A surreal/spiritual adventure to an imaginary Mars and further (more real) metaphysics, spinning strangely familiar worlds as close to us as the beating of our pulse and as far into imaginal space as the endlessly fascinating Red Planet and beyond. by the poet of Dawn Visions (City Lights, 1964), Burnt Heart (City Lights, 1972), The Floating Lotus Magic Opera Company (1967-69), The Chronicles of Akhira, The Desert is the Only Way Out (Zilzal Press), The Ramadan Sonnets (Jusoor/City Lights, 1996), and The Blind Beekeeper (Jusoor/Syracuse University Press, 2002).

"Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps."(William Blake) A cooly impassioned, and "pathward" adventurous series of poems joining two modes of enlightenment, Buddhist and Sufi, that may in many ways be parallel-from my sitting with saintly Shunryu Suzuki of the San Francisco Zen Center in the early 60s, and my blessed time with Qutb Shaykh ibn al-Habib of Fez in Meknes, Morocco, in the 1970s, may Allah be pleased with both of them. Are the two protagonists of these poems the main characters in Waiting for Godot, now no longer waiting, but there? Exalted humor lightens our spiritual...

RAMADAN SONNETS, not always a spiritual meditation, nor often even what should be felt and achieved in the fast (the poems are striving for some reality of feeling and experience), these poems are an imaginatively inspired record of the month, its small epiphanies and grim endurances, heading out from its physical constraints to contemplate a vast panorama, or focusing in on particulars, those embryos of explosive meaning, to evoke the blessed month of Ramadan's intertwining flavors of asceticism and sensual gratitude, its palatable and palpable Light.

A collection of poems from the poet of Salt Prayers, The Blind Beekeeper and Ramadan Sonnets, simultaneously plummeting down and somehow ascending, all the while embracing Whitmanic vistas in vision of longing and epiphany. As 11th Century Sufi Master, Al-Hujwiri writes in his Kashf al-Mahjub: When Moses conversed with God, he asked, "Lord, where shall I seek You?" God answered, "Among the brokenhearted." Moses continued, "But, Lord, no heart could be more despairing than mine." And God replied, "Then I am where you are."

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."