(via Momus


"...I wasn't even a regular Shi'a; if this Ahlul-Bayt scene was only a heresy, then I was a heresy of a heresy. Like the Mughiriyya I say Allah is a man-shaped Light. Like the Mu'ammariyya I neglect my prayers. Like the Ghaliya I say Ali is fighting his enemies above the clouds. Like the Khattabiyya I waqnt a vocal prophet and a silent one. Like the Saba-iyya I want my Imam back. Like the Tayyariyya my soul will transmigrate into a camel, then an inferior animal, then an animal inferior to that, and so on until I am a worm thriving in feces and keep going down until my soul inhabits clay and iron and mud and I am tormented in fire.

Like Allama Iqbal I am one who weeps for the Martyr of Karbala." --Blue-Eyed Devil


Dead Tech.


    (Terzanelle Beginning with a Line by Plomer)

‘We came upon them there by accident,’
caught in the headlights’ glare at half past midnight.
After so much lost sleep, and sights to daunt
the stoutest heart: escaping through our net,
two children, barefoot, plainly terrified
caught in the headlights’ glare. At half past midnight
that alley saw flashes stun the brain, then fade.
Why would anyone bother to execute
two children, barefoot? Plainly terrified
we fled the way we came. Can’t sugar-coat
what happens in war and the panic haste of men.
Why would anyone bother? To execute
orders: you think you know what that must mean
walking the sniper streets like us. All zombie’d,
what happens in war and the panic haste of men
is a tragedy of clowns; our sins abide.

We came upon them there by accident
walking the sniper streets, like us all zombie’d
after so much lost sleep, and sights to daunt.

4 15 04


"If every couple of years I could feel what I was feeling at that moment, I'd be happy mopping floors for the rest of my life. I could be a rotten old man with stringy white hair yellowed from not washing it, living alone in a crumbling apartment in miserable Buffalo... Allah could even put me back at my old place on Herman Street where I couldn't sit outside without smelling the sweet, burning dog-food smell of someone making crack, if I just had a shelf of books with my name on them." --ibid


Rockin' Pachelbel.