The Mind in State

Fady Joudah

Does consciousness exist only when
you name it? Was the double helix a
stranger, the nucleus the first brain?
I feel therefore I am. This is more
peptide than pep-talk. The tongueless
mood is sticking its tongue out at us.
The mountian wool is shaved into
vineyards. Without other there is no
self & and we are not always other of
other selves. Is the moon a self, is
wine or grape? The body & the as-if
body, taking time taste waking slow
rain healing grass.

[…]

Still they ask in podcast
and electronic ink: How are you doing?

And they keep you in their hearts, pump you
to their minds, circulate you unimagined.

Take all the space you need, they say,
empathy loves the damaged.

Fady Joudah

2024

Unacknowledged Pollinators

“If you were a star,” you said, “you’d be called Forgive me.”
To which I smiled (you couldn’t see me) and said,
“Or Forgive me not.”

You said “Beware the ides of March on days we’re distant
from bees and flowers.”

“Not if the bees in the mouth don’t sting,” I said,
“and the air we move is a monk’s in a meditative year.”

Fady Joudah

2020

The Poem as Epiphyte

All this talk through a tunnel 
of kid gloves and landmines went underground.

You were catching my limbs
in sequels and spoofs, commemoration my organs

with friends lost, whose names like patients’ names.
Our clumped desire stirs and how

when unwound, as with DNA, it sweetly wounds us.
Hope in the right place, you said, is hope misplaced

or no hope at all. But I say, in my dreams I dream, 
in my dreams I do not hope.

Where were you when was I?

Fady Joudah

2018

Poems

The Mind in State

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Unacknowledged Pollinators

The Poem as Epiphyte

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The Mind in State

More by this poet

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Unacknowledged Pollinators

The Poem as Epiphyte

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