NON OPTATION

Amir Mogharabi
DIRTY MEN
RUPTURED HEART
YOUR LAST LIE
SWOLLEN HEART
CORRESPONDING ORGAN
MY LADY
WAR AND JOY
SCATTERED I
SCATTERED II
DELICATE POISON
BITTER EYE
MORGUE AND TONGUE
Poetry, like dance, is fertile in wonders like
dreams and heroin. ‘Harmony’ tastes every
pleasure, adorns herself in every ornament,
exercises every power - in her imagination. The
white poet prefers reality, even paltry reality, to
these rich lies.

His work is an incessant struggle against pride,

imagination and laziness.

Accepting his gift, even if he suffers from it and

suffers from suffering, he seeks to make it serve
ends greater than his selfish desires: the as-yet-
unknown cause of this gift.
Every poem is born of a seed, dark at first, which
we must make luminous for it to produce fruits of
light. With the black poet, the seed remains dark and
produces blind, subterranean vegetation. To make
it shine, one must create silence, for this seed is the
Thing-to-be-said itself, the central emotion that
seeks to express itself through my whole machine.
The machine by itself is dark, but it likes to proclaim
itself luminous, and manages to make itself believed.

As soon as it is set in motion by the seed’s germina-

tion, it claims to be acting under its own steam, it
shows off for the perverse pleasure of each of its
levers and gears. So be quiet, machine! Work and
shut up! Silence to word games, memorized lines,
memories fortuitously assembled; silence to ambi-
tion, to the desire to shine - for only light shines by
itself; silence to self-flattery and self-pity; silence to
the rooster who thinks he makes the sun rise. Silence
to the foreigner who thinks he is at home.
And silence parts the shadows, the seed begins to
glow, lighting, not lit. That is what you have to do. It
is very difficult, but each little effort receives a little
glimmer of light in reward. The Thing-to-be-said
then appears in its most intimate form, as an eternal
certainty - a pinpoint of light containing the im-
mensity of the desire for Being.

Fuck Being.

Fuck the Philosopher who commences with

Doubt
and arrives at
Being.

Fuck the Saint that asks one to commence

with a confession.

I confess, time is an easy game to play.

DIRT Y MEN
Sand is upon the faces of dirty men.

Dirty critics who

(after losing a glorious

but unmistakably messy war with the desert itself)

have nothing at their disposition;

other than regrettable, and isolated arguments.

Their disguised longing to return

unequivocally
to a standing marble placard.

Where the names of less fortunate generations

reserve a toll to pay their way out.
Out of an intolerably honest life.

And amongst each potential inscription

set in stone
stone in set

the theatricality of it all

drives the sand down their throats.

It slowly peels away at their skin

as successive, and less informed men,
mistake the wind
for the bumps that would rise on their skin.

For the bumps that their fingers race over,

as they try and write with the same temerity
as the blind sing before an image of love.
RUPTURED HEART
Floral decay.

Rupturing heart.
Soul returning with a carcass in its hands.

I beg you to answer me now:

Will you hear the murmur from this bloodied mouth?

After a fight with wars and wands

motioning across worlds composed of words.
Of dialectics.

A saddle sits on a broken horse,

remains polished and silky over the overtones
of a slightly stronger gust of wind.
The tweed and hair lays itself thin.

A stronger gust of wind lays

upon a laziness for yesterday.
When these words,
all but became, the desert and the crackled lips under which
my teeth began to rattle.
Like the snakes at my feet began to escape,
from my fear.

My agony is wedded to the imagination of animals.

YOUR L AST LIE
As light burns through your hand loomed linen;
draped across one of many windows where

you awake with your body a-blaze;

the task
at first

is to understand that you exist.

Then, it is to believe, causally, in this existence.

Then, it is to deny
that your very attempt to believe
your will to become,

makes you wish you never opened your eyes.

All together.

A feather.
From outside.
Causes you to wonder:
Fly from one testament to the next.
Where each argument, whether it is the way it floats
is equally irrelevant. that makes you want to fly.

Where each experience,

equally as unbearable.

