for SAP

What is love? Ask any ten-year old, she'll say

Love is an abstract noun wafting

Flawlessly on the page of a grammar book.

Noun. Abstract. That which cannot be touched.

But between holding hands and silent sobs on wet shoulders,

Withered and faded petals in fragrant letters,

Blood slowly soaks the page, flames slowly turn

The pages yellow; the edges crumple.

Emotions gallop in through the sluice gates of the sky.

And what remains is the memory of a lost innocence,

The promise of eternity in your ring

With the past carved as diamond on top of it.  

When clouds array themselves in white ribbons

And the dawn wraps itself around you,

Waves rise in the sea of time

And the abstract tide stops, falters, spills

Filling the room with a mercurial gloom.

The distance is what binds us. The emptiness.

Why are we as immiscible as the oceans? Touching

At the borders yet never becoming one?

The tunnel stretches further the closer we reach the light.

But love is an abstract noun, its ways

Unknown to our mere mortal hearts,

And through many a fateful turn

We become just another Troy ready to burn.

Yet in its name we become martyrs.

And in words I dream

Of one kiss on one dying star.

Abdullah lives in a world as Finnegans Wake and talks with Dostoyevsky. Tell him Ça suffit at asabdullah.ag@gmail.com