Kaveh Akbar. Photo by Paige Lewis
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Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before
I can’t even remember my name, I who remember
so much—football scores, magic tricks, deep love
so close to God it was practically religious.
When you fall asleep in that sort of love
you wake up with bruises on your neck. I don’t
have drunks, sirs, I have adventures. Every day
my body follows me around asking
for things. I try to think louder, try
to be brilliant, wildly brilliant. We all want
the same thing (to walk in sincere wonder,
like the first man to hear a parrot speak) but we live
on an enormous flatness floating between
two oceans. Sometimes you just have to leave
whatever’s real to you, you have to clomp
through fields and kick the caps off
all the toadstools. Sometimes
you have to march all the way to Galilee
or the literal foot of God himself before you realize
you’ve already passed the place where
you were supposed to die. I can no longer remember
the being afraid, only that it came to an end.
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Kaveh Akbar is the author of Pilgrim Bell (Graywolf 2021) and editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse (Penguin Classics 2022). In 2024, Knopf will publish Martyr!, Kaveh’s first novel.
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Fiona Banner, Simpleton, Simpleton, Simpleton, oil on found painting, 77 x 127.5cm, 2021.
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Author: Terence Winch
