This poem is dedicated to men who are unhappy for a living
Whose last smiles have long been slaughtered
A friend once accused me of being an unhappy poet
But then I ask him, how can I be happy?
How do you even expect to find a happy poet in a burning country?

When I write tragedy, I think of heaven
I imagine God looking at me with an omniscient pity
I think I hear his voice as he laments
“Darkness has consumed this boy.”

But then I did not choose this darkness, this shimmering anger I wear like a tunic
I am not even angry, I am simply a burning river
One who flows through Hades just to escape the cold heat of his home.

Sometimes, I speak out loud yet inwardly wish not to hear my own words
They sound like shrapnel, with all its heaviness
How a man was shattered with a letter bomb
How a man’s freedom was amputated with the sword of injustice
How my mother cried as she stirred her soup
Because Daddy’s innocent jail term is nine years unserved
All these memories gnaw at my head
And you expect me to write about candy and honey?

When my tongue is ready, I’ll tell the full story
Of the night when I had an apparition that took me to paradise
Paradise is the meeting point of rage and ecstasy
A confluence of the boiling and the freezing.

A man, long dead, once met me in my garden
He’d come with a scroll from the sepulchre at the heart of Sahara
To teach me, rebel artist, the language of rancid truth
But first I must learn the orthography of this language
So he opened the scroll, asked me to repeat after him
As he began:
A for Asunder; B for Broken . . .

I was crying when he got to R
Requiem for those whom injustice buried their bones.