Two Watches (5 Sufi Poems)

1 // Daniel spoke to God last night. She said that the moon was too bright, and asked if he might set out to work in dulling it down. Upon which he immediately smashed all the windows in his house as a reply; simply so he could see it brighter. Then he and God laughed ecstatically together.

The epitome of ‘faith’, he explained the next morning to his despairing wife, is rejoicing in what apparently is wrong.

Look! See how God loves us! Daniel later announced. She even invited some rain clouds along, so we needn’t even take a shower!

2 // It is Time again for a war between all the world’s broken hearts. Daniel loves such fights, and his greatest weapon is ‘complete surrender’.

Do you remember having half a lung only, when you were still in the womb? How your parents, half complete themselves, were somehow completed by you...

This is the best way to love someone: show them your broken doors – let them fix the whole house for you. In the process they mend themselves. This is Daniel’s trick, though it’s more of a ‘mindset’: to show his enemies precisely where to point their arrows.

Admittedly, however, he does sometimes fight back. But this is only when he’s drunk, and has forgotten about it all by morning.

3 // Daniel wants nothing more than to make love to himself again. No one else it seems can quite do it right. They rarely touch the perfect combination of spots.

This evening let us undress ourselves with ourselves, and not even pretend that our hands are another’s. After all, you have the same skin, the same hair, the same smell everywhere. Who can enjoy you more than you?

Daniel likes to first freeze himself outside in the cold, almost to the point of death. Then it’s that little bit more intimate when he returns to his warm bed for self-love-making.

4 // The best thing about God is that he’s a hypocrite. He wants us, more than anything, to laugh at him and ourselves. Yet we can sometimes get the wrong idea and start believing that what he apparently once said was the truth...

If one knows God well, he knows that the opposite of death is to be truly alive. He understands that to merely exist is both inevitable and finite in equal amounts. 

The only time God speaks is when Daniel starts to get either too comfortable or too cocky, or both. When he boasts about no longer needing an alarm clock, for instance. You see, God wants all of us to be both early and late at the same time. Early means alert and prepared; late means relaxed and forgiving. And the watch of God goes in both directions, so much so that the invention of God may not have even happened yet...

Daniel naturally wears two watches, so he can never perfectly tell the time. This is how he guarantees himself a daily dialogue with God.

5 // On this night, think not about the vastness of the universe, the heat of the sun, the enigmatic meaning of the moon. Instead, gaze into your lover’s eyes. They know you better than the stars will ever do.

If you have a tendency to be overly romantic, good for you. Like Daniel, you too have understood that indulgence is an absolute necessity.

Balance is lived out in extremes that find occasional meeting points before disappearing off again. Balance is not a place, nor a set of rules, but a journey. If you desperately need to sleep, the best suggestion might be to dance wildly all night. That way you ensure that for the whole next day you’ll be snoring.

Daniel is always awake when he’s not sleeping, and always asleep when he’s not awake. Anything in between he calls ‘meditating’.

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