Wawie, I think what's happening to you is natural.. You see.. long long looong ago in the mountains of Yemen there once lived a tribe of unrully vampires...lazy ones.. but vampires nonetheless.. They called themselves the Khoornifashoon.. Initially they feasted on the blood of caterpillars, baboons, and the ocassionaly albino sheep (mostly for dessert).. but one day.. one fateful day.. they humanized their tastes!!.. I am getting ahead of myself here though.. that's for later.. to truly understand you must start from that place they call.. the beginning.

We must look a few generations back.. swooosh..... swoosh.. swaash...

Ahem .. Part A of our ancestry:

It was a hot and unbearably humid day (3rd of Sha'ban 1222 Hj.) in the magnificently terraced mountains of Yemen. Wet blobs of heat permeated a sleepy... well... very sleepy (with a genetic predisposition to sleep)... mud village in Hadhrammawt (Southern Yemen). As my father says, "It was a scorcher!".

Each additional degree of the rising sun, exponentially increased the degree of degrees. Iqbal and Mustafa, the local scrawny mountain roosters, simply could not cope. They were cooked to a delicious crisp, and unable to cuckoo the tiny mud village awake. As the feathered unfortunates roasted in their vaporizing juices, so too did three of the villages most corpulent Sheikhs. Sheikh Bin-Daheer, Sheikh Yahya and Sheikh Binbrek, the more bulbous of the three.

Oblivious to the harassing heat, these three men continued their descent deep into the comatose, omega phase, of hibernation. Waterfalls of sweat gushed from their jungly body pits, in harmony with the warm gaseous emissions emanating from their various orifices. Hour after hour they continued to sleep, until finally they were forced to surface. It was a rude but welcome awakening, as they were drowning in a cesspool of their own sweat. All three men paddled off their beds, reached for their jambias (daggers), and headed to the local qat (a leafy narcotic chewed by most Yemenis) market.

Anyways... I'm getting sleepy now, so the next part will have to come from our highly esteemed cousin, The Looney Man!! Take it away cuz..

Where are you now?

Nearly a lifetime has passed
since our fingers first met,
Blindly searching for some sort of net,
Feeling for feeling, feeling for grip,
Crawling in space, blindly they hit,
Duelling for life, our fingers were bound,
My mind awakened, shocked from the ground,
I can't thank you enough, you transformed my strife,
Word by word into the most beautiful life,
No reason to frown, no reason to mourn,
For out of our hands, a universe was born,
A world for the weary,
Your glove of sanctuary,
We had good times, we paid no fines,
Yet, despite the quiet, despite the wit,
The glove was always too small to sit,
If only it stretched, it would snuggly fit,
If only we met where no one bit.

Maybe I dug too deep,
creating a path too steep,
blackening my fingers with the tar of your sleep,

Darkened were my hands, they were harder to see,
Out of control, they were looking for thee,
Day by day they crawl away,
A part of me begs them, pleads them to stay,
I don't know enough to finish this poem,
My solitary hand, at a loss while you roam,
Too much to say, much less is known,
What can I say when nothing is shown?

You have more wisdom, you feared to linger,
Wasn't so easy, I was wrapped around your finger,
Twas a moment of eternity not long enough,
So soon it ended, too soon it's rough,
Will a handshake ever do?
Do you fear it may be true?
Where are you now?
Where are we now?
Tell me how?
I sit and wait, hoping for your call,
But I fear deep inside
the day may never
fall..

Silence has befallen me..

These two months of drought describe infinitely more than any string of text.. At first glance, it's just another dry patch of sand in the Empty Quarter...Another dune behind me, another bullet on my resume...It scares me how easily I succumbed, how easily I crossed the burning sand..

Yet, despite my automatous actions and monotonous distractions, I continued to ferment the mixtures in my closet.. I am still host to the midnight rendez vous of questions and answers...often in arms with one another.. more than often against me.

So much is desired in this world, yet we deny ourselves what we truly need.. It is painfully obvious, yet ever resounding, too painful for some...I cannot delve into didacticism for I am guiltier than the next, nor do I need to.. my three readers already know what they need to know.

Wisdom can come from many directions, but to act on it requires that I disentangle myself from myself and away from that which holds me in place... It is mutiny from below...supreme mutiny.. and if it succeeds.. it will leave a heartfelt voice in my head... strong enough to beautify the Quarter.. soft enough to bring the birds and bees.. deep enough to bring the rain... large enough to bring life. But what is new???

Questioning the questions.. they do arrive in plenty.. but if they are finally answered on paper will they hold any value? Will the test be outdated.. ? Will there be enough to salvage?? Will I ever know?.. Truth can be the most slippery of creatures.. will it consume me whole? Or suffocate me with its pervasive presence, just out of reach, but close enough to squeeze out life. When will I care enough?