word of the day

big⋅ot

–noun

a person who is utterly intolerant of any differing creed, belief, or opinion. one who is strongly partial to one's own group, religion, race, or politics and is intolerant of those who differ.

---

Origin:
1590–1600; < class="ital-inline">bī God by God

Here's a lucky penny for you.

fo[u]r example[s]

number.one

The old lady was studiously chewing an apple and spitting out the peals into her wrinkled, pale, palm. Her figure was that of a perished leaf: brisk and timid.

Her yellow stained eyes gave away nothing. Not wisdom, nor remorse. [What a beauty she must have been, I thought.]

She traveled alone everyday, and inhabiting a small corner on that steel-bench, she would patiently and religiously bite off small pieces of a rosy apple.

And today she wasn’t there. 

[Was she dead? Or was she out of apples?]

Her sacred affair with the apples of this town remains a mystery. 

chaos

how far will we be in the universe, before earth runs out?


aren't we cute? little animals: fighting, thinking, reproducing, feeling important....trying to defy age, transcend human knowledge, be happy.
aren't we so damn cute? sitting on a stone, cheek on fist, asking the question: "why?"

i don't know.
i have a test tomorrow.
and this question won't be on it. that's all i know.

last night

It took me four hours to sleep last night. I repeatedly twirled in my heavy sheets, changed my pillows, counted my breaths, or thought of new things to draw.


I thought about my parents, I thought about my writings, toes, this little sheep on my blog.

I tried to predict if tomorrow morning I would wake up really late.

I got a strange phone call on 3:33 a.m. I hung up. I would still have one more hour (of wide awake thoughts and tightly shut eyelids) to go .




I made up a story about the village of Odnacom, which had 5 prostitutes. And they were all furiously competing, even Henrietta and Kiana, who were twins. The twins were the youngest of them all, and arguably, the prettiest ones.


I thought about when I used to have long hair, and how immortal I used to feel.



Meanwhile, my basement neighbours were watching a movie, after a weird-sounding and short-lasted sex.



I also tried to analyze why I have been dreaming about cats, mice, and animals in general. Maybe it’s the urban deprivation of nature that is making my subconscious seek something other than human connection: This inescapable web of jealous friends, confused lovers, distant relatives, ignorant potatoes, and egomaniac megalomaniacs.

Hmm....I also went over what I was going to make for breakfast- or brunch if the insomnia was to continue.


All this typing is making me sleepy. I’m going to make myself coffee..

f word

Are you refined?
find the finite fascination
Found?

This is
for my majesty
for cruel submissions of sum
one two three and five hundred forty four
"the f word"

Behold subjectivity - in
"and out"
fold around my asymmetrical center
canvassing
the hissing of whispering refugees
A virtual cure
esoteric sentimental Killing
parenthesis around his neck

Penetrating
suddenly
and sick-ly
Pen
pen
pen and a pencil to find

Found
have you not

lick the led
let the f word follow.

---------------------------------------the library------

She blushed and ran off nervously, not knowing why the surface of her cheeks were quickly heating up with a relentless zeal.

"I didn't know anything about that."
"But I just asked for your card and you said you don't have it!"
"I wasn't listening...I didn't know which card you meant."
"You’re in a library! I wouldn't be asking for your gym membership, would I?"

And then it hit her. The red haired girl that was standing in front of her a moment ago, with potentially beautiful freckles sprinkled on her face, could have easily given her the information she so desperately needed. The bureaucracy of membership was only loosely, if ever, held up in that self-righteous establishment. It was something deeper, or yet, shallower, holding back the proceedings of a meaningless material exchange, which was concealed merely by the folds of a folder. The short, carelessly dressed girl, with teeth that were almost perfect and a void confidence, viewed her as a dandy, ditsy, pretty-face, who had no business in that building.
Was she hurt?
She couldn't be. Because being hurt meant that she wished to be something else, or at least appear to be something else. She quickly estimated the number of books she had read that the freckled friend could not even spell the writers' name for. That knowledge was not even necessary, considering that she wouldn't have gone to the library to use the washroom anyway.
At least not on Wednesdays.
So she smiled and stopped herself. She turned around and entered the building again. She grabbed a pencil, not a pen because you never know if they actually work, scribbled a short sentence on the back of her card, and gave it to the girl before slipping away.

It read: " i don't go to the gym.
p.s. fuck you"

She wondered if the girl would ever call.

"quote" of the day

Truly, I live in dark times!
The guideless word is folly. A smoothed forehead.
Suggests insensitivity. The man who laughs
Has simply not yet had
The terrible news.

-- Bertolt Brecht - To Those Born Later (1938)

The Apology

I apologies
for my mistaken identity
as the angelic fair curled curved carved young-woman-who’s-a-beast.

