Manifesto: I Am For A Poem

 

''I am for a poem''

I am for a poem that does things to language, 

shameful and timidly disturbing things, inappropriate to mention.

I am for poetry that mixes pain and pleasure,

and makes its purity, a priority.

I am for a poem of a delusional paradox, a poem of

an elegant oxymoron that can't help but sound logical.

I am for a poem that neglects the trivial smiles from a wrecked face,

and demands an exaltation of expression.

I am for a poem that does to time what time does to humans.

I am for a poem that features a length of power and reason, and a width of integrity and truth.

I am for a poem that squanders desires, hinders emotions, thoughts, instinct and conscience from all functioning.

I am for a poem that thrives with speech and flies out of focus, as if a blind butterfly of an ending spring.

I am for a poem of reinvention, rehabilitation, a poem of refuge to cosmos.

I am for a poem that imagines the depth of words and the death of meaning, a poem born out of a future history.

I am for a poem that exposes the meanness of the word mean, and finds meaning in familiarity.

I am for a poem that does something other than collecting dust from page, which in turn collects teardrops from eyes.

I am for a poem that does something other than be read, be it in whispers or aloud.

I am for a poem that flickers your soul, that shrinks your faith and twinkles your life.

I am for a poem that obliges no degree, no culture, no knowledge and no school.

I am for a poem that looks shy and sounds funny.

I am for a poem that does exactly what one cannot imagine, a poem that is cautious, enough not to be taken for granted.

I am for a poem that fits political, religious, social, psychological discussions, and can also be mentioned in erotic encounters, a poem of reference to all and to none.

I am for a poem that laughs at itself if it has been overly analyzed, and cries its eyes out when one of the interpretations is deemed official.

I am for a poem that highlights not figures of speech, but raise figures of heads.

I am for a poem that adopts the lifestyle of a chameleon, and can sense the texture of its geography and time and melds its nuanced being accordingly.

I am for a poem that exposes truths and hides lies for you to do the research, and see which lies lie in truths.

I am for a poetry that accepts intimate mating with other languages, but remains a virgin to its natal consumption.

I am for a poem that lives amidst concepts, but is taken example of in domestic quarrels.

I am for poetry that smells like honey in your final breakfast, and tastes like water for a fish, and sounds like guns in the air, and feels like love-making.

I am for a poem that shivers skins from desperation to decapitation, and sensitivity disappears just when it started to become comfortable.

I am for a poem that ignites the realm of nightmares, which scares and terrifies; a blossoming art of capacity to endure, of perseverance and adaptability.

I am for a poem of no title, a poem that strips you bear from your clothes, a poem that treats nudity as a form of expired formality.

I am for a poem that matures with a rebel, and reminds them that periods are not a trapping loop of time, their time shall pass, and it shall come again too.

I am for a poem that develops wrinkles of literary forms, hardly attempting to cover them with anti-aging creams.

I am for a poem that models utter confidence in the catwalk path of modernity, and stutters in backstage.

I am for a poem that answers when the fool asks 'What do you have to say?' with: I have nothing else to say. 

I am for poetry that may be used in tribunals, prisons, business dinners, kindergarten and funerals.

I am for poetry that prevents you from checking your phone and all of life distractions absentmindedly, a poem whose help in sinking into the fictive dream is paramount.

I am for a poem that breathes with purpose, and suffocates out of indifference.

I am for a poem that neither carries nor gets carried out, let alone by.

I am for a poem that makes sense to dogs and cats, and birds and sheep too.

I am for a poem that is tired of fashionable shoes, so much so it decided to walk barefoot despite the harsh gemstones underneath causing bleeding.

I am for a poem that celebrates its faux-pas.

I am for a poem that humiliates its alphabets into thinking they're not enough.

I am for a poem that invites you to play in an unfair game, but promising you it may fail, and that you may win.

I am for a poem of no answers, and if it does, they have to look like questions.

I am for a poem that narrates or describes, or sometimes laments the beauty, the ugly, and where humanity between them resides.

I am for a poem that is better read by a choir rather than by you, alone.

I am for a poem that robs your time and then yield it back, this time doubled, or tripled.

I am for a poem that invades minds, bitterly, and in the bus you think of it, in the prayer your heart sings it, in your sleep the dream pictures it, even the dawn shines with it.

I am for a poem that praises music for its fidelity in partnering (for good or bad) with poetry.

I am for a poem that shows that life is white and black, and lures you to embrace both of them, but still choose to stand in the white. Knowing all good knowledge that in white is itself, all colors combine.

I am for a poem that has faith in crescendo of perception, of courage and of madness too.

I am for a poem that resembles the art of architecture at its artistry, and responsibility most of all to the people that may live, and may die because of an ambitious roof.

I am for a poem that resembles medicine in its nobility to save lives.

I am for a poem that resembles the Milky way, in its majestic impossible-to-wrap-up-your-mind around view, with its lights and darkness, with its shades and explosions, with its supernovas and newborn stars, with its rogue planets circling without aim or hesitation, out of orbit clusters, a poem with uncountable scale, a poem of limitless creations, a poem of constant movement that shows the rhythm of life at its strength and at its weakness.

manifesto - 2015

imad afdam