Kaveh Quotes

I am not a slow learner I am a quick forgetter such erasing makes one voracious if you teach me something beautiful I will name it quickly before it floats away

envy is the only deadly sin that's no fun for the sinner

I lack nothing I need unless you count everything I want

my body follows me around asking for things. I try to think louder, try to be brilliant, wildly brilliant.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry. This may be me at my best

when you fall asleep in that sort of love you wake up with bruises on your neck

I have been so careless with the words I already have. I don’t remember how to say home in my first language, or lonely, or light. I remember only delam barat tang shodeh, I miss you, and shab bekheir, goodnight. How is school going, Kaveh-joon? Delam barat tang shodeh. Are you still drinking? Shab bekheir. For so long every step I’ve taken has been from one tongue to another.

I'm becoming more a vessel of memories than a person it's a myth / that love lives in the heart it lives in the throat we push it out / when we speak when we gasp we take a little for ourselves / in books love can be war-ending a soldier drops his sword / to lie forking oysters into his enemy's mouth in life we hold love up to the light / to marvel at its impotence

I feel most like a person when I am forcing something to be silent,

All I want is to finally take off my cowboy hat and show you my jeweled horns. If we slow dance I will ask you not to tug on them but secretly I will want that very much.

my body burned like a barnful of feathers nothing was on fire but fire was on everything

When I awake, I ask God to slide into my head quickly before I do

Sometimes a mind is ready to leave the world before its body

I am less horrible than I could be I've never set a house on fire never thrown a firstborn off a bridge still my whole life I answered every cry for help with a pour with a turning away I've given this coldness many names thinking if it had a name it would have a solution thinking if I called a wolf a wolf I might dull its fangs

Will I ever even know when my work is done? I'm almost ready to show you the mess I've made

Much of being alive is breaking

I’ve given this coldness many names thinking if it had a name it would have a solution thinking if I called a wolf a wolf I might dull its fangs I carried the coldness like a diamond for years holding it close near as blood until one day I woke and it was fully inside me both of us ruined and unrecognizable two coins on a train track the train crushed into one.

the addictions that were killing me fastest were the ones I loved best

I'm learning how much of myself I don't actually need

Here I am, dying at an average pace.

That the moon causes tides seems too witchy to be science

Is there a vocabulary for this - one to make dailiness amplify and not diminish wonder?

Sometimes I feel beautiful and near dying

Love was a room that appeared when you stepped into it.

Somewhere between ‘I love you’ and ‘but’ is mankind, a giant loneliness strolling through an even greater loneliness. — Negar Emrani (trans. Kaveh Akbar), “Somewhere Between the World and the Mirror,” published in Asymptote (April 2017) (via bostonpoetryslam)

I don’t remember how to say home in my first language, or lonely, or light I remember only delam barat tang shodeh, I miss you, and shab bekheir, goodnight.

Performed pain is still pain

The barbarism of eating anything seems almost unbearable

This makes sadness seem more like tradition

If you teach me something beautiful I will name it quickly before it floats away

I wish I was only as cruel as the first time I noticed I was cruel, waving my tiny shadow over a pond to scare the copper minnows.

Wrath is the desire to repay what you've suffered.

I wish I was only as cruel as the first time I noticed I was cruel, waving my tiny shadow over a pond to scare the copper minnows.

When I say “nations,” I mean “armed marketplaces.” Always.

Poetry very literally, unhyperbolically saved my life...I think it’s an honor to get to spend my life in service to the thing I love best."- Kaveh Akbar

In “The Palace,” Kaveh Akbar writes that “Art is where what we survive survives,” and I think that’s true not only of the art we make, but also of the art we love.

The story pretends to be about names but it’s actually a story about time, how time flattens everything. Family, duty, whatever. Into dirt. There’s something comforting about that, something vast and, yes, inescapable. Like bright ink spilling over everyone at once.

Do you have this organ here?” Cyrus asked her, pointing at the base of his throat. “A doom organ that just pulses all the time? Pulses dread, every day, obstinately? Like it thinks there’s a panther behind the curtain ready to maul you, but there’s no panther and it turns out there’s no curtain either? That’s what I wanted to stop.

