Old eyeglasses on wetland.
Deep footmarks in cold sand.
Green tide takes all.
LazharBouazzi, January 11, 2017

A rugged sidewalk cried hard by the way-side;
Its cracks could not hold their grey tears anymore.

A puny man pushed a red cart in the tide
Down a darkling, narrow street in Salammbô.

He gasped behind his overladen chariot,
As he hurried toward the “Sunday Market.”

His merkabah bore many a lost gadget
Which he had found buried in the quicksand;

Among them a fountain pen and a helmet,
A pair of eyeglasses, and a trumpet.

I wondered, gazing at the small man’s wet face:
Will this worn-out scene ever reach the market?

© LazharBouazzi

An ashy weeping willow,  
Lay in my wobbling garden.
Like a cosmic silver pigeon.

Up: the still, leaden flow
Sailed - a cold, prowling woe,
Charging to pounce on Carthage.

In: the wreaths of smoke letters
Gather as leaden fetters,
Then dart like Irish setters,
Released after a game.

LazharBouazzi, January 6, 2017

Through the moiré windowpane -
By my leaden writing desk -
I saw a host of dark clouds
Hastening to their somber task
Like a herd of frightened sheep
Shrouded ‘neath the callous mask
Of the night - on the way home.

Through the moiré window pane
A question stood in my way again:
What is a cloud that leaves shut
The flask* of an announced rain?

© LazharBouazzi, 30/12/2016

When he’s alone in the night,
In the absence of the light
And the presence of the sight,
There, begins the tearing blight:
Dark veiling dark, light veiling light.

(What am I doing?
Poetry-dwelling
In these dunes of salt
With five syllables?)

When he's alone in the night
In the half-presence of the light
There, begins the specular fight –
The scarlet mutiny within.

© LazharBouazzi, December 12, 2016

Autumn leaves
would do
for remembrance,
Perhaps,
more than words,
or a  plaintive air
Of a yellow guitar;
a rain,
a wine-dark wind  
spraying last summer's
fragrance.
Ah! Your absence!

Your white,
present, absence 
unshields
my metaphor!

© LazharBouazzi, December 7, 2016

In the yellow,
cold light
of the wine-dark
night _
between the new mall
and the Roman Site _
he staggered
alone,
drunken
with "Magon"*
and memories.

Vast,
so vast is the night _
vast
as the memory
of an English
prairie,
and an emmer-haired
maiden
he had walked
to the ferry
on a summery day.

Vast,
so vast
is a night
masquerading
as a want of sight.


© LazharBouazzi

The sun loomed young through the ribs of the Punic Port
Bringing back his turquoise splendor to the Med-Sea;
And Seagull, who in his morning flight did escort
The golden loaf of bread fishermen longed to see,
Soared higher and higher over the glazing port,
Preparing for the long voyage when the time be.

Expectant and white was the Carthaginian knight,
Oblivious of the blue peril; no long flight
Would scare him, no azure thirst would he have to fight.
Only the phantasm of an alien skylark,
who would despoil the timer of the golden sun &
peck out her "off" button  with his accent mark -
Would make him soar & sing in his vision of bravery.

(c)LazharBouazzi

I took a walk in La Goulette yesterday
From the “Bridge-of-the-Casino” to the port.
The things I saw on my sun-bathing way
So simple they were, here is a report:
II
Sea snakes under a blue bridge did frolic
As hardware stores displayed paint in their windows.
The water snakes performed some dance symbolic
And the paint braved the dark rust from a distance.
III
And I, hastening to my liquid address,
Shot a side look at a man in a dress,
And hoped the blue water in the White Sea*
Would wash the wound bleeding in my memory.

© LazharBouazzi, 16/11/16 (revised Nov. 17)

Full Moon speaks the last word tonight -
Casual-recherché and light.
In the absence of the sun she
Leafs through the pages of the night
And shoots a side-look at the pond -
Her desire stretches far beyond
His specular contour.

© LazharBouazzi,  November 28, 2016

My hungry lips started to talk
To her lips in language hungry,
And my tongue began to unlock
The well of  her language sundry
Necking her North African mounds;
Halting at her salving shell pink
To sip and sup her winy words,
And faint and wake and rise and sink
In the waking sleep of the tongues
Of her fire
To pen my un–Sufi desire
To die in the dunes of her body.

© LazharBouazzi, October 20,  2016

The lane is light-less tonight;
But I’m not unduly perturbed,
For there is still enough sight
In my fancy not to be curbed
By a solitary lamp
Who was forced into silence.

© LazharBouazzi, October 16, 2016

Swarming in the incense, this part  of “The City”
looked like a Turkish bath, and the books, old & cold,
shivered in trays as they awaited their faux leather,
While a wet winter wind whistled in the keyholes.

