Ode to Sleep

When you fall asleep

it is I who dreams 

suspended in vacancy

watching things that wander

unmoored from gravity

beds and bedrooms

libraries and brooms

names untagged from things

all of which will come down

and return to identities

when you awake

Teas

Mid-morning tea is not morning tea

one is for throat-wetting 

and the other a pick-me-up

of a flagging day

but then there are other hot drinks

laced with words picked 

from conversations 

from touch and memory

a smile, a laugh, silence and a kiss;

there's tea in give and tea in receiving

and I don't know what lifts more

The virtues of unemployment

like an ethereal scavenger sweeping
over the litter that collects in tiny piles
on the architecture of the political
those made-up faces and faces that are beyond repair;
I see the epic narratives missed by literatures
in a scar, in the plain tea quick-fix
the marshmellows and poisons
the varnishing that makes palatable
ineffective and yet bitter medicines
prescribed by these quack doctored times;
I stand at a window without a frame
by a petti kade too humble for name
but which is sentinel to monotonies unnoticed
same faces at the same time
same voices asking for the same things
same greetings, same smiles and same conversations
layered over the unspeakable
in the courtesies that say nothing
but are warm nevertheless and true as well
kohomada? vahiy da? Ennam....
'We are one,' I tell myself
'We are solitary people,' I also add,
take a breath and think of you.
Life is good.