Look me in the eyes and stop being sad—

The doubt between us hangs like a moon. There is no such thing as certainty

Our messiahs are hopeless and modern, they speak only in our sleep

Now it's lonely all over

Some days we can see Venus in midafternoon. Then at night, stars separated by billions of miles, light traveling years to die in the back of an eye.

I couldn’t dream of doing anything by halves. Whatever it is, I’ll take the whole bouquet. Please and soon.

America I warn you if you invite me into your home I will linger, losing, kissing my beloveds frankly, pulling up radishes and capping all your pens.

Every person I’ve ever met. Has been small enough. To fit. In my eye.

What was the point if every road led back to the same shame?

The story is what comes after.

...so how shall I live now in the unexpected present I spent so long in a lover's quarrel with my flesh the peace seems over- cautious too-polite

There’s a moment of Farrokhzad where she says, I won’t see spring, these lines are all that will remain. As heaven spins, I fall into bedlam. I am gone, my heart is filled with sorrow— O Muslims, I am sad tonight.

There’s this story I read one time, some old-school Muslim fairy tale, maybe it was a discarded hadith I guess, but it was all about the first time Satan sees Adam. Satan circles around him, inspecting him like a used car or something, this new creation—God’s favorite, apparently. Satan’s unimpressed, doesn’t get it. And then Satan steps into Adam’s mouth, disappears completely inside him and passes through all his guts and intestines and finally emerges out his anus. And when he gets out, Satan’s laughing and laughing. Rolling around. He passes all the way through the first man and he’s rolling around laughing, in tears, and he says to God, ‘This is what you’ve made? He’s all empty! All hollow!’ He can’t believe his luck. How easy his job is going to be. Humans are just a long emptiness waiting to be filled.

Painting saved me, but I can’t say I loved painting. I painted because I needed to. What I really loved, what I love, is having-painted. That was the high. Making something that would never have existed in the entirety of humanity had I not been there at that specific moment to make it.

Behind me is silence, and ahead of me is silence.’ And that was it. That was her whole answer. Isn’t that perfect?” “Yeah, that’s beautiful,” said Cyrus, though it confused him. “What I mean is, I think maybe you’ll find your real ending once you stop looking for it,” Orkideh said. “I think real endings tend to work their way in from the outside.

When you are ten, shame stitches itself into you like a monogram, broadcasting to the world what holds you, what rules your soul. In school Roya could smell the dank must even though she’d soaped it away and changed into fresh clothes. The scent wasn’t so much on her as it was of her, compositional. It clung inside her nose like a kind of rot. She was certain everyone else could smell it.

As if to incentivize the whole ordeal, the body offered you dreams. In exchange for a third of your living, you were offered sprawling feasts, exotic adventures, beautiful lovers, wings. Or at least the promise of them, made only slightly less intoxicating by the curious threat of nightmare. How sometimes, at random, your mind would decide to reduce you to a whimper, or a gasp, in the night.

She was looking at herself in the little gold mirror we had hanging near the entrance. It was something I’d come to love about her, in time. It wasn’t narcissism, the way she was always looking at herself. I recognized later there was a kind of wonder in it, running her fingers over her smile lines, the skin of her forehead, as if to say, “Where did you come from? This skin, what a strange envelope!

For our species, the idea of art as ornament is a relatively new one. Our ape brains got too big, too big for our heads, too big for our mothers to birth them. So we started keeping all our extra knowing in language, in art, in stories and books and songs. Art was a way of storing our brains in each other’s. It wasn’t until fairly recently in human history, when rich landowners wanted something pretty to look at in winter, that the idea of art-as-mere-ornament came around. A painting of a blooming rose to hang on the mantel when the flowers outside the window had gone to ice. And still in the twenty-first century, it’s hard for folks to move past that. This idea that beauty is the horizon toward which all great art must march. I’ve never been interested in that. “As heaven spins, I fall into bedlam.

