Poem Collaboration

So its been a while since I last wrote. There are lots of excuses: I broke my laptop, lack of internet access at my house, trying to be more productive--but at the end of the day I still have a new years resolution to keep with this blog. And being so close to my one year successful completion, now is hardly the time for slacking off.

These past few days Hamid and I have been delving into poetry together. I never realized how important it was to share that with a significant other until now, and it is quite an experience. Anyways, with Hamid being more of an oral poet and me being a written poet, we've taken to him speaking poems and me writing them down as closely and fast as I can in his own words. This is Hamid's first time writing english poems so its kind of exciting to hear him put those feelings he has always expressed in persian into a language I can understand without translation. He recently was inspired to write this poem for me (I know, spoiled), after which we went back and read and re wrote and talked about what he wanted it to mean and how to best express that. I've never collaborated on a poem before so it was rather interesting, and I thought, worth sharing. So here it is, without further introduction. I'll be writing quite a bit this next week to get my 4 posts a month quota done before the end of the year, so gear up for a lot Christmas-time Sydney ranting :)
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"The First Child"
by Hamid Hoseinzade and Sydney Odell

She talks about her dark places inside
the parts I haven't explored yet, or
maybe the parts that never
come to the surface--
that have never come to daylight.

I look into her blue eyes, deeply
and I can't believe there is any darkness
under that storm after the ocean--
but I can guess that
not every part of her is as white
as that porcelain skin that betrays her.

Sometimes she is so poetic
but sometimes she is like literature.
I can read the inner conflict of war and peace in her,
though I know she prefers peace
to being right.

Bi-sexual, bi-lingual, bigeminal
I can feel the duality in her
which rises from the
antagonistic battle between
our reality and the
adventure she chases down the rabbit hole of her own
inner complexity.

Sometimes I wonder
if she is just bi--
what if she is "multi," if these
two black and white parts of her
are merely the two opposing ends
of her soul's colorful spectrum.

Once I mixed science with emotions
in the container of cynicism,
catalyzed by ego--
the reaction of which
resulted in the birth of logic,
whose eyes are limited in
recognizing wavelengths between
400-700 nanometers.

None of us can see the other waves
we can just feel their polarity--
either as heat
or as a growing tumor inside our body.
I see people as waves too,
some of us overlap--
seeing the visible light,
feeling the invisible darkness...

I always knew that the
villain was merely a
framework for justification
made in the mind of the storyteller.
Sometimes the prince of darkness
can be an illumination for others
when spoken on the tongue of a fallen son's experience.

I wait for the story to
unfold the truth
from the shadowed side of my prism.