By the fallen, balmy cloud the fruits of cactus
lay in a red cart like porcupines colored, tired
of being on guard all the time. Their hues stirred
the hunger of the centenary walls, so their fissures
oozed and their latter-day hieroglyphs began
to crumble.
(c) LazharBouazzi

The citrus trees grow grey with fear
As the fierce wind they could overhear
Reminds them of a fact so clear:
That the badlands are not where they belong.
© LazharBouazzi, September 23, 2016

The moon, a hollow
Saint Jacques shell,
whose kernel
lovers
and language figures
had wasted through the flow
of time,
came
to this eerie pond
a dry vagabond -
now a dweller
of the surface deep.

© LazharBouazzi, Carthage, TUN, September 3, 2016

I
He was intoxicated
by the scent of the coffee
dancing in the morning
to his mother’s humming.
II
Then a blacksmith - his father -
taught him how to hammer
form out of chaos
in the muddle of force
and a sweaty anvil.
III
Now if he wished to see
the sunness of Sun
and the greenness of Tree
he would summon the specter
of an Arab maiden - Fatma -
who was once Berber
to come write on his face
with her soothing finger:
“Salam, my anguished lover.”
IV
When green-eyed Fatma comes
the wreaths of coffee
Would come with her
writing in the air;
and all the songs of history
would come marching too,
in battle array,
like an army dressed
in civilian clothes
for a dance in Rio.
V
Fatma’s hair –
a still cascade
of thin goldeness,
a tide of watery fire,
a flight motionless  
of a million birds who
speak in tongues
and laugh
to the stone unlettered
of his fidgety cenotaph .

© LazharBouazzi, Carthage, TUN, August 27, 2016

I saw two butterflies in the alley,
between the new well and the orange tree;
With the shade of the tree they seemed to dally
to tease the sun who, without them cannot be.
I overheard two blackbirds when I looked up:
“Why can’t we tease the shade like the butterflies?”
Said the maid-bird, pretending an orange to sup.

And before she could even realize,
The darkbird spread his long wing over her thighs.
In the throbbing blue flakes of the sky she cries
& she cries & moans & she moans & she cries
unlike a Buddhist.


© LazharBouazzi, Carthage, TUN, August 25, 2016

An oblique path cutting in two a blue hill,  
bathed in a cobalt ocean of morning glories.
On the blue hill there were also a red mill,
Crickets, ants, bees, and many-hued damselflies.

A haven was the fresh upside-down coquille
For long stories untold and movements still
Of difference and dragonflies of fluttering
Over a bluesky ground of mute uttering.

On a dry log pitched not too far from the mill,
Rose an artless sign in the hushed sound of the hill;
Each of whose letters was written in blueberry -
Surely placed there by a traveler in a hurry:
“No matter how often a road is traveled by,
It never tells twice the selfsame story.”

(c) LazharBouazzi, Carthage, TUN, August 23, 2016

The first thing I saw early this morning
when I pulled back the blue-sky curtains
was a hectic white and orange butterfly
waving in the fair sun of my garden -
between the enclosed well and the laurel tree.

On the scarlet, bright sidewalk,
two damsels strutted together;
a turquoise skirt wore the one,
a chocolate T-shirt the other.
Jubilant they were together,
for the cadence of their laughter
waved in the air as Tunisian silk.

See?
No harvest did my screen display today -
no mountain range loomed far in the distance -
all that was unraveled were a laughing sidewalk,
and a quivering sun in a small garden.

(c) LazharBouazzi, April 21, 2016; revised, August 17, 2016

A cabin that had once been white
Stood, peeled, on the shore of Carthage.
It looked like a drunken scarfaced knight -
Eyes shut to Dionysian carnage.
A pack of lost dogs roamed around it,
Their pangs of want they sought to manage.

The lone cabin stood on the wrinkled sand
Like a young tree on Shott el Jerid's* white pale
Whom the white monster forced to speak with the hand:
“Basta, no stubborn resistance from me will avail.”

The fuming sun displayed his festival of fear
Over dogs who could handle their thirst no more;
While the salt has now made its white task clear:
Gnawing the sapling and gnawing evermore
Until the only mark on the Shott will disappear.

And the poet who has only half-chosen the vision
Half not knowing what to do, tried to listen
To the trickle of his obstinate, patient cheer
Oozing through the new orange laptop,
He had purchased from a Chinese peer.

(c) LazharBouazzi, August 10, 2016.

Writing is
the frozen music
of an ellipsis,
the silent song
of a lonesome poet
who sings in the dark
among howling winds
crossing swords
in the white shades
of unseen things -
a winter on the Pole
on whose  obverse side
there's Rio,
and the Sun,
and the Samba
and the revenge
of the color.