Where each bit of tolerance, is no less than a short reading

before an everlasting vigil.

A vigil as earnest as your last lie.

SWOLLEN HEART
Rumble.

Rumble with fury and fire.

In your swollen heart.

Revel.

Revel with delight and disgust.

In your swollen heart.

For
now that your heart is in your hands

it is easy to watch
each palpitation
grow stronger.

Grow with each iteration

of
who you want to be
who you will be
and how you will eventually burn.

How you will eventually burn

and how your poetry will be read

with the same fury and fire

that you first saw emanating
from your swollen heart.

From your swollen heart.

This swollen heart.

This swollen heart.
This This.
C ORRESPONDING ORGAN
His head felt as if

(summoned by the same gods from whom we

construe images of anger and aggression)

it were held in place from above.

And that

(having lost all recollection of his body)

if it stayed suspended like this any longer, he

would begin to dry heave what was left of his
imagination, and its corresponding organ.
MY L ADY
My lady’s tomb is living amongst us.

It stirs, with the consistency of a mirage

from under our inconsistent tongues.

As she begins to speak:

the sun and its radiance merge effervescently.

and

In the darkened house of architects who believe in progress

or
In the darkened heart of artists who believe in reason

my lady is never to be found.

When the dead return home to drowse,

They return to where the body, the earth, and their simulta-
neous decomposition, are all pigments on a circular canvas:

And the spirit maintains its flux and its effects.

A contradiction between
A crown and its construction.
A vapor full of alchemy.
A gust of wind that drifts across a drying puddle, at irregu-
lar intervals.

There, with what we may call dreams, what we may call a

string of symbols against a static black the drifting and the
dreaming, will occur at the level of absolute indifference. At
an ‘immanence nouveau.’
WAR AND JOY
When vigilance proceeds intuition
something within us
also goes utterly wrong.

A child
(elbows pressed against a cold
formica table-top)

must either

resist the beveled edges shaped across his tongue

(until he finds that they cut

through the iron rods of knowledge,
through the calcified image
of ignoble emperors)

the bodies of war and joy

or accept that,
to learn:

is to enter an orchard
full of flowering obstacles
(also blooming along a beveled axis)
that shank us,
without effecting our harmony
in the ever-absence of a scream.

Not even silence is forgiven.

Ever-silence.
Ever-absence.

An attunement has its back turned.

All cries are laughter gone mad.
A back has its attunement in turn.
Everything is black.
SCAT TERED I
Scattered

late at night
late at night

my rivals cast away

their flattery, with battered bends and batting eyelashes.

Their backs are turn towards their stomachs.

Finding their torment, they are deserved of warm plates

serving them ‘unjustly.’

They defend the simple things

the little nothings of our common cuisine.

And they weep,

squandering all of my verse and
mistaking the aversion of my eyes,
for a confident soul battling with a body
that is full of fear
and gas masks made of poison.

Torn up from the roots

and scattered all over the world.

Like the seeds of a plentiful harvest.

Or a page less book, unbound
that sits precariously atop an equally ignoble building.

A slight breeze begins to scatter pages over the

horizon
with just enough simplicity and just enough softness
to avoid
a permanent fold in these words or worlds.

Words and Worlds.

SCAT TERED II
Scattered
are the remains
of a pleasant day.

This remorse: is its own comedy.

I laugh out loud and wonder why each tear

falls apart; like despair made of brittle grime and clay.
Brittle clay women, filled with despair and crime.

Despair, like in the dreams of grander

criminals and heists. Grander glamour.

All women find themselves beautifully portrayed,

in the gaze of soldiers preparing for departure.

Or is it servants, who walk with the stride of shipwrecked and

abandoned dreams?

Their lost fortunes, also awaiting the arrival of a letter.

Dried mucus sealed along an enclosed history,
full of misery, love and lies.
This war is not over.

Not this war: The one which wreaks with the ardor of bombs
or the plight of burning pedestrians and falling boxes full of
grace; but the war with our restlessness.
Our insatiable need to experience the world unconsciously.
The same world which dismisses us
as the earth sullenly shakes its beliefs into our homes.

