ramadhan: day after

been avoiding the news, the same news i glued to for information, as a child, on happenings in the world, whose fiction i spat with fan loyalty like wwf fans cheered on by the urgent vocals of the sports-casters.

babylon.

began to watch it to watch them, the rulers of our universe, the ones who dress themselves as sheep and stitch wolves clothing on those they anhillate, whose countries they rape, whose lands they steal with cold steel pressed on the backs of men with beards, women with covering. wolves who occupy the highest positions of power both in the financial capitals of the western world and in the print, visual, audio media that governs your tastes, excitement, incitement into saying- bomb those terrorists. into us in the privileged realm to dissect the victim, get into their pathologies, into how they could be tossing molotovs and homemade rockets at the poor nuclear apartheid holocaustic state, whose name was stolen from the bible and old-testament.

even the left who beef with each other on a word in a manifesto, who come to blows for less, nod their head in judgement on the desperate self- defenses of a people who live in a permanent refugee status, in what desmond tutu termed as worst than any apartheid he'd seen in south africa.

at best we might say free the occupied territory, but may not recall that this country with the star of david, was only fabricated 70 years ago by way of some of the most heinous acts of colonialism, which replicates to a T, its brother nation, in the manifest destiny that began here on the shores of north america 4 centuries ago. from a religiously persecuted people to jamestown, smallpox, genocide, slavery...and a steady media campaign to remind u of the savagery of the headhunting godless natives.

your average right wing historian will acknowledge that america is stolen land. not, the hopi or navajo or shoshone...reservation, as occupied. but somehow we can't make that connection about what was palestine. lets just talk about the gaza-rez that's being gassed with cyanide, hailed with bombs. hell, india, with all its issues with pakistan, refused to recognize israel as a legitimate country till the 90's, when it opened its shores to neo-liberalism and gave up on the movement it began against british colonialism 50 years prior.

is history repeating itself? not to liberal historians and academics who are stuck in romanticizing the defeated natives and how great they were. the defeated shifts, goes beyond color. we have more of an equal opportunity for cracking the whip so long as we bind to the ideology of the them, the new savage, which alleviates you from that title. whew!

the truth is most of us know/see that the wolf has no clothes, the babylon king never does ( i see you obama). but we're too scared to say anything. rightfully so. leonard jeffries a professor at city college back in the day, blasted white people, harangued the chinese merchants in africa, thrashed the arab slave trades, but the second he said something about zionism, he lost his job. deep.

you could talk about white people, about the crackerism of american history, but don't mention the zionist-persuasion of anything...you will lose your political position, academic position, your life. gotti had nothing on the mafia that controls america.

watch your neck kid!

ramadhan 2014: number 5: leaders

the rabbi, at the interfaith dinner, blasted hamas, said they were at fault for the death of the palestinian children, said they were the reason for the crisis in gaza, said once they stopped terrorizing the poor israelis, then peace would be possible. imam shamsi ali nodded along, agreed, even added how palestinians were at fault. his addendums were those that zionist liberals echo - both sides, the arab countries, patholgical arabs.

deep, i thought. wondered, what was the intention of this rabbi n imam in this high-profile interfaith dinner. wondered if the rabbi didn't know about how the secular plo and pflp (way before hamas was a thought), were massacred en masse by the idf. wondered if he didn't know that israel was constructed in very much the same way america was - manifest destiny - kill the savage - take the land. hence reservations, hence refugee camps. wondered if he thought people didn't know about zionism running the show, almost everything we see, hear...a million things. but he must've, he was old enough, in his 60's atleast. deep. real deep. if he knew n he was saying what he was saying.

wondered about the indonesian imam, wondered when he became an authority on speaking of/for a people and a struggle. wondered if he thought it was important to atleast read on the topic, on the history, or if his reading the Qur'an was enough for him to pass judgement on a region he wasn't from. wondered about leadership.