© Lazhar Bouazzi, May 31, 2016; revised, August 5, 2016

“Rain for my words!”
Cried the poet.
But the rain would
Not acquiesce.
For she dreaded
Lnguage Judaskiss.

(c) LazharBouazzi, May 14, 2016; revised, August 2, 2016

It rained last night while he slept
in the chair, waiting for her -
I mean for the rain to bedeck
the olive tree with her silver perls
and cause a stir
in his reason and imagination -
a spur.
But the rain came while he slept.

She came and came and came -
for nothing.

© LazharBouazzi, Carthage, May 17; revised on July 30, 2016

The good thing about a tortoise
Is that he carries time on his
shoulder
and does not have to run
to cry.
He is like a river
flowing backward,
climbing  the rocks on which her mother
had bitten
to un-feel the pain of origination,
so as to cast a glimpse on her nest
in the mountain.
He is a figure, a language, a sun
whose force is sustained by his own spirit -
unrelated, unlike a star,
a candle, a night.
He is his
own version
of the light,
and the rite,
and the fight
Sisyphean.

© Lazhar Bouazzi, Carthage, TUN, July 18, 2016. Revision made on July 25, 2016.

I
A hungry black-backed gull,
ready for the ****,
circled over a school of sardines.
II
Beyond the black-backed gull,
an old boat stood still,
waiting for a place in the harbor.
III
At the top of the hill –
in the back -
rose a lighthouse and a mosque
Who,
through their small windows
Gazed at the aquatic scene.

(c) LazharBouazzi

I' ve cut my way through life on camelback,
Halting only punctually by the track;

Yes, “punctually” indeed, to sleep and feed
On what was placed with care on my steed:

Sun-dried Thoughts & Language for me; the fruit,
For those I met on the opposite route.

© Lazhar Bouazzi, Carthage, TUN, July 1, 2016

My doctor,
who happens to be my own wife,
said I needed a rest from mental activity.
I will comply with her
orders, but I can still read your
Wonderful poems. I hope I will be able
To resume writing soon.
Lazhar.

As the shape all sun
tore up the curtain
of blood and ululation,
everything in Tunisia,
as stricken by a wand,
came to a standstill,
and slipped away
from the senses -
Even rivers stopped.

Medjerda* froze
halfway
through the descent
to his destination,
as he realized
he’d been making a fatal error:
pouring forth all his passion
into the ocean.

So he stopped,
retracted his course,
re-collected himself,
and started flowing backward,
toward
the source
in the Atlas
that had bidden him
farewell.

In his spear head
there was a design:
start a new chaos
in the valley,
in which there would be
a sweet-water lake
and sailors drunk
with sunbeams, sweat
and pleasure.
Butterflies would flutter
around the scent of mint
and bluegreen rosemary.
Sweet Moon to Sweet Lake
would come, unannounced,
In the rays of the nightlight
of the fluttering night
to watch her self
shoot
the scene
of representation.

The river, now swimming
in his own water,  
carried the sky on his shoulder,
while an ant and a grasshopper,
holding a basket together,
watched the new scene.

As the figure all sun appeared ,
reason melted;
imagination
her hazel eyes opened.

*Medjerda is the most important river in Tunisia. Length, 460 km; basin area, 22,000 sq km. It flows out of the Atlas mountains into the Gulf of Tunis.
© LazharBouazzi, June 16, 2016

"Stung
like a bumblebee,
Danced
like a butterfly."
Once or twice
he was on his knee,
But never lost
the “tiger’s eye.”

Au revoir,
inerrant Punch Press!
Yes,
adiós,
Black Orpheus!
Adiós,  
adiós!

© LazharBouazzi, Carthage, TUN, June 6, 2016

A crimson boat waives
The flow of the waves
As a blonde damsel craves
An infernal sun.

Next to the maid and the dandy-fella -
Blossoms a vermillion umbrella
Whose washed out shadow - a pallid cellar
For two green apples and one apricot
The blonde damsel on the way had bought
To quench her want of the lustful monster.

Closing her ice-blue eyes, the fair woman,
Her sinful inspiration did summon
To come carve on her navel so sullen
A blue picture of the new Benzart bridge.

© LazharBouazzi, Carthage, June 5, 2016


*"Benzart" is the Tunisian name for “Biserta” or “Bizerte”  - a beach town on the northern coast of Tunisia.

How did the Greek Pundit mark
The middle of a storyline
If time, space, and self are handmade,
If language is borderline,
If a lover knows not what love is,
And if a poem’s writer is its first line?