GOD I am ready for you to come back. Whether in a train full of dying criminals or on the gleaming saddle of a locust, you are needed again. The earth is a giant chessboard where the dark squares get all the rain. On this one the wet is driving people mad—the bankers all baying in the woods while their markets fail, a florist chewing up flowers to spit mouthfuls here and there as his daughter’s lungs seize shut from the pollen. There is a flat logic to neglect. Sweet nothings sour in the air while the ocean hoots itself to sleep. I live on the skull of a giant burning brain, the earth’s core. Sometimes I can feel it pulsing through the dirt, though even this you ignore. The mind wants what it wants: daily newspapers, snapping turtles, a pound of flesh. The work I’ve been doing is a kind of erasing. I dump my ashtray into a bucket of paint and coat myself in the gray slick, rolling around on the carpets of rich strangers while they applaud and sip their scotch. A body can cause almost anything to happen. Remember when you breathed through my mouth, your breath becoming mine? Remember when you sang for me and I fell to the floor, turning into a thousand mice? Whatever it was we were practicing cannot happen without you. I thought I saw you last year, bark wrapped around your thighs, lurching toward the shore at dawn. It was only mist and dumb want. They say even longing has its limits: in a bucket, an eel will simply stop swimming long before it starves. Wounded wolves will pad away from their pack to die lonely and cold. Do you not know how scary it can get here? The talons that dropped me left long scars around my neck that still burn in the wind. I was promised epiphany, earth- honey, and a flood of milk, but I will settle for anything that brings you now, you still-hungry mongrel, you glut of bone, you, scentless as gold.

What use is knowing anything if no one is around to watch you know it? Plants reinvent sugar daily and hardly anyone applauds. Once as a boy I sat in a corner covering my ears, singing Quranic verse after Quranic verse. Each syllable was perfect, but only the lonely rumble in my head gave praise. This is why we put mirrors in birdcages, why we turn on lamps to double our shadows. I love my body more than other bodies. When I sleep next to a man, he becomes an extension of my own brilliance. Or rather, he becomes an echo of my own anticlimax. I was delivered from dying like a gift card sent in lieu of a pound of flesh. My escape was mundane, voidable. Now I feed faith to faith, suffer human noise, complain about this or that heartache. The spirit lives in between the parts of a name. It is vulnerable only to silence and forgetting. I am vulnerable to hammers, fire, and any number of poisons. The dream, then: to erupt into a sturdier form, like a wild lotus bursting into its tantrum of blades. There has always been a swarm of hungry ghosts orbiting my body—even now, I can feel them plotting in their luminous diamonds of fog, each eying a rib or a thighbone. They are arranging their plans like worms preparing to rise through the soil. They are ready to die with their kind, dry and stiff above the wet earth.

Even the terminal dryness of bone hides inside our skin plainly, like dust on a mirror.

when they asked where it hurt you motioned in a circle to the ground under your feet

Must be exhilarating to be a symbol for everything at once

It's difficult to be anything at all with the whole world right here for the having

Most sick things become dead things

One way to live a life is to spend each moment asking for forgiveness for the last

Nobody has turned out to be as powerful as I believed my father to be

One day I will wake up in someone else's bones

All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.

You're one of the major figures of the canon who's sort of guided the way that poems about family are written, showing they don’t have to be these saccharine, sentimental odes. You can write about someone you love in a way that is not flattering.

sometimes paradise happens too early and leaves us shuddering in its wake

Rumi said the two most important things in life were beauty and bewilderment This is likely a mistranslation

I love my body more than other bodies. When I sleep next to a man, he becomes an extension of my own brilliance. Or rather, he becomes an echo of my own anticlimax.

I love my body more than other bodies. When I sleep next to a man, he becomes an extension of my own brilliance. Or rather, he becomes an echo of my own anticlimax.

I ADMIT, IT IS FRIGHTENING. YOU ARE FRIGHTENING.” Kaveh snorted. “Well, you have a point. We are the species that produced Bill Maher.

It is pretty to be sweet and full of pardon like a flower perfuming the hands that shred it, but all piety leads to a single point: the same paradise where dead lab rats go. If you live small you’ll be resurrected with the small, a whole planet of minor gods simpering in the weeds.

The entire corpus of Sappho’s work burned with the great Library of Alexandria, so today we know her only through the bits other writers quoted, shadows of Sappho cast on our cave wall. Time marbled silence throughout the texts, and those gaps, those cavities, beg readers to wonder them full, to complete the poet’s circuits of cognition – twenty-six centuries after they were made.

yes! radiant lyre speak to me become a voice

Tao Te Ching China Translated by Ursula K. Le Guin Le Guin’s translation of Lao Tzu preserves the original’s crystalline clarity – we meet the language in motion, flowing, elemental, like laughter passing between friends, or water moving over land.

