("As-salaamu alaykum wa rahmatu Allah wa barakatuhu.")

<May peace be upon you, and the mercy and blessings of God.>

---

Call me Ismail.

This is short for my Muslim name: إسماعيل عبد الإرادة (Ismail Abdelirada). (My real name is quite different, but for reasons of privacy I do not choose to share it here. Others who have shared it did so without my consent.)

Until 2013, my wife, نظيرة (Nazeera), and I lived in Camazotz, California, a small town filled with rugged individualists who all do the same ruggedly individual things at the same ruggedly individual time in the same ruggedly individual way.

We then lived for 16 months in San Francisco, where mobile tsunami alarms ply the streets in the chill hours before dawn, pterodactyls wheeze politely as they choke on refuse under your windows six times a day, and you know it's time to cross the street when someone opens up on you with an Uzi. (Okay. Literally, the street sweepers make a noise when they start that resembles a tsunami alarm, the garbage and recycling trucks really do make a wheezing sound, and yes, the crossing signals on Market and several nearby streets actually sound like a machine gun. Unable to account for all of this in any other way, I have concluded that the City and County of San Francisco are inordinately clever in devising new ways to annoy residents.)

On the other hand, a few blocks away, we could get some of the world's best five-meat pizza, cooked halal by Mexican chefs in an Italian restaurant operated by Egyptians. (It's on Eerie Boulevard between Clones and Leavin'-Worth.)

Now we are back in Santa Cruz, at least until we can secure the necessary documents to begin our jihad:

We intend, God willing, to fly to Morocco, and then set out on foot from Tangier, along the coast of the Mediterranean, to Tarifa, Spain — a distance of just under ten thousand miles.

Our purpose in doing this is to spread a message of peace and brotherhood, both within Islam and between faiths.

Many people — and in particular many Muslims, even before we became Muslim — have been kind to us in countless ways. Now Allah has put this jihad into my heart to give me an opportunity, perhaps, to give something back at long last.

---

“Of no avail,” saith Richard Burton in his translation of _The Thousand And One Nights_, “is a twice-told tale.”

So, if you want to learn more about me, check this page (which will probably tell you far more than you wanted to know — ha ha, hee hee, ho ho!): http://www.moralintelligence.net/si....

If you want to reach me off site, click here: http://www.moralintelligence.net/co.... I will then (assuming you give me a valid address to which to reply) write back to establish direct contact.

(I forbear to offer harvester bots my direct email address by displaying it here.)

∞

<Lamentation
A moiety>

يا حبيبي، يا حياتي

و يا الألمي

:قال لني، قال لني، من فضلك

لم أنت تسحرني؟

:قال لني، قال لني، من فضلك

لم أنت تجاد قابي؟

∞

<Lamentation
Transliterated>

Yā habībī, yā hayātī

Wa yā 'l-alamī

Qāl linī, qāl linī, min fadlukī:

Lima enti tasaharanī?

Qāl linī, qāl linī, min fadlukī:

Lima enti tajalada 'albī?

∞

<Downwind
Vers libre>

Daily the freeway edges a little nearer.
Daily it grows a little bigger, dirtier,
More crowded, more congested. Daily it
Roars ever so slightly louder, with just
So much deeper a note of menace.
Pollution, too, and airborne death in

A thousand shapes: daily the freeway
Vomits a fraction more of these its woes
Upon a luckless downwind multitude.

Daily wanes the scant screen of ragged redwoods
That have for so long stood sentinel —
Forlorn hopes, perhaps; reminders of
A better time; symbols still, whether
Effectual or no — melting almost
Perceptibly before thousands of luckless
Downwind faces. Daily, too, the CalTrans
Trucks rattle past, rows of steel carrion
Beetles grown enormous, racing to some
Wound in raped and moribund nature's flesh
To aid in the corruption.

∞

<Fluid Fire
A Carminal>

Who but she, that fluid fire of my heart,
Hath eyes of ice in burning aqua framed,
Whose sparks like midnight fountains' blazes start To flash in spectral firestreaks from their spheres Like firefalls on mountain cascades untamed
Or dance of city lights on darkling meres?

Who but she, igniter of blood and mind,
Hath on her head a crown of gold ablaze
In tides of fire surging to make eyes blind
From phosphor seas of moonbeams burning bright
As gold and pearls in gulfs of silver rays
Whose waves like gems blaze in dawn's topaz light?

Who but she, she who sets men's souls afire,
Hath aspect so with beauty's rays aflame
That bright heaven's stars to its beams aspire
And the very sun envies its fair glow
And maids fair as the moon on it lay blame
Like night unstarred outshone by sun-gilt snow?

Who but she hath all these? Yet all were naught
But for that taintless mind, that force of thought, And perfect beacon soul of love's light wrought.

∞

"Not ignorant of trials, I now can learn to help the miserable."