An Anthology of Poetry Written in the Motherland

A Twenty-First Century Drug Revolution

I’ve learned to convert my social standards
when speaking to you. I merely listen and
agree—parliament member limbo.

You’ve converted this world to your own
dictatorship. Stalin controlling the bourgeois—
quiet, sustained, contemplating riots.

Stalin, your female Trotsky is gone—
she was exiled years ago, remember?
She chose that path, and I hope it didn’t
lead to nothingness, but life in general
is pro-choice, remember?

The drugs illuminated her pain, so you
now follow the same path alongside
a ghostly Trotsky. You’ve become a ghost
too—mindless and filled with anger, you
float through each of us leaving behind
traces of your fused personal pain—

but you are the dictator, and I am merely
the bourgeois (secretly liberal, secretly
socialist, secretly thinking with a dumb smile).

I believe in your life’s right to be pro-choice.

So, consume your balm, not quite of Gilead—
pop your remedies in pill form, liquid form—

but if you don’t recall, Stalin dies too.



The Square Root Of The Eightfold Path

Like Siddhartha,
I sit in Om stance on the wooden floor of my house—
a shelter beyond my means and
as my mind fucks the air that surrounds it,
I
feel,

Nothing.

I surrender my mind, my so-called
soul, and in my incepted imaginative realm,
I’m awakened by stripping naked
and walking into the feminist
ocean,
Chopin follows.

I search for the Three Marks of Existence
on my store-bought wooden floor
within the ocean of my thoughts,
but I don’t know where to look for them
in my tie-dyed shirt and paint-stained sweats.
.
The corners of my mind all look the same,
so gregarious,
like the people I mock.

The dog barks—fuck.
Back to fold one.

Om stance renewed, and I’m reminded
of hypocrisy and its growing trend.
I see the faults of individuals
of humanity
of myself,

and I begin to pray—

to Siddharta
to Jesus
to Brahma
to Zeus

none of them answer.

The dog barks.



Christian: adj. decent; respectable; not brutal; humane

We watched a video in my Christian
University classroom with sad music—
damn Brahms gets me every time.

“Fools for Christ” they called it. Three
people quit their jobs despite the
overwhelming amount of
denouncement from the masses—
they did it for the “big and the small”—
they threw away the possibility
of superfluous capital because they
“fell in love with Jesus”—
The music played as they read the
Bible to the small children, as they
stood in fields holding hands in
praise together, together.

I admired their heroism, but they didn’t
show the hypocrisy of the judgmental
nature that soon follows. They didn’t
show the man arguing on the Christian
counsel for the persecution of gays.
They didn’t show the woman teaching
the Sunday school teenagers to cast
off their pregnant friend because
of her sinful child, growing within her.

(a sin transformed into a miracle
in just nine short months)

They didn’t show the thousands
of years of jihads fought for the
invisible omnipotence.

(Lilliputian people dying over
cracking eggs on the short
side rather than the long)

They didn’t show the Christian police
suppressing the crowds of dancing
people in the streets—

(because happiness holds Satan)

They didn’t show the bloody faces
of the dead burned in camps
in Auschwitz, Peter the Hermit’s
face clinching under torture,
Jonathan Edwards
condemning people to hell

(over the holy book of Blefuscu,
the Alcaron)

They left out clips from
The Thirty Years War
The French Revolution
The Lebanese Civil War
The Iranian Revolution

We soon stood and held hands like
those “Fools for Christ”—we stood
circling the classroom like an eternal
wedding band. Our instructions
were to pray for one another
and I,
I did.

I prayed for all of them.