the past couple months i've relished winter in my thumbs, jamming myself into a solitude so deep only bedouin monks in the last car of the 7, q, and 5 train could find me, as i nod off between 2 hour commutes from one end of queens to a dead end road of the bronx. parts of me have already been there, separated by 1990's and the words from the ashen lips of past lifetime friends who lived and breathed those neighborhoods through blunt smoke and cheap liquors that we poured like a movie, until our libations to upstate prisons were a mirror we could fix our curly hair in.
of late i've been dreaming the surahs of the qur'an, imagining what it would be like to read the scriptures on the bed of the arches of utah and hear the echoes of jesus in his gospel of yassein: more important than the written word is the living word; the living word is the scripture of the earth mother. word. all praise is due. all praise is due to the earth. much respect to You, even if the actions of my kin show you the opposite.
i made it into the prayer rug of the prophet muhammad (peace n blessings be upon him and his family of shahids and the lineage of revolution he has brought to planet earth). finally, after returning from the hideout of jesus, as rumored between whispers of the people of south and north and east india (bangladesh), i have made it out of the asphalt zoo, where i paced in a cage and howled at something happening somewhere that set bars closer to my face, bars that were always maya.
here, in the woods, i am returned to innocence. for a week. for a week, i hope to rewire, recable my body and mind with the hudson n catskills and my fake cousins who left babylon like fugitives when the dollar signs of capitalism prophets in the colors of pink-clinton, brown-obama, olive-bloomberg, made it clear.
i'm yodeling quietly, singing little darling, its been a long long long winter, to warrior indigenous women like my amma, like mina, like sadhya, like sarah, like sol, like nana, who beat their chests and cry poetry into the hudson river. i nearly fall and allow myself to take the journey of moses, but not yet.
i'm not ready to go back to the city of strangers, where the parvenu, the bourgeois or aspiring bourgeois of muslim men n women i've occasionally sought philosophy with at nyu's islamic center, see through me like the wall-sized windows overlooking the urban-renewal of washington square park. i am an invisible-man among these muslims, alive for moments sometimes, until my words slip through the cracks of my feet swaggered by 1980's beat-down culture and the war paint that class wars put on my face, permanently marking me as slums of dhaka, a generation from house-boy. i embraced it though, 1st through tim's and braids, and then through the shawls of bangli rebel poets and ghetto legends who served the words of ALLAH in the basements of lefrak projects in queens. i embraced the battle cry of the people of a past so rich, that the highest incidence of suicide and alcoholism and barbed wire along reservation borders could not stop the ancient call of forests.
all praise is due, i say, at these rejections of character, of people like places of employment, who wear the words of scripture like che-guevera on a gap t-shirt, like a do not enter sign. i enter anyway because i love them. but i leave shortly after, remembering the maya, remembering the road less traveled, were footsteps of messengers john afrika, and abraham, and joseph, and gandhi and harriet tubman and my amma n bhaiyas walked on. the rustle of the leaves here remind me. You remind me. the ice is slowly melting. here comes the sun, here comes the sun...
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