“A Petit Poet”

(She’s …my neighbor)

She lives alone and drives a tired truck,

wears worn out jeans and exhausted boots.

She puts on glasses, not those hats intellectuals do,

doesn't talk with her hands like people who think they know it all..

She keeps her tiny hands in her pockets and in fact

I haven’t heard much of her must-be-soft voice.

She’s just a very quiet person

smoothly walking through

a very noisy world;

                            Watching.

I saw her once at a thrift shop

sitting on the floor

and a pile of yellow-browned paper books

swiftly gathered around her.

We never met in a reading event

where dozens of poets pose behind the podium

shouting into the microphone:

" I is here"                                        

 (none of us was there).

I’ve also seen her with guys

wide range, you know,

none of them stays, of course.

So I think the most stable thing in her life so far

is the way those delicate muscles of her face

are in constant struggle with thoughts,

words and rhymes.

There are days that she shines

and days she just looks very unpublished.

I swear I once saw a long line of letters

marching into her head and out:

                                              Dancing.

I have watched her face,

many times, 

turning into a single word;

A-mused, disgusted, dark, kind ,deep,

pendulum, mute, tic tac, chaos, snow,

oak, kettle, lonely,

and sometimes just withdrawn,

                                               x, y, z,

                                                    dis-ass-soci-ate-ed;

                                                                   Being/not being.

She is (many thanks to many gods) un-special

just a middle aged woman

dreadfully invisible in the crowd.

Lost to the world

to herself constantly found.

She is everybody's insignificant other

and yet there is just something about her eyes;

                                      seeing/ not seeing/too much seeing.

something about her tiny existence,

her petit presence on this planet;

She stays for good

in every place she leaves forever behind;

                                                            Extending.

Azin Izadifar

2.3.2013