who passes themselves off as leaders? who put them there? what are the intentions of these leaders? what struggle are people who wage peace undergoing?

gandhi was a yogi, in bhakti, in jnana, in yama/niyama. part of the path of yogi is to be impartial, to judge not, and work from a place of nonattachment, compassion and justice.

justice has always been central to the prophets, from moses and jesus to the prophet muhammad and the messengers malcolm x and gandhiji. these yogis lived nonattachment, took a stance, lived truly fearless lives in pursuit of social balance, in alignment with the Oneness.

who are your leaders? what makes them leaders. my leaders r in such a deep Quiet they are beyond the babylon frequency of z100, hot 97, summer jam, cnn, mtv, bet, nbc... they are beyond this dimension, uncaptureable, immune to 70mm lenses and fbi cia.

all praise is due to the leaders, the silent ones, whose intentions are clear as lake tahoe, as the nyc skyline without buildings and smog. 

ramadhan 2014: number 4: lover

days are numbers. islamic numerology is laid out by the Grand Reader. decks of cards stacked as mountains. the stars carry answers for those who think. according to the Qur'an, thought, critical, creative, left and right hemispheres, must be engaged to see what is possible.

what is possible is seemingly impossible, head on ground, feet in the sky, legs behind neck. foot jabbed into thigh, hands in salutations to the Essence. all praise is due. all praise is always due. hence the path of yogum.

yoga stills the body into a deeper awareness of capacity, of alignment with ALLAH, with connectivity with sun moon planets galaxies. connection. connect with You. yoga is silent meditations, detachment from this body. om.

Ooooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

vedic language bleeds into Qur'an. truth is truth, is past the great illusion - shaitan - nafs - ego.

i Am a Lover. fall in love daily, with the ascenders, those who fly, take flight. melt in their eyes as they live beyond status and professions. take hold of their hand, even as they shudder about a breeze they recalled from a walk along riverside park. fall into their story and walk. jesus walks with us. the guru muhammad Guides.

i Am a Lover, without a border, this skin can hardly hold me, growing past head and shoulder stand. i Am feared by those who look for lines written by successful authors of how-to's, who regurgitate the nihilsim of meek mills and frenchie and rick ross and bop their heads to rikers frequencies. i escaped sing-sing and have run away with the beggars bowl to grow, to grow. i can only grow from You. what do you have to say?

i Love with tears, until we are both crying, until the ocean we lay by envelopes us in a kiss of drown before we resurge and recall breath. ahhhhhh. alll praise is due. alive. another moment to get deeper in this fast, beyond eyes, beyond bones and organ systems.

these words are un-packageable. no product here. no hits. no clever rhyme schemes that mangle eminem. no formulas of exposition, conflict, rising action.... climax with You. hold You in my arms. and then i move on. find You everywhere. Lover. Love. 

ramadhan 2014: day 3: lines

errands ran me from one line to another. been trying to circle around the lines, but people kept telling me to get back, to stay in line.

the guru muhammad prescribed salat, ramadhan, dikr, quietness. but there were no lines, at least not like the sky scraping city bank building in l.i.c, queens, not lines like the sidewalks and welfare and medicaid and kendrik lamar concerts.

lines like geometrics encircle the path of submission (islam), of hands up head down. lines as circular as the moon and the lunar calendar that men with beards spot like the three kings before determining the month of fasting has arrived.

the surrender (islam) is from understanding that the choppers with the spots shining down after the heist, the sirens and blue and red lights, and blue men with .9mm's are maya, are there for the banks and the individuals with property deeply invested in the ism of being separate from their fellow man, beings.

their lines are maya, i could hear the guru isa whisper. their lines are yours and mines. we are the lines. we are individuals in containers of spaces called apartments and houses and possible waves at neighbors, possible nots. we are the lines - mine not yours, here's my number to prove it, called it, did your phone ring? no. mine did. my money, my women, my levis and nikes, and time. all mine.