And death, on the interior of each blue

is like a painted, leaning, tired
and perpetually working woman.

A woman whose darkened room serves as an ironing board.

An ironing board burned in the same darkness she occupies.
DELICATE POISON
In an age where poison is a delicacy
we search for nourishment; with dim eyes;
dim witted and tender hands
covered in soot, in dust and dander that trembles
along each crooked canyon. Each broken knuckle.

And I am alone in my pursuit,

of unhappiness.

My integrity, breaks with the slander

I hear
from falling ice clouds, filled with faces
of laughing men upon laughing horses.

Then,
descending with the weight
of an icicle laden memory,
the horses and their armor dwindle.

An elderly man, of many days forgotten, is deemed an icon.

Yet he smiles like a stupid child. He stumbles, and falls onto my
empty rocking chair. Breaks it into splinters for the starving
soul of every young poet holding on for good.

Oh, empty rocking chair. Oh un-stiched desire to let go of each

success, and its sense of satisfaction.

An archive contains my memories, and each one, hand picked

from amongst the cherry blossoms and
their impossible thorns
are like pawns;
defending the rite of nature so that
the particular
may simply pass
while
the universal
may simply make
us cry.
BIT TER EYE
Haunting the black air

I escape
gently
from the rumors and secrets that deafen
the melody rolling from my contra-bass.

Fingers

still young,
move in opposition to my doubts.

The history of the others:

(those for whom I would bury

pennies in empty lakes
those for whom I would wish
permanence into a deep well.)

Their youth, their sovereignty.

Their blackened discoveries
under solemn moons
stained upon a surface discovered decades ago)

They are the file cabinets of my future.

They are the remorseful perspective

I must speak of from yet another angle.

Having now seen:

That invisible pain where the social climate

fills itself like champagne and cherry laughter.

Shunned with a bitter eye.

MORGUE AND TONGUE
On this side of the continent, it wreaks of spring.

Heathen. Earthen. Scent from below, from below the

softness of my now calloused feet.

Confusion rises, with a plume of mulch and moist soil,

as a woman passes me by.

My head, full of agony, full of the plumb tongue of my scream.

It beckons but will no longer roll.

And instead, like a man in the morgue

I scream with my glance, my own image,
underneath the darkness of a sallow, darkly bitten skin.

Bite me again.
Bite me again.

The winter desert is cold again.

The winter desert is cold again.

And I ask, if on the other side, of this same earth:

Is it instead snowing angels as consistently

as stupidity reigns free,
everywhere?

May freedom mean utter stupidity.

May utterances mean nothing.
May logic lack an utterance altogether.

May my mouth smile in synchronization with what

I want to mean. Namely this.
VICTORIOUS PILOT
Feverish:

Stupidity is primal.

An escape, to the ocean, or through a forest

full of predators, delighted
by the sight of numbers and fixed stars
hovering above our
cruelly human heads.

Kneeling:

Humility is a liar between two poles.

One is mourning.
The other is

Celebrating.

Celebrating:

Either a victorious murder (as if victory were a mask or a swol-

len disguise covered with vaccines and barriers of defense)

The getaway, is fortutitous.

The crowds, enamored by artwork, must be dead already.

Since, outside all we hear are the passing of cars.

And call our pilots away from the wind.

As if the planes were not already painterly objects, after they are
displayed, in a ravaged collection of obtuse triangles, across a
colorless ocean.

The horizon will never arrive.

The horizon will never arrive.
When the sun rises,
There is a glimmer upon your fingernails.

A nail, upon your trash and dust and can.

A nail, upon your trash and dust and can.

And, when the time comes to build your-self anew

Whether with a flock of pigeons

Or on the side of a stable
full of swollen horses,

You will not be the one

Who beckons the storm before the rain.

The storm before the rain.

And a dead pigeon.

Mash.

Walk along a river and inside

Each nest
Each harmony
Each rupture
Each crack in a muddy slope of nevertheless,
You will find rain before the storm.