way sometime, find
me.

Disconnected I

One I was born, raised, in Tehran.  So long ago.
Another I resides here in Vancouver, haunts
the woods and taverns, coffee shops and seasides, wants
to know
the scent of scentless tulips, sounds of dusty streets, the taste of fumes
that shroud Tehran—the foreign smoke that covers crowds and cars.
To know the empty rooms
that one assumes
perhaps contain some hints.  What was
or could become, I'll never know,
but it is time something connects—something resumes. 

What will grow in Aleppo? (a 5-7-5 haiku)

Life born from Tigris,
yellow asphodels, tulips.
Scent of sun-dried blood.

Memories

memories are bones we find

inside unmarked burial grounds
when digging for fresh water

memories are Frankensteins
fragments forced into sense
their last words your lips her scent

memories are misleading brochures
tales with no beginnings and no ends
sickly ghosts needing doctors or priests

memories are abandoned rusting rails
they’re circuses of snapshots and sounds
floundering zoos of beauties and beasts

memories stretch from depths of the brain
through blood and flesh and through bones
like a meandering poem looking for home

Sky Ghazal

I saw my lover's face in light at dawn
The sky's visage in candlelight at dawn

Sky's face dyed with streaks of rose and lemon
As though a bursting dynamite at dawn

I wish I could reach up and touch the sky
Just like a rising delta kite at dawn

If I could breathe in the sky's scent up close
How I envy the birds in flight at dawn

My love for sky's sweet face keeps on burning
Yet all Arash can do is write at dawn

Longing's Song

I'm the catnip's scent
I'm the purring sound
In pursuit of lust
I'm the feral hound

I'm the rhyming source
I'm its ceaseless caw
In the timbered heart
I'm the pouncing maw

I'm the empty tick
I'm the timeless hell
I'm the drowning flesh
In the wishing well

I'm the grasping want
I'm the craving tongue
In abysmal lull
I'm the longing's song

Craving for Peace

Of late and when the world's asleep
I've got a strange craving for peace
And sleepwalk down so late at night
My fingers still groping for light
And if a plate inside that fridge
Oh even if it's just one piece
One taste of it could make me weep
It's scent would float as if a bridge
Above ripples beyond my sight 
To where no word can stand for spite
To where no fear or fight can creep
Nor crazed turbulence in the deep

My doctor calling me "addict"
Prescribed a diet very strict:
No peace at home even outside
No peace especially at night
But healthy dose of grim conflict
It's tough love for this peace addict

No Simpler

Everything should be made,  
professor Albert Einstein averred,
as simple as possible but
no simpler.

I'm fond of your chubby dimpled chin
Delight in whispers of the scent of your skin
So much is lost in reducing all that's true
to only I love you

Last Fall

Leaves of saffron and marigold
mingled with canary and rose,
some shattered, some frozen
within the mud and early snow.

The scent of chilly air and soil,
the sound of familiar voices
rising up at once to a roar,
the feel of gloved fingers below,
all fused becoming something new
that grew more and more distant,
but she enjoyed her last fall; every hue.

Dirty Eyes

I woke up covered all 
In fragments of a dream,
All sticky like the scent of skunks
That sprayed my storybook last night.
—Wash up!  the voices shrieked 
And pushed my head madly beneath
A pool of tears until I drowned 
Again inside another dream.

So tell me whose tears were that soaked 
The leaves I'd flipped through all last night 
With every flutter of lashes so moist.
So speak but make it soft and clean
And hold my hands and smile and joke
And only then describe my nightly scene 
The screens projected on my twitching lids 
The ghastly films my dirty eyes have seen.... 

But Looking Back Tonight…

As I look tonight I see a clock that is cracked. 
My muffins tucked in bed, so we’re alone perhaps, 
the tree aglow in red, and all the presents wrapped,  
a Lego set for Kat—But face it, facts are facts! 
You smashed the clock (recall: my gift the day we met), 
and broke the twenty-year-old glass. Your bags been packed 
for years inside your head.  And yet I’d grown attached  
to whispers in the dark, addicted to your scent….
Though you left, it was your orchid pillow I kept, 
and for years and years I hugged the pillow and wept. 
You recall the nights I kissed the curve of your back? 
Hurts me you never truly loved me, loved me back. 
Now I know the thing was just a lie, was an act... 
But tonight I’ve you, my happy family, back.   
And looking back tonight I see the clock…intact.