Sunday is not
Funday.
Especially this one.
There is a hint
Of rain, more than a hint
Of dimness
Darkness
Cloudness.
Then there is
Tomorrow, the much-dreaded.
Today I will
Shave
Iron clothes
Gas the car.
Tomorrow, before daylight,
I’ll set off
Grim-faced
Determined
Single-purposed.
To arrive by 8 a.m.
Is not to
Sleep in.
No more of that
Human
Foolishness.
Because work is what
We people do.
They call it “making
A living” and not
“Having
A
Life.”
The Library, 9 A.M.
I am surrounded
By books.
Their covers flash
Colorful faces.
I step toward one
(In particular)
To note its personality.
I pick it up, look at its
First page.
Its words
Bring a smile. I place it
Back down.
I walk among
The stacks.
A million seductive whispers
Come my way.
I listen
I hear
I smile
(Inwardly).
They want me to stop,
Pay closer attention.
I will stop,
I whisper back. I promise
I will.
And so I do.
I stop, touch
A spine
And read the words
With reader’s eyes.
People have died.
People I’ve loved
Have gone.
I cried when they stopped.
I watched them disappear.
Their faces
Grew white.
It was the color of nothing, nobody,
No more. We put them
In expensive boxes
Left their lids open
So the curious
Could gawk.
Their faces were as plastic
As doll skin.
Then we closed the lids
Carried them to green places.
Once there
A man said,
Ashes to ashes
Dust to dust.
They went down
Were lowered
Into holes.
We left
Drove away
And forgot.
Poems are like
Things you find
On the beach.
They’re misshapen but usually
Sparkle in sunlight.
Some are alive
And scuttle about.
Others are dead but have left
Beautiful
White
Skeletons.
888
Visitors
Some days the poems knock
On your front door.
You go to open it
And greet them.
You get lots of visitors
On such days.
The knocking persists
Even as you turn off
The lights.
The knocking persists.
The knocking persists.
The knocking persists.
Other days
You wait. No one comes.
You feel
Lonely
Forgotten
Dead. Maybe you are dead?
How would you even
Know if you were
Or weren’t? Who
Would give you
The news?
When no one comes
You aren’t for sure
If you even
Are.
From 2008 to 2015, I lived in Cairo, Egypt, and taught at The American University in Cairo. In the spring of 2011, about midway through my seven-year stint in North Africa and only two months after Hosni Mubarak was pushed out of office by an enormous uprising of fed-up Egyptians, I met Azza, a born and bred Cairene and the woman who would become my wife less than a year later.
When I met Azza, she had a successful catering business, specializing in Italian food. Now that we are living in the US—in interesting San Antonio, Texas, a place that feels a little like an American city with a whole lot of Mexico mixed in—my wife is once again considering starting her own enterprise. This time, though, she’s looking at opening a home bakery. (The Lone Star State doesn’t heavily regulate the cottage food industry, thus incentivizing those who wish run such a business out of their own kitchens.)
We just finished up with the Christmas holidays. By the way, my wife is a Muslim and she just loves this time of year. In fact, she single-handedly destroys all the ugly stereotypes that many close-minded people—I’m thinking mostly about the Trump Evangelicals as I write this—have about practitioners of Islam. I bring all this up because she did a ton of baking in the run-up to the twenty-fifth of December, and as is usually the case, because she is such a professional in the kitchen, she wrapped a turban around her head to keep stray hair out of the food she was preparing.
One morning I saw her with such a wrap on her head and told her she looked like Aunt Jemima. Knowing that wouldn’t understand such a reference, I tried to explain who this person was. As luck would have it, I went to the grocery store a few minutes later and found the appropriate aisle—the one where they kept the syrups for pancakes and waffles and such—and took a picture of the label with America’s beloved Aunt’s photo on it, only to discover (and quite surprisingly too) that the Jemima of today bears little resemblance to the Jemima of old.
The conspiracy theorist in me immediately jumped to the conclusion that they took her turban off because it looked too much like a hijab. I figured that Quaker Oats didn’t want to feature a character who looked too foreign or too exotic or too Islamic. After all, this is Trump’s America and the rest of us are only living in it.
As it turns out, there was a reason for the company to modernize Aunt Jemima’s image, but it had nothing to do with them trying to make her look less like a Muslim. I’ve included a video that explains the whole interesting story about the politics behind the revamping of the image of this cultural icon.
I’d be a lot more relaxed than I am right now had I been born a cat. That’s because I’d know, right in the back of my feline mind, that I had been given nine lives, which is a lot of time to work with and provides for a large margin of error.
Human beings, unlike cats, are given only one life, and it’s a fairly short one. To make matters worse, a lot of that one lifetime is either spent asleep or doing things like sitting in a cubicle at work.
I’m writing all this because I am cursed with a strange affliction. From just about the moment I was born, I have had too many interests and passions. I am a very creative person with lots of different talents, all of which I’d love to equally pursue. But I can’t because of the whole lack of time thing.
I’ve had to neglect this blog, and I’m so upset about it. It’s not that I haven’t been writing. I have been. In fact, I’m about sixty percent done with a novella that should end up being about hundred pages long. It’s a dark book which suits my current mood. (There’s a backstory there that I won’t get into right now.) The thing falls within the genre of psychological thriller with elements of the horror story. My working title is The Red Room.
I’ve also been doing a lot of digital art. In fact, on the art front, there has been an interesting development. About a week ago, I got an email from someone representing Vida.com, an interesting company that works with artists and designers to produce fashionable, high-end clothing and accessories. The person reaching out had seen my work and wanted me to send them some of my images.
So I will send some. And I will continue to work on my novella when I can fit it in. And I will continue to make art, mostly late at night when the opportunity presents itself. Oh, and by the way, I hope to be a more regular blogger too.
I’ll finish by sharing a few pieces of my newest digital artwork.
Sigh. I probably missed my calling. I say “probably” because no one can ever predict how things would have actually turned out had I taken a different route.
My father was and is an artist, and I was born with artistic talent. As a result, I started doing drawings and paintings as a child, and I even showed work at small art fairs when I was just a youngster.
I studied something other than the fine arts, though, when I went to university. I continued to make artwork during my free time while I took classes in the humanities and liberal arts.
About a decade or so ago, I got this crazy idea that I would become a professional artist. Actually, the idea was sane enough for me to successfully place a lot of work in galleries in the US and abroad. I sold quite a few pieces and then had to scale back because it was too difficult to manage an art career when I was so transient and living is such far-flung places. (For about the past twenty years I’ve been an expatriated American and have only recently returned to my home country.)
Today, like so many others, I’ve become obsessed with the internet and all things cyber. As a result, I’ve become more and more a digital artist. Now, when I make I pictures, they are, by in large, computer-generated.
I have developed a pretty cool method for making these pieces. The works are the result of a complex creative process. Many of them start out simply enough, as digital drawings, paintings, or photographs, but then they morph into something that’s hybrid, bold, and totally funky.
I’ve included a small sampling to give you an idea of what I’m talking about. If you’d like to see more, go here.
Thinker Boy: Blog & Art 