Collective memory lives like a cesspool collecting waste history birthed into us a collectors grave- for our ancestors fought and even today, not asking for the sky to darken their days, the challenge remains across seas/ across plains birthed in a land of contradiction and dis-ease we claim our— birthright to land birthright to peace birthright to die in love- we do as we please our birthright to birth unfettered by greed. © Jay Mora-Shihadeh
Tag: #Literary
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BIRTHRIGHT #poetry by jay
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OH’ PALESTINE #poetry by jay
Oh’ Palestine a dreamer dreaming of freedom freedom to care about the birds the doves delivering baby breaths and milk to the one you love Oh’ Palestine, you elude the one who dreams a dream laced in honey and memory of roots once dug deep within the recesses of your rebellious son— a love of sweet honey died a death upon the blackening eclipse of the yellowed sun Oh’ Palestine a dreamer, I dream of freedom for you for your children to smell the sweet scent of jasmine and taste the cedar the thyme of history in tea cups and breathe the air of freedom in daylight all night long Oh’ Palestine a dreamer, the leaves swirl dreams in sugar spun tea at the bottom of your last sip and the fractured seam of your fortunes lost at sea— oh’ sweet freedom, a dream a dream, a dream!
© Jay Mora-Shihadeh- Poetry and Art
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FEIGNED #poetry by jay
You you, what’s your name
he mimics time and time again—
in his broken english
he feigns to not remember
who I am/ a loving playfulness
only a grandpa can play this game
I sheepishly grin at the expected greeting
left to repeating the childish laughing
and answer him
knowing it’s the only language we share
in that awkward greeting we bear/ down
Oceans deep and years between
the clan intact but the clinging to bloodlines stretched
thin bare needles and pins/ what gravity we stand on
keeps us there/ hopeful in history
the fig/ the vine and earth/ tilted toward our ancestry
they left behind—
the promise of hope soiled by decline in fractured family lines
the feigning of play and fullness of love waned and waxed then withered
to dust. Moon/ sun/ earth/ bore no existence to the fig/ to the grapes
and the garden abandoned all hope/ mortal destructions placed under
time constraints. Pots and tables full empty of their plates/ a dream/ a laugh
the play/ full belly debates/ feigned a reason to disintegrate.
© Jay Mora-Shihadeh -
A CENTURY PLUS 9 #poetry by jay
A CENTURY PLUS 9 Today is your Birthday you would be 109! A century plus 9 years not shabby for an old man— to recognize the history/ the ages/ the lines on faces like tiny cracks and fissures along the banks of years that have slants that wriggled sideways/ lines that mimic each other creating rhythms and music to celebrate today—you me tateh the sea bubbling up to greet family lost at your absence— but the cost of remembering slays the weight of it all. Wow! It’s been 5, 10, 15 plus one, since you're gone. © Jay Mora-Shihadeh
Photo by Pop & Zebra on Unsplash
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The MOTHER of all TORTURE #poetry by jay
The MOTHER of all TORTURE Even the little moments/ full from yearning/ taste of regret lingering hold patterns of whiny self-importance. The sun cresting the hill on winter's day understands this more than humans care to. Mourning its final minutes/ its bulbous head hanging low/ purging/ raging like the sea/ its mouth dampened a bruise of purple-orange— a sucker punch from the night’s lurking shadow—the sun knows this is not defeat/ only reprieve. I too mourn/ with less beauty and grace/ my days are check-marked bright red/ night’s exhaustion tackles/ quickens the pace of my needs/ desires. The spilling of sand in hourglass grates my inner-ear/ speck by tiny speck/ echoes/ drum-like boulders/ crashing down cliffs. The mother of all torture/ is time wasting away/ on the bones of my existence. © Jay Mora-Shihadeh
Photo by Michael Niessl on Unsplash
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SURRENDER is SWEET #poetry by jay
I wave the white flag and breathe a sigh of relief when I realize detachment is gained— have I waited too long to feel the breeze of this flag, waving alone / white in the wind? Have the roads jagged turned in and lost their path, a wayward man’s sin? I recognize the absurdity to which this leads surrender is sweet I do believe Silence is master and in love I grasp her, willfully I surrender in glee Where escape once reigned over me I now saddle the horse and ride free, towards the silence I longed for and always hoped to see.
© Jay Mora-Shihadeh
Photo by mohammad majid on Unsplash
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LOVE SHATTERS EVIL #poetry by jay
The devil writes evil into my memory and locks me into a box for eternity. And, it’s memory that haunts me daily. I forge onward, fire burning steadily, hot-blue and ready to forget all about you. Legend of Satan begot the fragile mindset that God bestowed upon me, to fork his heart on tines thrown into battle. Love rings smoke circles around you, as I lift my hands to you.