© LazharBouazzi, June 3, 2016

Writing is
the frozen music
of an ellipsis,
the silent song
of a lonesome poet
who sings in the dark
among howling winds
crossing swords
in the white shades
of unseen things -
a winter on the Pole
on whose  obverse side
there's Rio,
and dancing
and mirth
and the sun's critique
of hegemony.

© Lazhar Bouazzi, May 31, 2016

Poets, like
madmen and prophets,
are banned from
the Kingdom of Reason,
as they are
the progeny of the sun
(the sun who illumines as he blinds)
and the siblings
of the rays
who never tire
of beating
the world into
magnificent new shapes
that fascinate us
all – including
Unwavering Moon whose
lonesome secret is to be
madly in love
with the rainbow.

© LazharBouazzi, May 26, 216

I do not turn to poetry
to rescue me from memory;
on the contrary,
I conjure the red humming bee
on the bluegreen rosemary tree,
I teased when I was a carefree
boy, in the backyard,
only to roll with the punches -
aye, with the punches - of synecdoche.

© LazharBouazzi, May 2016

No brazen sign
On his smartphone,
No token of friendliness!
What portable solitude,
What mobile loneliness!

© LazharBouazzi, Carthage, May 20, 2016

A turquoise fly battered on a red laptop
on whose twenty-inch pane glowed a green apple.
A poet, some distance away from the backdrop,
with the fly and the apple sought to grapple:
What stories? What parables would a laptop
offer Hermes - about an oozy apple
and a fly who understood not that the fruit
on the red laptop is only the image of a copy?

(c) LazharBouazzi

“Rain for my words,”
Cried the poet.
But the rain would not acquiesce;
For she dreaded a languagekiss.

© LazharBouazzi, Carthage - Tunisia, May 14, 2016

Being a novice
in poetry
he knows how to color
an old tree,
a sky in the winter,
an ocean,
or even a dancing
emotion.

But pleading
with the wind
to come
and sing
the sparkling
thunder
that tears the ,
weeping dome
asunder,
is a different tale –
altogether.

(c) LazharBouazzi, May 7, 2016

When the ant had told
that December cold
night the grasshopper,
who had spent Summer
singing in the tree,
to go dance now that
he was hungry but free,
he didn’t show the hurt,
for he was alert
To the discomfort
of Winter and language;
but he left the village.

When he, years later,
Came back as a baker
(who sang in the day
and worked in the night),
the first thing he did
was to go see the ant -
a gift-wrapped guitar
in his hand.

(c) LazharBouazzi

Poets are lonesome cactus vendors
In whose palms grow hurtful ascenders
From having to peel colored wonders
To those who dread thorny fruits - the dwellers -
With too many cores inside.

© LazharBouazzi

Speech
can become
touch,
depending on
intonation.

Writing
can become
dance,
depending on
the typewriter.

(c) LazharBouazzi

Simplicity
Is the
Act of giving shape
To chaos -
An affair of alchemy,
Like turning sweat
Into drops of
Silver.

(c) LazharBouazzi

After so long a journey
The traveler needed rest
So he picked one of two trees -
That was in his eye the best.

Getting off his “Clio”*
He stepped on a flower
Whose color had braved alone
The asphalt of the highway.

From his car he moved away
And faced a trench gaping gray
Which he was unable to cross
To where the water-spring was.

He yelled into the ditch
Trying to get an answer
Only his echo returned
For want of a transfer

Then a scarlet sand rose,
pulled by the small man’s toes,
Jumped right under his nose
Into the chasm with no bottom.

Back to the tree he returned
But the whole site was now ferned -
Rhizomes wherever he turned:
Underground, too, were now the
badlands.

(c) Lazhar Bouazzi, April, 2016

The first thing I saw early this morning
When I pulled back the light green curtains
Was a hectic blue 'n orange butterfly
Waving in the fair sun of my garden -
Between the enclosed well and the laurel tree.

On the red radiant sidewalk,
Two damsels strutted together;
A turquoise skirt wore the one,
A chocolate T-shirt the other.

Jubilant they were together,
As the cadence of their laughter
Waved in the air like Tunisian silk.

No harvest did my screen display today,
No mountain range did loom far in the distance;
All that was shown were a laughing sidewalk,
And a quivering sun in a small garden.

(c) LazharBouazzi, April 21, 2016

O crimson, fresh sapling
O bronze Hell&Heaven;'s gate
You impress on a poet’s fate
Your wanton, insatiable burning.

© Lazhar Bouazzi, April, 2016

I love you
so much
despite  
the
countless
sediments
of  knowledge
that were
bestowed
on us
by the victims
of their own
ignorance,
whom I
rarely curse
but oftentimes
weep.

© Lazhar Bouazzi, Carthage, April 13, 2016