With not even a trace of self-doubt, you can trust the universe completely.

As for poets, only the misguided follow them

Now my blood is drying on the pillow. Now the man who held the knife is gone, elsewhere and undiminished. I can hardly remember anything about him. It can be difficult telling the size of something when it’s right above you—the average cumulus cloud weighing as much as eighty elephants. The things I’ve thought I’ve loved could sink an ocean liner, and likely would if given the chance. From my window, the blinking windmills seem further away than ever before. My beard has matted itself into a bloody poultice, and a woman’s voice on TV is begging for charity.

Whatever I learn makes me angry to have learned it.

The Book of Things Not to Touch gets longer every day: on one page, the handsome puppy bred only for service. On the next, my mother’s face. It’s not even enough to keep my hands to myself —  there’s a whole chapter about the parts of me that could get me into trouble.

for some / to live well is easy / a flea leaps and is unshocked by its flight for others it's harder and hardly seems worth doing

At the intersection of Iranian-ness and Midwestern-ness was pathological politeness, an immobilizing compulsivity to avoid causing distress in anyone else. Cyrus thought about this a lot. You cooed at their ugly babies, nodded along with their racist bullshit. In Iran it was called taarof, the elaborate and almost entirely unspoken choreography of etiquette that directs every social interaction. The old joke, that two Iranian men could never get on an elevator because they’ll just keep saying “you go,” “no you,” “no no please,” “I insist,” as the doors opened and closed. Midwestern politeness felt that way too, Cyrus learned, like it was burning cigarette holes in your soul. You bit your tongue, then bit it a little harder. You tried to keep your face still enough to tell yourself you hadn’t been complicit, that at least you weren’t encouraging what was happening around you. To you.

THERE’S A KAVEH AKBAR POEM that begins, “it’s been January for months in both directions,

Every time Cyrus had been there, the baristas were almost off-puttingly friendly, Stepfordian. He’d felt tempted to ask for his coffee with just a splash of misanthropy, please. Or at least sullen ambivalence. Their eagerness felt offensive, too much to bear.

we’ve always held the same obnoxious, rotten souls. Souls that have festered for millennia while science grew. How unfair, this copper delivery. How unfair, this life. My wounds are so much deeper than yours. The arrogance of victimhood. Self-pity. Suffocating.

Everyone in America seemed to be afraid and hurting and angry, starving for a fight they could win. And more than that even, they seemed certain their natural state was to be happy, contented, and rich. The genesis of everyone’s pain had to be external, such was their certainty.

If the mortal sin of the suicide is greed, to hoard stillness and calm for yourself while dispersing your riotous internal pain among all those who survive you, then the mortal sin of the martyr must be pride, the vanity, the hubris to believe not only that your death could mean more than your living, but that your death could mean more than death itself—which, because it is inevitable, means nothing.

It feels so American to discount dreams because they’re not built of objects, of things you can hold and catalogue and then put in a safe. Dreams give us voices, visions, ideas, mortal terrors, and departed beloveds. Nothing counts more to an individual, or less to an empire.

I cry all the time,” she continued, as if I wasn’t even there. “I hate it. It embarrasses me. I am not fragile, but sometimes my body just cries and I can’t help it. It’s a betrayal. Like someone tickling you, you laugh even when you don’t want to, even when it hurts. That’s how I cry.

Each giraffe had the long eyelashes of horses, and those same sad eyes, like they knew they weren’t made for this world. Or worse, like they knew they were.

We sat there in silence for five minutes, ten, watching the giraffes do basically nothing, just stand there and chew sadly, I never thought about how sad something could look chewing.

But I did love you here, hour of the world.

Whatever was merciful in the universe lived in Zee,

Where does all our effort go? It’s hard not to envy the monsters when you see how good they have it. And how unbothered they are at being monsters.

All those severe poets talking big about the wages of sin all the time,” Zee added, “but nobody ever brought up the wages of virtue. The toll of trying really really hard to be good in a game that’s totally rigged against goodness.

An alphabet, like a life, is a finite set of shapes. With it, one can produce almost anything.

To the extent I was a fraud, I was no less than anyone else. I was grafted onto my living from a part of the universe that remains nameless, like smoke rising from a great fire. I demand to be forgiven.