Male Middle Eastern

The smell of freedom
came with peach;
orange-like soap suds
under a low-ceiling
of showering promises.

A small iron-framed window
in the tile wall
into the dark unknown
its handle too wet
for fresh minds to grip.

Faces awashed with the assumed known
flicking mental floaters of
easy experimentation
into endlessness...

It all came to blossom
many seas later;
here.

The specimens of by-products
of time's tests
lined up at my
roach-filled
residence.

Some blowing dreams of
fall-like aspirations
into the remaining sunlight,
gripping moments like
dripping chocolate on ice.

And most blew bad mouth breath
into contaminated fish bowls
and observed the fish sink....

Um Ali

There were dreams for a house
scratched on paper …
at odd moments when the corner
of an available room was free
and the light sufficient.

Dreams for a home
while on the run
from dream-killers
and home-destroyers.
Thoughts of reunion
under a roof
when blood mattered
and distance had drawn too long…

Her scratches as emblematic as
sunshine on sunflowers;
groping for a reality
loudly passing away.

Silently scratched on thin scrap paper
supported by thick books of thought
that were very different
filled with skeleton letters that danced to
a homesick tune…

Hiding from the moonlight
under eroding bus stop signs
escaping the end
though it loomed
as close as the following second…

Silently stopping within a sunflower second

as the dream-killers
seize the scratches

rip the paper house to pieces

shredding all dreams of homecoming
shooting the last 'different' thoughts
back into the skulls of snoozing sunflowers
before the sun could
even dream of a horizon…

-Um Ali was an Iraqi communist who was hunted down, detained, tortured and eventually murdered by Saddam’s regime, in the early Eighties. In her run from one hideout to another, escaping Saddams 'gestapo', she dreamed of building a family home.