Venus humbly presents
the mutually fortuitous fornication
of the bacteria feasting on our festive organs.

The fetishes I hide:
sharp brim imaginations
scenes of a broken frame
the emigration of those malicious circumstances
resonate
the banal existence of dining tables
and door bells.

I
sincerely
apologies for my dull convictions,
partial disclosures-

though, when you believe the maggots
in the afterlife
what room does our accidental breakfast occupy?

مونولوگ

مغز استخوانم
استخوان مغزم
می لرزد
و هیکل مریضم چرا نمی میرد

ناراحتی؟
ناراحتم
ناراحتی؟

نفس که می کشد مثل ماهی باد می کند
نخ و سوزن با هم عشق بازی می کنند
صدایشان را تکّه پارچه می شنود

این کت و شلوار تنگ است
می گویم یخ زدم
منبسط
تنم سنگین و زیر چروک های چشمم چه دنیای پلیدیست

چای کم رنگ
یا پُر رنگ؟

یا اصلاٌ بی رنگ، چه فرقی دارد؟
با این علوفه کسی داغ نشد
مگر دودش کنیم

بیا اصلاٌ من را نگاه کن
و خلوتِ انگشت سبّابه ام را
در خوذ ارضایی با خودکار
و این سوزن ها
این سوزن ها
را نخ کن و لبانم را به هم بدوز.

دسامبر 2008

It wasn’t the coffee, I swear. Maybe the music or the barking dog across the street. But everything shrank and I was a little child screaming for a fair division. Screaming for a permission to sing, to be bare, to be fair, to be ...to be!

Whoever is reading this, you don’t need to sympathize with me. You don’t need to think about what made me the little child that I am always going to be. Carefully swinging on a big black tire hanging from a tree, anticipating death or another manifestation of life, I am still screaming, with a closed mouth; my eyes swell up as tears climb my nostrils with every gasp.

Forget about good or bad friends; forget about dishes and digital cameras. I can hear the atmosphere of Iran, I can taste the gasoline-filled air or the breezy hill-tops of Shemran. Yah, all of this Orientalist, mystical, shit, I feel it. You may not understand, so don’t pity the young aspiring writer /journalist in exile. She’ll go back, to finish screaming for a fair division of rights, land, ideas, the good, and the fucking bad.

It wasn’t the coffee. It happened when I realized that people who experienced the pre-revolutionary Iran, are getting older. I realized it’ll get really difficult in 20 years to know the truth about things, no matter how many 9-min clips there are on YouTube. Because now, all the blood that was shed, all the puppets carved out of infected trees, are silently anchored in some forgotten nightmare that no one wants to remember.

xxx

Kiss the cracks that weave and mingle on the wall
The careful folding of each cause

Sinking in a passerby’s exhale
Escaping through his teeth.


A whispering apex shivers in its disguise
Be further, away, apart,
Leave me
And this deluded sense of smile
Brooding
Dissecting the location of an unnatural suspense

The partial prostitutes hover by, waiting for my signal

And the late-morning seeds irrigate the kitchen floor
Impregnating the memories
of our empty cup-handles holding us.

Rotten apples
exiled in the fridge,

kiss them (don’t) kiss them all.

subway season

There are clammy handprints all over the poles, and every inhale brings in second-hand, rusty air. People’s body temperature gets confused as they sweat under their jackets, and go out on the breezy streets to uncomfortably dry up.They are all hunched back and nervous. Most of them are listening to their ipods, drafting texts and emails on their mega-phones, or doing Sudoku.



I wonder how we used to commute before and what it meant. I picture the adventurous roads we used to discover, and as I close my eyes I imagine that the noisy clash between the metal body of the train and oily rails, is in fact the sound of a horse trotting rhythmically on a stony street.

Then I realize its my stop, and embarrassed from my romantic delusions, I put on my favourite song and swiftly exit.

(insulting) word of the day

frump : (noun) A girl or woman regarded as dull, plain, or unfashionable.

Synonyms: dog

Usage: Her hairstyle had not changed since the early 1970s, and she did little to shed her reputation as a frump.

(n1)

I just burned my hand while pouring tea.
TEA.
Then I put some toothpaste on it and sat down to type my essay.
But I don’t have an essay to type. And that seems to be the only thing that I talk about lately; The fact that I have to write an essay that I don't have a topic for yet.


Yet: seems to be a word I need to get rid of.

Sincerely,

- t

run

It was the nostalgic enterprise of an emotional reaction, made to destroy. “I can’t be any more clear…do you understand?”

“Are you going to vote?”

“For what?”

It was the trivial uselessness of bookshelves and paper cutters, dark framed glasses and grey clothes. The superfluous attempt at becoming the next “Hamlet” or “Hedayat”.

“Your references are weak.”

“Are you going to vote?”

