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."

Of the three books collected here, the first is celebratory of Islam's eschatology (next-world doctrine), the second an homage to the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, and the third written on an 'Umra in 1995/96 to Mecca and Medina... These are all poems of my root work, going down into the loam of study, practice and fidelity to the ideas and often the terminology of Islamic and Sufic thought, while my poetic development since these book incorporates more imaginally leaping imagery and unhesitantly associational language, to more openly circumscribe both the tone and experience of a modern American but cosmopolitan Muslim/Sufi in our very promising but rambunctiously tumultuous times.

A MADDENING DISREGARD FOR THE PASSAGE OF TIME: While we are indeed born into time, and at death we slide out of time altogether into eternity, in whatever space we might conceive, in a supreme moment we might taste timelessness, fleeting though it may be (though that fleetingness too being still only a matter of time). But there are also those whose "disregard" of the passing of time is due to their absorption in Eternity, and The Eternal One.

YOU OPEN A DOOR AND IT'S A STARRY NIGHT: What is this life to us if it's not a continual wonder, whose elements of surprise should lead us to recognition of the Source? A continuation of the Ecstatic Exchange Project of putting a life in poetry, and poetry in life, in the new voice of a radiantly indigenous application of the Prophet Muhammad's revelation, peace be upon him, and its living and instantaneous continuation through enlightened teachers / ...a sky full of small circular rainbows like/pinwheels, small enough to see the/radiant sheen of their entire/circumference spinning, / a door you open and it's a starry night..

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.

This may be a secret among only a few of its recipients, but cancer is a direct and positive gift from God. Its chemo and radiation therapies wrack and ruin us... and its alternative therapies may bewilder us with the arcane and often whacky character of their methods... I chose the traditional medical program of three chemo and thirty-five radiation sessions, begun immediately after diagnosis of my cancer, and I praise Allah for the doctors who treated me with their medicine chest of tough love. _________________ Redemption happens the way/ water falls/ Forgiveness is air/ let into an airless room/ Even at the top of the highest peak/ we can't just step off into the sky/ At some point only God's Love has any reality/ and everything hangs enraptured from that ferocious hook/ Streams of light continue to enter us from we/ know now where/ The truth of our beings/ light streaming everywhere

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