Poetry | Curly

Thoughts

A poet is a dreamer, a fool who falls in love with an idea, with ghosts haunting him, talking to him, and most of these ghosts never existed. To entertain his imagination, he falls in and out of love more than the entire human race. Cannibals may sharpen their teeth, athletes their muscles, physicists their minds, but poets their imagination until it’s very sharp to cut through anything, anyone, or any story, but too sharp to cut a slice of bread he, like everyone else, needs to survive. He wades through life like a nomad, never belonging anywhere, never calling a place home, always seeking new adventures in the darkness of his room.

Audio Podcast

The Poem | Curly

I have always loved curly hair before I knew what curly meant—
a heart so sent into the wild looking for the treasure back home!
The eyes I searched for in every face, like perfect diamonds,
too perfect to fit any other necklace; my arms too cold to warm
around any other neck. To think I have taken any road, I’m back
to the very first poem I wrote and the very first girl I met;
I thought the road had taken me way beyond that first step,
here I am— stuck like my feet had never moved and I had been
sleepwalking in my dreams but it’s finally time to wake up.
I have loved that curly hair that curled my heart a maze; it takes
the architect to know the way around—I have been lost all my life.
Today I woke up with a thought— could these twenty-five years
be but an illusion in a dream and now awake I seem ready
to live my life back? Could there be a more generous god
to let me feel like twenty-five years passed to see you back,
and learn from that long dream to whom once I turned my back;
rewind it, like watching an old tape; I can barely wait for it to rewind back.
I want it reset and chances reborn and you in a cozy corner all alone—
like that day when I left and words never made it and were stuck on the road,
today I clear my throat, and say I will never leave again, but life
is a masterpiece of no second chances, and dreams are born
and dreams are buried under piles of years remembered as only numbers.

I have loved that curly hair winding up my pen giving me hints
to write in a foreign tongue on a foreign land; I have lived long enough
to impress you, to lose that scent, to hold on to that childish memory
to grow up to be that big child you have left eternal in me;
It was all until yesterday I thought I was a happy man;
now that I ‘ve seen you, I know, I’ve never been one—
That child has never grown up, never has he grown out of your love.
I have lived long enough to know that I have truly loved, but once,
I have truly loved and that curly hair showing on my screen telling me
I have not lived, for once I had, but now drowned in old memories
I have truly loved, but once, yet I have never truly lived.