Love shatters evil, and you white purity, save the memory born in babes and raised in fire. Water Lilies grow on seeded fertile soil, a breath, a breeze, on wind and seas, takes the evil to its knees. Lush-full-ripples of love and soft spoken words to ease and kindle gently, a rest, a reprieve, on these rivers that recede.© Jay Mora-Shihadeh
Photo by 愚木混株 cdd20 on Unsplash
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SURVIVAL #poetry by jay
The baby toddled from mobile home to mobile home, begging for a scrap of food from anybody who came to their door. Neighbors provided what they could, but they tired of the toddling grazing baby, because they themselves had little means. And, I mean little in the way of food/ housing/ clothing/ decorum/ mindset all of it. It was a hardened, baked-in depression, all seemed a normal existence to them. But, who doesn’t snap out of the dredge for a cute little baby begging for food, at least on the occasion they themselves were properly fed.
A trailer park designated for the poor, the lost souls whom life left like garbage bags, holed up in some dump on the outskirts of pristine tract homes in white suburbia, locked-up in grids and in cul-de-sacs. This Lazy Park is nothing but cheap scraps thrown together, but for them and their young, it was all they had—if they could keep it.
Mother always passed out cold on the sofa, unable to bother, nor care for the toddler. The toddlers mother was on her second husband, but he didn’t stay as long as the baby’s father did. Little Virginia was the youngest of the four children they birthed together. But, after years of trying he couldn’t keep her satisfied any longer, or meet the constant demands of Alma. She was a bottomless pit or so it was said. So he left and never came back. Things were different back then, or not.
I searched and found you on the internet. A shadowy gray and white image of you and your brother Edward. My eyes popped wide when I immediately saw the image of my mother in your face. Your body is slight and stout, actually a bit like a stout twig. The years upon years, built these decades of not knowing—not knowing if this face really existed at all. Shrouded in deep mystery and story, you emerged, surfaced like an old shipwreck lifted from sea. The sands of time washing you free. This search prophesied long ago, the stories brought me eventually to seek you out. Mother has come very far, as they say, from a neglected toddler to a wise, older, cheerful lady. This doesn’t lessen the pain she lived, nope it just shellacks itself into a happy shiny veneer that’s called survival.
© Jay Mora-Shihadeh
Photo by Jakub Kriz on Unsplash
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THE MAN OF PURITY #poetry by jay
They say shame lives quietly under the skin piercing pins needling at your humanity and fondling the inside of your self-esteem shame, they say prevents movement freedom a jail-keeper a prison guard mocking at your door I turned my skin inside out to escape the pain of less-er than you or him you know who I mean THE MAN of purity who belittles my kin.
© Jay Mora-Shihadeh
Photo by Sabine van Straaten on Unsplash
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BUTTERMILK #poetry by jay
Butter white chalk milk viscous thick cream in a glass silk smooth it runs slow purposeful like feline it stalks soured puss lost by mouse it hones in on butter white chalk milk glides heavy sleek coating throat drown downpour like slow-mo milk rain spout buttermilk yellow white fermented chalk milk bellyfull mouth full now.
© Jay Mora-Shihadeh
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DISCERNMENT #poetry by jay
There’s a discernment that one considers after the fall the careful consideration of how it all ended How? Why? Dismay settles down where reckless abandonment lay, there’s reason to banter, to be fickle and fitful that isn’t today Trends say/ dictate/ you should iterate to find answers, get granular and nit-pick the evidence for a kernel of truth leading to that resolute moment A fall without purpose is the worst of all purport the reason to discern some meaning in the encounter, buckle-up your spine and lift your head, face to face toe to toe, display some grace The discernment comes as a reckoning a sober cold slap on a hot face What really mattered? Was it all a waste? Discern it down to a tiny speck, a seedling you placed.
© Jay Mora-Shihadeh
Photo by Ramiro Pianarosa on Unsplash
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STUCK ON REPLAY #poetry by jay
Heavy in humidity and in heart, I pound the keys hoping for an answer to my intense emotional dismay to friction in contact with the human race. I divested my spirit from wealth in breast to bankruptcy in human decay. Function serves no purpose as I tumble about for words to lick the sodden breath from my taste buds and beat the gravitational pull backwards. As time races ahead of my slow motion pace it caresses inwards. Banter and blase’ form a pact to immobilize the speed in which I set my movements, as though this moment of time is lost in space, floating in a lulling-gentle-sway looping like a tape stuck on replay.
© Jay Mora-Shihadeh
Photo by Enzo Tommasi on Unsplash
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ERDGEIST RISES #poetry by jay
Does it count if you don’t know them? You know—family, years of living under a family rite and ritual of practice/ if in the end/ or the middle/ family doesn’t matter. Answering to myself and my wife suits me better. I fear I let the ghosts follow me on my path way too long. I cared about running in endless fear. Fear to progress, fear to digress— fear, fear, fear. Hopeful for life to whisk away that fear, where one day I wouldn’t recognize it anymore. A reckless steerless burst! From dawn ‘till dusk, no rest. No wonder I live quietly to the chest and relish the silence in my head. Today not fearing but living in slo-mo effects. I understand the Gnomes/ the Hermits/ the Erdgeist—in life and in death. I manifest the tales that weave through the devil’s grip, to God in spirit—I slip, I slip! I materialize in incubation from due West to due East to the forests in my dreams— to ‘The Here, to The Now’ Erdgeist rises on misty vales. Water vapors turn heathens and materialize on the waves of oceans and mountain sides. Blankets of pelting Blackbirds dot the skies, lifting the veil of midnight through violet nights. I reflect backward to leap forward with antelope strides, a herd stampeding through space and time. African plains dusted from the quakes of my hooves, beating back those fears lost to my strident youth.