It was the only thing this herd of superior beings knew how to do. Clashing with the next door tomcats and the pole dancer on channel 478.

“The polls are fictive, you know?”

I was simply agitated. Loud laughs made my head hurt. I always thought migraines are genetic.

“Do you watch porn?”

I walked out on them. I went for a jog and then followed the road and realized I was tired, too tired to go back. I was out of breath and my mouth tasted like thirst, drought, sweat, salt.

“ I bought pepper. How could we be out of pepper? It’s in the left cabinet on top of the stove.”

I was hungry and hated feeling like a martyr again. What was I dying for, what am I deprived of? How long did I run? 23 minutes and 56 seconds. 20% discount on a $ 78 jar. The second biannual study on third generation exilic memoirs. Lover number 13. Liar number 3905. The 5000-year history of the second becoming of monotheistic religions of the glorious pi.

“Who are you voting for?”

خواب

خواب عجیبی بود. انگار با مستی تمام در حال لرزش در جلوی چشمانم بود و من بی اراده در آن تاب می خوردم. خواب عجیبی بود...صبح که بیدار شدم به فرید گفتم و نگاه عجیبی کرد و گفت که همیشه همین را می گویم.

خواب عجیبی بود رنگها چرک و کثیف بودند و 3 نفری ما کنار یک دوکِ بزرگِ نخ ریسی، به بلندی درختی قول آسا یا یک کشتی بزرگ ایستاده بودیم. دوک می چرخید و می غرّید و هوا را به جریان می انداخت و همچنان که سلسله وار جو را در هم می شکست آدمهای گوناگون از لای آن به جای نخ می ریختند بیرون. لخت و ترسیده، می دویدند و از دید دور می شدند. من دیگر وجود خارجی نداشتم و کم کم از زمین فاصله گرفتم و از دوک و آن دو دور شدم و باز هم بالاتر رفتم تا دلم حرّی ریخت پایین. امّا دل نداشتم چون وجود نداشتم...پس دست یا پا یا، دل، نداشتم.

در هوا چند مارمولک سبز گِلی می خزیدند و با هم بحث می کردند و برای خود می پلکیدند. پایین را نگاه کردم و پدر بزرگ دوست بچّگی هایم را دیدم که یک بار خانۀ او همگی با هم کارت بازی کردیم و من هر بار که می بُردم پدربزرگش پاهایم را نوازش می کرد...آنجا ایستاده بود و به من زُل زده بود. تععجب کردم چون به غیر از او هیچ کس -حتّی خودم- نمی دانست که آنجایم.

به زحمت مسیرم را عوض کردم و روی پشت بام یک برج خاکستری، که قدیمی بود و انگار فقط روی همان برج آن روز شب بود، فرود آمدم. در کنجی چند ماهی قزل آلا که پولک نداشتند و معلوم بود به تازگی کسی آنها را "پاک" کرده است، سرگرم قمار بودند و با لبهای نوچشان برای هم بوسه می فرستادند. نزدیکتر رفتم و دیدم دور تا دور آنها شبهه حباب های سفید و کدری هستند که نفس می کشند...هر کدام به اندازۀ یک چرخ ماشین. بوی تعفن همه جا را گرفته بود. پیرزن لختی که چهره اش معلوم نبود، دست اش را روی سطح غلیظ یکی از حباب ها گذاشته بود و چیزی زیر لب زمزمه می کرد...سرش را متداومأ تکان می داد انگار که می خواهد پشه های نا مرئی را از خود دور کند.

از آنجا پریدم پایین. فکر کردم ای کاش بدن داشتم تا کیف می کردم. کیف در دست جاذبۀ زمین بودن و کیف پرش را. همچنان که با بی وزنی سقوطی آرام و پوچ می کردم، خودم را دیدم که لخت و عور زیر دوک لمیده ام.

خواستم خودم را صدا کنم ولی دهان نداشتم...وجود نداشتم. و در چالش جیغ زدن از خواب پریدم.

فرید ازم خواست خوابم را تعریف کنم. خواب عجیبی بود. "ازش هیچ به یاد ندارم."

this is not this is it

vice amplified
strengthen my shame of being
holding a name
my naked mind
your graceful disguise
forever red

how do i
Do
sin so softly
in the absence of affection
presence of a drunken repulsion
rejecting time

this is my silly life

the rhythmic dance
engage the ink with a paper
as turfs of smog
attack my lungs

this is my sin.

as it goes

...Maybe, and this is mere hypothetical fallacy, but maybe she could use her imagination somewhere else. Maybe she could create a whole new town with orange pavements and botany trees. But in this small corner of the world, her whole being was clinched in her fists, buried in her pockets, and waiting for the street light to turn green...

finally

The tomb opens
He emerges
With hands as cold as a frost
asleep on my window since last winter

And lips
Moistened with trust.