dasss wasss goooooooood

salaamu alaikum
this is the 1st place winner for poetry in MIST 2006. congrats to my boy hasan, known also as baller4life. here it is:

In my head I’ve got these dreams, these depictions, descriptions
Barrages of collages, colors outside the spectrum of sight, just light beyond the range of my vision
But they fill me to the brim, no use to suppress them, no way to win
Except through the burning of my soul, the fat of laziness dripping off its end
By expending this newly born piece of flesh and muscle into its truer function
As it pumps my blood and life through these wrinkled veins into these flashes of imagination
No, more like personalized personification of a reservoir of emotion
Dampened, barred and hidden behind a veneer of the visage of men.
So instead I intend to attempt to paint this picture of thoughts and feelings with words
Because my fingers and hands cannot fathom subtleties left to the mind, hold, or grasp this burden of worlds
This sketch of a solemn soul sitting in solitary at the strand of a stream, holding stones
And it might seem like a dream, but if you know what I mean, he’s grinding them down with scorching coals.
This fiery heat of struggle, dirt falls away as it bubbles when he experiences trouble,
Sharpened and shaped by all the times that he felt prone to the suggestion, that he should just lash back in an act of reactionary aggression, because he can take revenge and avenge his pride for that snide comment or the backbiting from behind, but to swallow that coal, and take the cold in his eyes and lump in his throat and throw it away, disregarding the pain of bowing low and letting go of the hate, the ire in his gaze, the daggered words on his tongue, the fire in his ways, the urge to simply stain a steel sword red, or put a gun to a head, or just return what was said, and what’s been said has been said, so to take this to bed and forgive and forget without remorse or regret grants a greater reward, far more whole than the black hole of revenge, gratification of a soul with a spine that can bend like the kind tree that bears its fruit low to even the lowliest of men.

And no its not the end, he knows that rest is not his friend, he dodges a bullet from a gun, its the whisper of shaytan, to leave his stones alone and show his own that this is what he’s done, unless he wishes to undo the labor that he has done to none, by leaving his stone, his soul, his whole, outside in the sun, because the stagnant heart is nothing but a degenerating one.

So now he’s back, he was never gone, with this same stone clutched,
Grinding viciously with a heated coal that burns him to the touch,
Crouched over and working fiercely, because his mentality’s such,
That he knows he started this job, and finish it he must,
So with another chafe of his scrape he unveils the glitter of past times and present dates,
And takes a step forward when he couldn’t contemplate
The leaving of his prayer for the next time he would wake, because what if he didn’t wake and met his fate and his lord in this most miserable state, of heedlessness
So he wakes from his warmth in the cold air of the night,
And prays to his Lord takes the sweetness of Light when no one saw or heard
He took another step forward when he curbed his desires, blasting through the doors of vile indecency, by fasting on the day in which he would eat normally, or all the times that he felt the tug of this world come at him so bold, he’s hanging off a single strand while stranded at sea in the midst of a storm that swarms him so, that he surely would not persist in his hold of this string, but he does and that’s what strengthens his resolve and drowns his remorse and remolds his whole soul into a resilient slave and a true mortal.

And this rock that he shapes with his bloody hands and welling eyes, feeds his soul to mold one simple characteristic goal: Patience in relations, in frustrations, in temptations, bearing not the limitation of reactionary situations, but patience is pro-active like meeting your enemy with a smile, or walking that extra mile, plunge headfirst into that trial, and with this you turn that first rock in your pile into a rock no more, and you see that your efforts are worthwhile because you have just won one battle in a war and these metaphors can’t fully store the heat of this metamorphosis, but this process will be hard and bitter, sometimes even torturous, to take your sweat and time put your heart and mind to the test, you need a map? take the Quran and look up your coordinates, and become of those fortunate enough to read and actually learn from it,

And then if you see your rocks you’ll find that the stones are now refined, gleaming with light of Allah’s Noor and his signs, and you know in your mind, that this is small victory and you have so many more stones to find, and to grind each and every one will be just as tough, but for that you have just carved Patience into a Diamond from the Rough.