“9” Poems
Maged Zaher
*
Hey femme fatale
I love you I swear
Why did you leave me behind
To be devoured
By these nerdy girls
*
The deviants penetrate the colors - elegy on, elegy off
There is a madness baked in rationality
Call me recovering into death
I am on the first step toward heaven
Bwahahaha
I mean I am on the first step into dying
Now let us
Let us
Not block each other
*
This book about pain
Is it useful?
My mind stops itself
And thinks so
I'd rather read O'Hara
Or tell you about my desires
How I am behind myself all the time
Looking for technology
Where the solution is cunning
*
Linearity of thoughts
And their stains
I dance
Please
Around the typical ideas
Of home, love, etc…
And I pay the price of leaving
*
I am fully secular, but I am not linear, which probably means it is inevitable to believe what doesn't work: Say for example the ones who treated me harshly are the ones who approximate me to love. The opposite isn't necessarily true of course. Logic is to be packed and thrown away.
*
The meaning of things is the number of arrows coming from them. Pain is the amount of excrements you produce without knowing. It is not the three dimensionality of space that things move within. The space of connectivity is bigger, call it pain, call it metaphors. Just stop the step by step fear of everything.
*
My literalness
Since I was 7
Seems to have extended
Until now
Where I am shaken
Under the waves of illness
This is not about God
God is everywhere already
*
Of course the fascists love you, you fucks. All of you, all kinds of them: Police, Army, high bureaucrats, etc… They love you to your death. It is kinda cool to love them back to save yourselves. Start by listening to their immense slogans. You spend time with them despite themselves, ah their jails where they advertise pasta and Coca-Cola.
*
It was an early date for them. She told him she wanted to go dance salsa. His shy body took her to the big salsa dancing event in the city, she tried to teach him and he failed, and she hit him with her shoes and he looked in her eyes in disbelief then continued their love relationship.
Twenty five years later, he sat in front of a more vivid copy of her, in a dance performance show in a different city. Sitting next to her, her boyfriend. She seemed to make fun of him and when he would become unhappy she would hold him. In one of these holding him episodes she slapped him mildly. And they kept the embrace
Hey femme fatale
I love you I swear
Why did you leave me behind
To be devoured
By these nerdy girls
*
The deviants penetrate the colors - elegy on, elegy off
There is a madness baked in rationality
Call me recovering into death
I am on the first step toward heaven
Bwahahaha
I mean I am on the first step into dying
Now let us
Let us
Not block each other
*
This book about pain
Is it useful?
My mind stops itself
And thinks so
I'd rather read O'Hara
Or tell you about my desires
How I am behind myself all the time
Looking for technology
Where the solution is cunning
*
Linearity of thoughts
And their stains
I dance
Please
Around the typical ideas
Of home, love, etc…
And I pay the price of leaving
*
I am fully secular, but I am not linear, which probably means it is inevitable to believe what doesn't work: Say for example the ones who treated me harshly are the ones who approximate me to love. The opposite isn't necessarily true of course. Logic is to be packed and thrown away.
*
The meaning of things is the number of arrows coming from them. Pain is the amount of excrements you produce without knowing. It is not the three dimensionality of space that things move within. The space of connectivity is bigger, call it pain, call it metaphors. Just stop the step by step fear of everything.
*
My literalness
Since I was 7
Seems to have extended
Until now
Where I am shaken
Under the waves of illness
This is not about God
God is everywhere already
*
Of course the fascists love you, you fucks. All of you, all kinds of them: Police, Army, high bureaucrats, etc… They love you to your death. It is kinda cool to love them back to save yourselves. Start by listening to their immense slogans. You spend time with them despite themselves, ah their jails where they advertise pasta and Coca-Cola.
*
It was an early date for them. She told him she wanted to go dance salsa. His shy body took her to the big salsa dancing event in the city, she tried to teach him and he failed, and she hit him with her shoes and he looked in her eyes in disbelief then continued their love relationship.
Twenty five years later, he sat in front of a more vivid copy of her, in a dance performance show in a different city. Sitting next to her, her boyfriend. She seemed to make fun of him and when he would become unhappy she would hold him. In one of these holding him episodes she slapped him mildly. And they kept the embrace
Maged Zaher is the author of seven books of poetry, including The Consequences of My Body (Nightbook, 2016) and Opting Out: New & Collected Poems 2000-2015 (Chatwin Books, 2018) as well as two books of translations. His novella On Confused Love and Other Damages was published in 2022 by Chatwin Books. He has edited and translated The Tahrir of Poems: Seven Contemporary Egyptian Poets (Alice Blue, 2014), featuring writers from the Arab Spring. He has also worked in civil engineering and software, and taught poetry writing at Seattle University.