Delicious Strawberries

“Delicious strawberries!” the peddler cried
I smiled, knowing he lied:
Strawberries of this large a size
are always the hormones’ pride,
I thought and pressed on my way, when
a voice in my head whispered thus again:

“Representations in sound collude with sight,
no less with smell or touch or taste
t’assail the mind and smite one’s hopes with blight
in thoughtless actions due to haste, resulting to waste.”

Interview

Interviewed by the Iranian journalist and poet Mrs. Farideh Hassanzadeh-Mostafavi. Thank you dear Farideh, for introducing me to the Iranian public.

Aggression

Don’t interpret; show the human trek!
The implicit aggression and threat in food consumption.
A bite on a piece of bread, or a bite on the neck:
I live, you die – satiation versus starvation.

This late afternoon in early June

This late afternoon in early June,
on the Craterus beach
(hail river Byzantine General
robbed of water and victory)
my field of vision, a cerebral canvas,
is aching to split horizontally in half.

The top is in flat, smooth strokes of baby blue:
sky and sea in a seamless pairing,
almost imperceptible if it were not for
the petrified dragon – the isle of Dia –
divulging to reason the Line.

The frequent whirs and drones align with the shore
to alight on the hard shoulder of the General
to my left and hatch the seasonal suitors
of sun, sand and sea.

The bottom half is livelier,
a honeycomb of gritty gold and grey
worked with the palette knife
of the setting sun on sand.

The near crackling of dice in the tinder-less
abdomen of a backgammon echoes in my brain
and I cannot catch the silence of the sailing wind.