© Jay Mora-Shihadeh
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I CAN’T BRING YOU FLOWERS EVERYDAY #poetry by jay
Consider it a sealed emotion nestled in the cleavage of your heart I can’t bring you flowers every day— for this love is now set in stone and made a pact with trust to deliver the best of me and the worst of me in full blossom and in faded stem Love arranged itself in asymmetrical patterns in full color palettes, not lost on seasons that wither and fray like dried smatterings of cuttings left in a vase A full house swelling in contentment with each passing day the days of lust and bright bouquets every day— exchanged for a coddled heart dug out, excavated to unearth my timid soul hidden deep away.
© Jay Mora-Shihadeh
Photo by Colette Allen on Unsplash
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THE FAMINE #poetry by jay
The disparate desperation seethes viciously through my veins in the air, an outward cowardly despair, in the air, a breath saturated in a tantalizing wish a dare on feathery dandelions blown, seeding the air a taste of cherries of figs, of pears a life of delicacy, deliciously plump, juice runs ripe ‘Alas- your trees are bare the earth is not right not fertilized in specific care, the loam- no sand, no silt nor proper clay the famine in your bloodline a betrayal, unfaithful the bearing of the fruit yields an unstoried fable.
© Jay Mora-Shihadeh
Photo by Jasper Wilde on Unsplash
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FRITTER’S #poetry by jay
Hell, don’t give in to it the repercussions aren’t worth the dime of payment they will lay on you. It’s easy to react in-kind the life you made severed by the malfeasance of their backward mind serve-up those fritters and forget the waste of your time— love comes easy to a soul who feeds the starving people a plateful of homemade fritters battered from their enemies' hateful hardened hearts.
© Jay Mora-Shihadeh
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TUMULT #poetry by jay
Tumult renders me paralyzed as the day holds silent in no particular manner still, silent, dry mist in and about this residence. The grip of Monday jeers at my shock of solitude not welcomed and concretizes itself into a badgering Blue Jay that won’t go away. Gray cloudy chills roll through the hours, calling up memories and feelings of my frenzied youth. Coffee laden chatter and crowded thoughts in coffee shops that never stop. Paint brush marathon’s beating the canvas not aware of the dampness or darkness or late hours, frantic. Fragile flowers, limp yellows boxed in my studio without care of time passing and the caffeine—electricity racing around in my mouth, fuels and spews out of my cursing lips. Fingertips lit like bolts of lightning. I erect that power-shock today as I sit in tumult rolling like tumbleweeds, in the fractured hour of this now afternoon, of this shitty Monday blues. Clouded gray showers with doom possible on the horizon if no answers start rising, clearing my head from this paralyzing tumult of misty bliss!
© Jay Mora-Shihadeh
Photo by Paola Chaaya on Unsplash
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THE MIRROR #poetry by jay
Old man look in your mirror
cry if you want to
the mirror reflects back
the pain of severed love
Old man you wanted love
to bicker the day with
a fragment of reality
hit the play button
on the mending setting
the fissures that separate
in two
your heart of one
Old man look in the mirror
reflect a life well-lived
and gratitude for more to give.© Jay Mora-Shihadeh
Photo by YashRaj Verma on Unsplash
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A SCREAM WITHOUT AN AUDIENCE #poetry by jay
A scream without an audience is no way to end this call of the wild to no end it is but fragile and in haste the wind carries it away Tall Florida Pines scrub the sky of it’s gray and the hawks glide and bob like kites caught on a line for display I figure, the time of forests lost behind the convenience store, in dreams, ended to childhood cemented in my mind the moss and deer and crick's wind through neighborhood to neighborhood connecting friendships never destined to survive Convenient thoughts of stolen pops, not the kind you score from countertops but below of pennies and mops, that only tots and moms remember most I figure you, screaming into the wind with no reception, is kinda’ like dreams without a host unseen through dust the days drifting upstream, possibility lost.
© Jay Mora-Shihadeh
Photo by Santiago Lacarta on Unsplash
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READY FOR MARKET #poetry by jay
The day welled up in me like a dead swollen body stiff from rigamortis, wading on garbage strewn waters. The sick feeling of having lost all sense of perspective, has knocked some sort of alter-existence into my blood, streaming forcefully around my psyche. Have I been in this state before? Yes, but not quite like this state, similar yet different, an arranged-kind-of-marriage existence, in which you feel powerless over your own body, mind and spirit. Marriage certificates branded like cattle-prodded calves stamped, burned and disregarded, set out to market for a cheap dollar and carcass. Life bled-out like a sack full of empty cockles. The muscles torn loose from their shells—vacuum sealed and ready for market.
© Jay Mora-Shihadeh
Photo by Shapelined on Unsplash
