Poem
By Jehangir Saleh
Written:  April 1, 2005

My wife
Wanted me to write a poem
To purge myself, essentially, from myself
For what is this poem
But a shield
As every tree is a signal
Towards heaven
The question of the reader is to ask
What is the poet trying to hid
I have compiled a list to make your job much easier:
Victim hood
Helplessness
Love
Idealism
Romance
The answers to the questions I complain about
Have I mentioned love?

Where do we keep the houses
That we build up
Around ourselves
Once we are done hiding from who we are
And decide to emerge?
The sign of a person such as i
Is that he complains that the sunlight’s too bright
Or the trees too high, the sidewalk too paved
Until he learns to spot these same suppose irregularities in himself
And begins to ask questions like: show I plant lower tree, leave the sidewalk unpaved, learn to knit something so I can go outside, sit on the bench and enjoy the sun.
This is a poem I write late at night when I miss my wife and really just pretend that I am the victim of a car crash where only the driver dies, but the passengers suffer injuries to the ego.

The tortured artist button in my back side was jammed, but you held me anyway, even though the guy who usually repairs me in on holiday. There is something unusual and sophisticated about us together. Alone, we are total fuckups. But together, somehow, we can manage to hold on.
So hold me. I am broken. That line is so overused. But you hold me anyway.