stopped by the thrift shop in between babylon doctors who clocked me at 98.5 seconds, smiled plastic and ghost like the ones my great dada would capture in bottles in our ancestral village, which has over time become for me elijah muhammad's africa, sun ra's mars, the beatle's yesterday.

got some slacks to cut into long shorts for the heat, for the line where temperature meets modesty, an idea that is as clear as yin is to yang, where tall is 5'2 and short below 4'6. the yang changes when moving to masai land, to germany, where short is below 5'10.

modesty is a line like a circle with the night on one side and the day on the other. 

ramadhan 2014: day 2: daydream

slept at 6am. woke at 7 and fell into a daydream.

in the train, we whirled oms all the way to grandcentral, where i stood in warrior 3 for seconds n watched queen watch the sun rise in the vast underground. an attempt to make sense of am and pm and people in between.

attempted to make sense of what happened to istanbul iftar on queens blvd with bro n friends n queen. where did they all go? wondered if the rest of ramadhan would be the usual sense of non-community, of the ny i've always known - teeming with people going somewhere for something and ghost. the ghosts hang around for days after a convo and then become a quote... 

confused by the absence of everyone, i longed for a muslim partner to transverse secret ramadhan wonderlands, and finding no such community at the cvs in sunnyside, i rushed home for meaning. 

maha mahirishi yogi by way of youtube, gave me the antidote for success...transcendental meditation. i'm not sure exactly what he said anymore, but it made a lot of sense, and i was probably too busy wondering if he was really levitating on the river behind him when the cameras were off or was he swinging the yoga groupie circuit. i wouldn't be mad at him either way.

i was just dreaming and wondering if he was really there when i was standing on the concrete park with the dip bars next to the river he was being filmed at, by gigantic robots who carried him to osiris. yeah...osiris, 10,000 moons ago, which was all piled up and laid flat like a futon for me to sleep on for hours until it was time to leave.

sabhia was getting back and i needed to do something with my life, so i did what i knew best - hopped on the train and surfed for meaning...found it in the break fast with the fam...

ramadhan 2014: day 1: post-bottom

fasting from anything that walks, crawls, slithers, flies, swims. even honey...

vegan ramadhan - reminder of why i'm doing this...

this ramadhan is dedicated to all kindred species and their ancestors, and the water that spills, that leaves me parched and casting libations for all the extinguished smiling giraffes and mexican grizzlies and american giant beavers and extinguished beings...tears, prayers and meditations.

 saturday, i said no to the chicken. gave the bhaklava at the turkish iftar to the hijabi mother, who like my amma, gladly accepted, saying she'd give it to her son. we all gave her our bhaklava, my brother, his homies n queen.

queen came on the whim, rearranged time to leave the mountains n find me. i was with a client, finding pressure points on his back, readjusting his kapha by pressing on his lung meridian and hanging around long enough to listen to a past. ayurveda spoke sanskrit gibberish. tones i regurgitated while my client lay facing the earth 7 stories above...

queen heard, recited at grand central while she waited for me to call back: om tryambakum ye jamahe sugandim pushti vardanam...

i kept repeating the 8-syllable words till maha marishi yogi spoke to me, said the words in sanskrit were unimportant, knowing them will only have you contemplating information. it's the music, the vibration that's important, he said, to a harvard audience, in the ghost of malcolm's debate there a few years earlier, when ammu was reciting Qur'an. she still does, not knowing more than the meaning of a few words. she sways when she recites and i turn off pandora's box of babylon tunes to listen, to fall into a spell, like the breeze that carried queen n i that night into a cafe.

queen got coffee with chocolate, i mmmd and just stuck to the black drip in americana. queen shared chapters from her life, i listened, and added on, collaborating on re-making history as it never happened.

saturday was community, brother, bro's homies, queen, the outdoor ottoman break fast, a sense of union with others in this path of submission, of placing my hands in the air and bowing down...all praise is due.