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Print: $15.00 Download: $9.00 THE MUSIC SPACE, written in 2001, is a series of poems most acutely attuned to the sounds of our universe, composed for the most part while traveling back and forth to New York, unexpectedly ending with the world-transforming events of 9/11, completing in an apocalyptic way an unforeseen circle.
This is the music space
where music is most difficult
this place of joy and horror…
I think the music of the spheres
can be heard in this space…
And the original sound is the
sound of God alone audible to Himself
and we are the humming elements of that sound…
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Print: $15.00 Download: $9.00 UNDERWATER GALAXIES is a book of poems in the floating genres of open inspiration and Rumiesque narrative, taking a journey to Morocco, visiting Marrakech, being visited by William Blake in vision… golden bees, yellow roses… the long and winding road from the divine affirmation of our birth to the double affirmation of death and its afterlife, all its twists and turns made sweeter by serious (and often humorous) imaginal utterance.
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Print: $12.00 Download: $7.00 A surreal/spiritual adventure to an imaginary Mars and further (more real) metaphysics, spinning strangely familiar worlds as close to us as the beating of our pulse and as far into imaginal space as the endlessly fascinating Red Planet and beyond… by the poet of Dawn Visions (City Lights, 1964), Burnt Heart (City Lights, 1972), The Floating Lotus Magic Opera Company (1967-69), The Chronicles of Akhira, The Desert is the Only Way Out (Zilzal Press), The Ramadan Sonnets (Jusoor/City Lights, 1996), and The Blind Beekeeper (Jusoor/Syracuse University Press, 2002).
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Print: $15.00 Download: $9.00 “Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps.”(William Blake) A cooly impassioned, and “pathward” adventurous series of poems joining two modes of enlightenment, Buddhist and Sufi, that may in many ways be parallel—from my sitting with saintly Shunryu Suzuki of the San Francisco Zen Center in the early 60s, and my blessed time with Qutb Shaykh ibn al-Habib of Fez in Meknes, Morocco, in the 1970s, may Allah be pleased with both of them.
Are the two protagonists of these poems the main characters in Waiting for Godot, now no longer waiting, but there? Exalted humor lightens our spiritual endeavors.
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Print: $20.00 Download: $12.00 SALT PRAYERS / POEMS, a tangy and rich chronological collection of poems ranging from molecular flakes to imaginal scalings of rare and lofty mountains, written between May 29 – October 24, 1998 by the poet of Dawn Visions (City Lights, 1964), Burnt Heart (City Lights, 1972), The Floating Lotus Magic Opera Company (1967-69), The Desert is the Only Way Out, The Chronicles of Akhira (Zilzal Press), The Ramadan Sonnets (Jusoor/City Lights, 1996), The Blind Beekeeper (Jusoor/Syracuse University Press, 2002) and The Ecstatic Exchange Series, beginning with Mars & Beyond, and Laughing Buddha Weeping Sufi (2005).
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Print: $17.00 Download: $10.00 RAMADAN SONNETS, not always a spiritual meditation, nor often even what should be felt and achieved in the fast (the poems are striving for some reality of feeling and experience), these poems are an imaginatively inspired record of the month, its small epiphanies and grim endurances, heading out from its physical constraints to contemplate a vast panorama, or focusing in on particulars, those embryos of explosive meaning, to evoke the blessed month of Ramadan's intertwining flavors of asceticism and sensual gratitude, its palatable and palpable Light.
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Print: $20.00 Download: $12.00 A collection of poems from the poet of Salt Prayers, The Blind Beekeeper and Ramadan Sonnets, simultaneously plummeting down and somehow ascending, all the while embracing Whitmanic vistas in vision of longing and epiphany. As 11th Century Sufi Master, Al-Hujwiri writes in his Kashf al-Mahjub: When Moses conversed with God, he asked, “Lord, where shall I seek You?” God answered, “Among the brokenhearted.” Moses continued, “But, Lord, no heart could be more despairing than mine.” And God replied, “Then I am where you are.”
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Print: $20.00 Download: $12.00 I IMAGINE A LION – Poems in the devotional visionary tradition of Blake, Rumi, Christopher Smart, McClure… Ecstatic recognitions from both within and without our heartfelt common cosmic consciousness… "In the forest of matter so tightly meshed you/can't see the weave/I imagine a lion./Sometimes it's a table, sometmes it's chairs./Lion eyes out of the dark./Lion purrs when silence descends."
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Print: $17.00 Download: $10.00 COATTAILS OF THE SAINT – is a collection of poems which chase after the coattails of sanctity, in this world with its “meanings set up as images” (a Sufi definition of what we take around us as reality), and those souls living among us right now and forever who have had bestowed upon them that dimension of sanctity which sets them apart while making them at the same time true human beings. Imagination has given these poems a “saintly” thread, with no particular saint in any traditional pantheon meant, but rather that essence of simple sainthood of which we are all (God willing) capable.
