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A grand outgoing, heading directly into the puzzlement, the puzzle, puzzling it all out... Poems of search and devotion to the One, through labyrinthine manifestations... self and its various sheddings.

These are poems written over nearly a year in 1996, ecstatic, bewildered, exploratory, celebratory, remembering Allah in all the usual and unusual places, seeing (God willing) His Light through all things, people and places. A trajectory arc of heart over and through time. Hoping by these flights to acknowledge His Generosity to us in adversity and peace.

There are among us luminous beings who maintain that what we might taste of the Garden of Paradise and what we might suffer of the Fire of Hell is right here in our present earthly and mortal existence as well. The imaginal truth of the Spiritual Path that points to the Next World after death is perhaps indisputable (however some might vigorously dispute it) but our lives, upon reflection, sometimes thrown overboard and barely making it to sho...

Try to describe light and it's hopeless/ Nothing can quite catch in words luminous nothingness/ Hold something up in light and it's revealed in it say a/ miniature Easter Island head now brought out in its/ full strangeness by the surrounding illumination/ But how can you hold up something like light in light and hope to achieve/ the thing the flash the flat surrounding splashy airiness of brightness/ in whose beneficence everything/ including...

...The look of love death has on its face and in its fathomless eyes as behind the burning irises legions upon legions of angels file up and down a spiraling staircase carrying love-notes and bringing back blessings and reprieves..." I'm really not sure why this particular collection of my poems is called Blood Songs, the title it has had since beginning the first poem of the book written in October of 2000, and though, as with other titles of...

Here's the classic tale of Ala-udeen (Arabic pronunciation, meaning The Glory of the Way) and the well-known genie (or jinn) in the magic lamp, with all its smoke-blasts of wondrous mystery, swift mind-boggling transformations, heartfelt love-longing for the princess of the sultan, innocent good versus evil (with good triumphant against black magicky dark forces), and in modern, narrative rhyming couplets for today's readers. Everyone's invite...

A surreal/spiritual adventure to an imaginary Mars and further (more real) metaphysics, spinning strangely familiar worlds as close to us as the beating of our pulse and as far into imaginal space as the endlessly fascinating Red Planet and beyond. by the poet of Dawn Visions (City Lights, 1964), Burnt Heart (City Lights, 1972), The Floating Lotus Magic Opera Company (1967-69), The Chronicles of Akhira, The Desert is the Only Way Out (Zilzal P...

RAMADAN SONNETS, not always a spiritual meditation, nor often even what should be felt and achieved in the fast (the poems are striving for some reality of feeling and experience), these poems are an imaginatively inspired record of the month, its small epiphanies and grim endurances, heading out from its physical constraints to contemplate a vast panorama, or focusing in on particulars, those embryos of explosive meaning, to evoke the blessed...

Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps."(William Blake) A cooly impassioned, and "pathward" adventurous series of poems joining two modes of enlightenment, Buddhist and Sufi, that may in many ways be parallel-from my sitting with saintly Shunryu Suzuki of the San Francisco Zen Center in the early 60s, and my blessed time with Qutb Shaykh ibn al-Habib of Fez in Meknes, Morocco, in the 1970s, may Allah be pleased with both of them. Are the...

LOVE IS A LETTER BURNING IN A HIGH WIND is a chronicle in sequential open field poems of a second visit to Turkey (the first recorded in formal ghazals), and to the glorious atmospheres of Sufi Master Mevlana Rumi and his gnostic teacher, Shams. Included are three extended narrative poems in the thematic style of Rumi's Masnawi, undertaken with no plot or source other than spontaneous inspiration. characterized by talking animals and "decapita...

This high adventure, in loosely metered heroic couplets, follows Abdallah Jones on his quest to capture the ball of disappearing-dust from the mad Sorcerer and stop the destruction of the world. He has been given the task by his Sufi shaykh, which takes him to the Sorcerer's castle, where he meets Marbug the elf, Neptune, the King of the Jinn, and a collection of sweet and evilly dangerous characters along the way with more cliff-hangers and n...

COATTAILS OF THE SAINT - is a collection of poems which chase after the coattails of sanctity, in this world with its "meanings set up as images" (a Sufi definition of what we take around us as reality), and those souls living among us right now and forever who have had bestowed upon them that dimension of sanctity which sets them apart while making them at the same time true human beings. Imagination has given these poems a "saintly" thread, ...

THE MUSIC SPACE, written in 2001, is a series of poems most acutely attuned to the sounds of our universe, composed for the most part while traveling back and forth to New York, unexpectedly ending with the world-transforming events of 9/11, completing in an apocalyptic way an unforeseen circle. This is the music space where music is most difficult this place of joy and horror. I think the music of the spheres can be heard in this space. And t...

I IMAGINE A LION - Poems in the devotional visionary tradition of Blake, Rumi, Christopher Smart, McClure. Ecstatic recognitions from both within and without our heartfelt common cosmic consciousness. "In the forest of matter so tightly meshed you/can't see the weave/I imagine a lion./Sometimes it's a table, sometmes it's chairs./Lion eyes out of the dark./Lion purrs when silence descends.

THE FIRE EATER'S LUNCHBREAK: What does happen when we stop swallowing the flame, whatever it might be? This world, our own drudgery, our passions, low or high, that locus of our experience we call "I" - and take a break? There's a Sufi text by Shaykh ibn 'Ata Illah whose title I've always loved: "The Giving Up of the Management of Your Affairs." Neat trick! But somehow that's also the key to the present title, and God willing to something of t...

Of the three books collected here, the first is celebratory of Islam's eschatology (next-world doctrine), the second an homage to the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, and the third written on an 'Umra in 1995/96 to Mecca and Medina... These are all poems of my root work, going down into the loam of study, practice and fidelity to the ideas and often the terminology of Islamic and Sufic thought, while my poetic develo...

These poems consider (sometimes wildly) the inventions that are our lives, and their Inventor, the Divine Fashioner of ourselves and our actions, with passionate imagination, surreal humor, and abiding focus and love for that Fashioner, in all His manifestations.

IN THE REALM OF NEITHER: I had a dream just before waking of a shelf filled with books, and I was reading the titles when a spotlight hit the spine of one book that also seemed to protrude from the others and be coming out of the shelf toward me. On it were the words "In the Realm of Neither" that remained vivid and unforgettable upon waking... (poem) If all the wood in the world were to sing/and every rose gave a political speech/and every cl...

THROUGH ROSE COLORED GLASSES is a book of visionary poems mindful of the story of Sayyedina 'Isa (Jesus), peace be upon him, who one day passed by a decaying dog carcass in the road with his companions, and replied, when they complained at how rank it smelled, "Yes, but its teeth are beautiful!" We can live our lives in misery seeing only the miserable aspects of this often grindingly difficult existence, or in peace seeing the beauteous and m...

This may be my most personal book, as I wrote this collection of poems as an attempt to definitively and honestly connect in a deep way with Farid, my teenage stepson. "Ah, since you're not my/ natural son, you can be my/ supernatural son! No actual genes of mine// swim in your blood, your flesh doesn't/ resemble mine, though since I've been your/ dad from the time you were two, we now have a/ definite// family resemblance, leaping over/ genet...