Moon Kiss
The waters glistened, rippling their messages, calling to the moon above with yearnings of desire. The moon in all her beauty stroked their surface, iridescent fingers smoothed and caressed, the water undulated underneath.
You are that moon and my being is rising up to kiss your beauty.
This is what she said to the night, waking with a snake uncoiled descending with jaws open out of her being
and the night said
Desire
and we were moon led, seduced by the opal spell, our blood charged with the current of each other
You kissed me
and we danced
hypnotised,
a ripe flower, a fruit, a moon fruit, a taste, a wish, a kiss, a night sky song
the sky of me opening into your blue.
Where is the next kiss? I said
Upon St Catherine’s, we are dancing under the moon you replied,
I want an orchestra, jazz, with saxophone and we agreed and I would wear a red velvet dress and you your blue shirt
For our third kiss let’s kiss underwater I said
In a magical pool. Our breath never-ending.
Just as the soul does not end
and a rightful journey will always begin, no matter, no matter.
The Dancer
I want to make a dress like a lighted minaret
like a fountain’s kiss of water
like a silhouetted dome in the Cairo skyline
Yes
I want to make a dress like this
to pirouette through these ravaged streets
and reclaim the love that used to be here
Yes
I will make a flower crown and take it to my waiting lion
we will remember each hope
then set fire to the ocean of our hearts
The Bull and the Flower
Hearing the hypnotic thrashing of the bull.
The bull and the blood and the moon and the catcalling
its insides twisted with the bite of the praying mantis.
The desert yellow, textured and soft, a pigment none
could ever catch.
He said it was Venus up above
his voice and his warmth, his hand, our hands
And now I am waiting for blood.
The silver bull waits, that waiting not as a meditation but as
grass grows or trees root, a knowledge.
And oh the dancing girls of Apis, how I see their plaited
hair and sensuous limbs
and the flowers placed upon the glorious creature
This is the Egypt in my sex
The beatific boys
and the priestess cults
And I say, ‘I don’t care, he gave me a poem’
He gave me a poem yes
not the kiss but that breath after the kiss
yes, that
And the blood came and the blood and the moon and the
red, all one, a sonorous flower.
Remember the bull by the sea, not the white one who
brought his urging upon that spellbound queen, but the
one who heard your tempo, as I
You pushed
I opened
Again a flower, flushed with hope and desire
in a rapid moment of life.
And the desert sands and the oasis and the birds at dawn
all bring me into and out of this, this gloriousness.
He is sleeping now, his nostrils gently pacing his dreams,
dreams of pride and freedom, of suppleness, his lithe
soul, his uncontained will, virility and ownership
Yes
Because those of us who hear him
are owned by him unleashed as he is within the soul.
The Road
The road was a poem
reciting its destination
incanting gods of highway houses, kiosks, and dogs
it lay unfurled as a tongue shouting, ‘Get to hell!’ to roadblocks
and running, it ran, to all its waiting truths.
All artwork is courtesy of Reda Khalil.
