Urban Legends Poetry Slam

Bismillah...

This week I will be in Ottawa for the Urban Legends Poetry Slam on Friday, February 12th from 6:30-9:30pm. The Slam will be held at Roosters cafe at Carlton University so if you're in the Ottawa area come out and support God willing! Hopefully if I make the first round I will be attending the semi-finals in April (inshaAllah) for a chance to join the slam team at the nationals. I am very grateful for this opportunity and appreciate all the support I am recieving regarding taking this leap towards my poetry career. I have much work to do in preparation so...BACK TO THE LAB! I will keep you posted.

Peace & love

And then you discover my humanity

I remember the days you used to look up to me,
And believe I was invincible
The days of old
My ego wishes it could continue selling you this illusion
But my heart cannot bear the lies,
This disguise that you were banking on
Is nothing but a ploy of pride
Reality looks the same through my eyes
I don’t prophesize,
I don’t epitomize
My strength wavers
Like when waves of a tide subside
We are all broken in different ways
Yet there are different mending’s in our minds
As time sends wires and connections
Calculating our unique similarities
My heart beats close enough to yours
To know that you are alive and deserve preservation
We are students of each other as we teach the world
Our chalk board in sands
We document history with our footprints
And record albums with the melodic blending of our pulses
I feel all this as I let go of your hand
And inhale your expiration

What Darwin left out

I have never been an evolutionary theorist
But a revolutionary nearness…
brought me to the real theory of evolution
The poet’s solution
Solely intruding to be a part of its documentation
A revelation
As I evolve towards patience and away from stillness…
although the two often are mistaken as kin.
Again I begin…
As I unfold my promises to understand the origins
Dusty from negligence
Rusty from regret
Lucky to be led…
Through this thriving matrix
Intoxicated in its mystery
I strive to witness my soul but I can’t picture me
Only some angles have been revealed
Shadows make the rest unreal
I have been evolving for years.
Just like dreams at the tip of my pen
That refuse to cry when I’ve neglected them
Because they are stronger than the failure that has tested them
I want to feed off their strength and meet with them in secret
Somewhere close to my heart, yet slightly beneath it
So we can look up at the bloody mystery it is and seek it
Within an internal cavity…
We will discuss love and possibilities.

Haiti relief benefit concert!

Bismillah...

A very talented singer-songwriter, Foyo Jama, is holding a Haiti relief benefit concert (sponsored by AFRSA and BASE) this thusday, January 28th from 8:00-9:30pm in the Student Life Centre (SLC) multipurpose room at the University of Waterloo in hopes of raising awareness and to fundraise for the wide-spread Haiti relief effort after the devestating January 12th 2010 earthquake that shook the haitian nation. I will be performing my poetry at this event God willing. The pieces I will be performing are "Poetry and Promise" (which you can find in the archives of this blog) and "Tears of ink". This is not a ticketed event but donations will be accepted. Please come out and support this cause as well as your local (for those of you in the KW area) artists!

Peace & Love

Auditory Visuals

Oh but if we were so wise to…
Open up our eyes to…
Other than what our eyes knew
It might surprise you
The moments that work to define you
As you mine through…
Trying to find truth
It is just as much ahead as it is behind you
It is just as silent as a mime’s muse
But you must still listen with your eye’s view
To teach them what they know not
What you thought was unfertile knowledge
…until your mind grew
It is as easy as blinking to clear your vision
Sounds dance before your witness
Conga line straight into your soul
Carrying a message of the cure for blindness
Straight into you soul
Breathe this way to see this way
This respiration is pivotal
Marking a constellation of contemplation
I see stars in my visuals
It’s criminal to deprive my soul of this starry night
I hear it loud and bright
The sounds of light
It makes beautiful music in my heart’s symphony
This piece (peace) is called epiphany.

The Source of Freedom

Bismillah

realizing freedom ...
I subscribed to the task knowing little of its challenge
its reality flourecent...beaming from cupped hands
making promises and pleas for better days

I knew little of its commitments
Until I relapsed

Scratches on my palms that I once would stare at for hours
seem like less than the life lines they are
because I intrepret them as mere wrinkles when I relapse

yet I can see the plusating truth in the centre
As I place it on my heart to try and syncronize the beat
before realizing that they are of the same source.

The spectacles

States...changes in emotion and form that I revisit
Where I state my mission sent by ambition
The gardens through which minds have driven
but withered are the roses that I envisioned
When I rose from my slumber to see that I's (eyes) imprisioned
My eye can't witness so I'm blinking through an idle prism
Where the light shone too bright,
disperesed through my transistions
Positions shifting upon the chess game that I've conditioned
While Im trying to make sense of it all...the flight and the fall.
Landing is possible...
everything is just as lost as it is logical when you overthink the obsticles
Walls are felt, not seen.
If senses make sense, then I hear concrete and smell the sky
clouds tell condense stories, then cry
dancing in air...suspended like dreams
in a realm out of reach...
This my mind can teach
My heart can unlearn
This pen is my chisle...
I will carve poetry into your walls until they collapse
This pen is my needle...
I will pump poetry into my heart until it understands.

REinvention

A lack of sweat, blood, tears, and submission led to the demise of my day
We can do better: I market this to my soul.
beyond us is forever, behind us is lost opportunity to work on getting there
How do I find eternity in good spirits?
How can I feel it when blankets surround me?
Covers of illusion, a colorful intrusion
takes me from depth of thought to amusment
profundity slipping between time and space to land into an abyss
I count the divine conversations I've missed
memory is jaded,
all I remember is there is something I am forgetting
all I forget is the only thing important to remember
There is not enough here to build an empire
Theres a need for expansion
I want a skyscraping development so my mind can kiss skies and imagine
So the heart can be greater than what it fathoms
until feeling sweat, blood, tears and submission become its standards