I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I
me me me me me me me me me
you you you you you you

All of this seems so silly now.
Why are so much of the important things in this life not spoken?
Why do we choose and remember to forget our true reality for a shadow of our own light?
This that we have made is not better or even just as good.
Who is tired of the lie?
Souls lilt as flowers from poor soil and no sunlight.
We are drowning in thunderstorms of our own tears,
yet we keep drinking and drinking.
What else do we know?
How else were we taught to live?
Show me a reality I can sink into without losing my Self.
We are the ones we have been searching for.

How small we are, yet how big
Our graves that we dig.

In a hut or room, cottage or house,
Are we not laboratory mouse
In the hands of Human Almighty
Who builds village, town or city,
District, state or country?
Are we really folks gentry
Ruling subcontinent, continent?
Are we not the self proclaimed incumbent

Of this planet earth?

Solar system, stars, nebula, cosmos
And then?

Nothingness.

Information is now currency,
Nuclear warheads and biological weapons,
Another man-made big bang on earth;
No room, no house, no city,
No hut, no cottage, no village.
Another hundred years or may be less
To turn the cradle of civilization into a deathbed.

O! Oppenheimer what have you done!

The spiders glide in night by night,
Following a trail, light by light.

On top of the webs stand the spiders,
Ready to attack all threats with lighters.

A schism of venom to fill the cracks
Of the pieces that have always fit
And a wall is lifted upon their backs;
A webbed foundation of grit.

Brother Iran
by Michael R. Burch

Brother Iran, I feel your pain.
I feel it as when the Turk fled Spain.
As the Jew fled, too, that constricting span,
I feel your pain, Brother Iran.

Brother Iran, I know you are noble!
I too fear Hiroshima and Chernobyl.
But though my heart shudders, I have a plan,
and I know you are noble, Brother Iran.

Brother Iran, I salute your Poets!
your Mathematicians!, all your great Wits!
O, come join the earth’s great Caravan.
We’ll include your Poets, Brother Iran.

Brother Iran, I love your Verse!
Come take my hand now, let’s rehearse
the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.
For I love your Verse, Brother Iran.

Bother Iran, civilization’s Flower!
How high flew your towers in man’s early hours!
Let us build them yet higher, for that’s my plan,
civilization’s first flower, Brother Iran.

Published by MahMag (translated into Farsi by Mahnaz Badihian), Other Voices International, Thanal Online (India), Deviant Art, Portal Vapasin (Farsi). Keywords/Tags: Iran, Iranian, Farsi, Persia, Persian, brotherhood, culture, civilization, poetry, literature, poets, mathematicians, philosophers

'Every competition - is not
A struggle to win over others
But a battle over one's own insecurities
To overcome a perception of exclusion'

Do not ever allow yourself
to reduce the incomprehensible miracle
of your very existence

to basic questions of self-worth.
Do not ever allow your boss to write you off
as nothing more than a worker

who is failing to meet
some arbitrary set of expectations.
Do not ever allow a bully to tell you
that you are nothing more than a child

lacking in physical strength.
Do not ever allow a politician
to boil your being

down to a cheap distillation
of inside jokes and snickering, racist
circumlocutions.

The fact that you are here,
today,
alive and present
and reading these words
is a stentorian, staggering miracle.

We are,
all of us,
perhaps guilty
of occasionally forgetting
this fundamental fact.

But we must remember,
you and I,
and every other being with us,
that we sprang forth from nothing—
absolute oblivion—
into awareness and consciousness
and individuality, and personality
in this gargantuan, freezing, largely empty universe.

Allow me to remind you
that that idea
is entirely incredible—
the purest void was somehow spun into
the totality of your being—
into the infinity of the present moment—
a Möbius-strip mindfuck
expanding outward in space and time
reaching toward all directions simultaneously.

The fact that you and I are here is miraculous.
And the fact that you exist is a miracle.

Do not ever let
our sickly civilization
try to tell you anything to the contrary.

Gravel mounds in the mist
Are the mountain ranges of fantasy,
Spring green, eerie seen
Through commuter train windows.

Pitched roofs recede
Into infinite distance,
And junkyard parking lots are legion
In the gray suburban obscurity.

Factories and landfills loom,
Monuments and mausoleums,
The labor and the leavings
Of the little colossi.