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Print: $17.00 Download: $10.00 This high adventure, in loosely metered heroic couplets, follows Abdallah Jones on his quest to capture the ball of disappearing-dust from the mad Sorcerer and stop the destruction of the world. He has been given the task by his Sufi shaykh, which takes him to the Sorcerer’s castle, where he meets Marbug the elf, Neptune, the King of the Jinn, and a collection of sweet and evilly dangerous characters along the way with more cliff-hangers and near-deaths than anyone but Abdallah should have to endure – and finally to Madina, the city of the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings of God be upon him, his shaykh and people from the ‘Umma of Islam from all over the world, and a marvelous solution to the whole caper. Black and white illustrations throughout by the author illuminate the text.
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Print: $15.00 Download: $9.00 LOVE IS A LETTER BURNING IN A HIGH WIND is a chronicle in sequential open field poems of a second visit to Turkey (the first recorded in formal ghazals), and to the glorious atmospheres of Sufi Master Mevlana Rumi and his gnostic teacher, Shams. Included are three extended narrative poems in the thematic style of Rumi’s Masnawi, undertaken with no plot or source other than spontaneous inspiration… characterized by talking animals and “decapitated” watermelons. Ecstatic lyricism and sweet apprehension the impulse and goal to glorify and praise this swift life and its Originator and Sustainer:
Sometimes I get tired of all this talk about God/
and I just want to go and sit under a tree//
but then the tree starts talking to me about God/
and we find ourselves in another conversation
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Print: $15.00 Download: $9.00 THE FLAME OF TRANSFORMATION TURNS TO LIGHT is a book of poems in traditional ghazal form, the first half begun in Turkey, companion volume to “open form” poems written at a later visit, published in 2006 as Love is a Letter Burning in a High Wind (The Ecstatic Exchange). Visiting the epiphany-inducing tombs of Mevlana Rumi and his spiritual companion Shems in Konya, their baraka bathing the journey, the grave of Turkey’s great native Sufi poet, Yunus Emre, and traveling through a land of such subtle spirituality, these poems chronicle an imagistic diary through both interior and exterior countrysides, with the second half continued in the same vein at home in Philadelphia.
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Print: $15.00 Download: $9.00 THE FIRE EATER’S LUNCHBREAK: What does happen when we stop swallowing the flame, whatever it might be? This world, our own drudgery, our passions, low or high, that locus of our experience we call “I” – and take a break? There’s a Sufi text by Shaykh ibn ‘Ata Illah whose title I’ve always loved: "The Giving Up of the Management of Your Affairs." Neat trick! But somehow that’s also the key to the present title, and God willing to something of the poems this book contains. Poem: His High Command/and an ant’s vibrating antenna//The horrors of war/and a newborn’s uncurling fingers//Flash floods/and a dry riverbed gurgling//The heart alone/and entire humanity’s pulse beat
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Print: $15.00 Download: $9.00 IN THE REALM OF NEITHER: I had a dream just before waking of a shelf filled with books, and I was reading the titles when a spotlight hit the spine of one book that also seemed to protrude from the others and be coming out of the shelf toward me. On it were the words “In the Realm of Neither” that remained vivid and unforgettable upon waking... (poem)
If all the wood in the world were to sing/and every rose gave a political speech/and every cloud took pity on its neighbor/and every stone composed an epic poem about/being a stone
and each of us saw God direct with our/own eyes in naked vision/as clearly as we see ourselves stooping to/drink from a lake…
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Print: $15.00 Download: $9.00 This may be my most personal book, as I wrote this collection of poems as an attempt to definitively and honestly connect in a deep way with Farid, my teenage stepson.
"Ah, since you’re not my/
natural son, you can be my/
supernatural son! No actual genes of mine//
swim in your blood, your flesh doesn’t/
resemble mine, though since I’ve been your/
dad from the time you were two, we now have a/ definite//
family resemblance, leaping over/
genetic fact like some sleek green grasshopper of/
supernatural light."
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Print: $15.01 Download: $9.00 THROUGH ROSE COLORED GLASSES is a book of visionary poems mindful of the story of Sayyedina ‘Isa (Jesus), peace be upon him, who one day passed by a decaying dog carcass in the road with his companions, and replied, when they complained at how rank it smelled, “Yes, but its teeth are beautiful!” We can live our lives in misery seeing only the miserable aspects of this often grindingly difficult existence, or in peace seeing the beauteous and majestic Handprint of The Divine Reality in everything. These often ecstatic poems, mindful of the former, prefer the latter for their inspiration and their goal.
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Print: $15.00 KNOCKING FROM INSIDE, BY TIEL AISHA ANSARI, is the journey of the human soul towards the Divine approached through a number of doorways: sorrow, the natural world, and the listening heart. We travel through both real and illusionary lands to (re)join the Beloved at the end of all paths.
"When Tiel says 'God' she means it, in all her various ways and fresh poetic stratagems, in these poems in which there are many strata, and in this book which contains many gems." — Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore
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Print: $15.00 Download: $9.00 Poetic inspiration continues to be a mystery to me, but I am its deep advocate, and hold to its irrational and shady acreage like a greedy real estate developer gazing out over the possibilities (a ramshackle hut here, a barn there, a castle with a lake yonder…). Is it angels, djinn, my black cat curled at the bottom of my bed while I’m hot in composition mode? My “unconscious,” "God Consciousness?” (my fervent prayer).
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