We travel like everyone else, but we return to nothing. As if travel were a path of clouds. We buried our loved ones in the shade of clouds and between roots of trees.
We said to our wives: Give birth for hundreds of years, so that we may end this journey within an hour of a country, within a meter of the impossible!
We travel in the chariots of the Psalms, sleep in the tents of the prophets, and are born again in the language of Gypsies.
We measure space with a hoopoe's beak, and sing so that distance may forget us.
We cleanse the moonlight. Your road is long, so dream of seven women to bear this long journey on your shoulders. Shake the trunks of palm trees for them.
You know the names, and which one will give birth to the Son of Galilee.
Ours is a country of words: talk, talk. Let me rest my road against a stone.
Ours is a country of words: talk, talk. Let me see an end to this journey.

From: Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, 11

In order to live, they die by mistake. 12

We live our death. This half-death is our triumph. 18

I am from here, I am from there, yet am neither here nor there. 4

I love to travel…but I don't love to arrive. 8

For how many years should we sacrifice our dead to the oblivion mirrored in melodious ambiguity? 31

Our ruins lie ahead of us, and behind is our absurd objective. 32
Our ruins lie ahead of us, here as well as there. 38

But those who travel to nowhere have no chance of return, to become lost again in loss. 36

Longing is the place of exile. Our love is a place of exile. Our wine is a place of exile and a place of exile is the history of this heart.
How many times have we told the fragrance of the place to be still so we can rest and sleep?
How many times have we told the trees of the place to wipe off the invader's mask so we might find a place? Nowhere is the place that distances its soul from its history.
A place of exile is the soul that distances us from our land and takes us to our love. A place of exile is the soul that distances us from our soul and takes us to the stranger. 42-3

I gaze upon the unseen:
What will come - what will come after the ashes? 57

There is, here, a present not embraced by the past.
When we reached the last of the trees, we knew we were unable to pay attention.
And when we returned to the ships, we saw absence piling up its chosen objects and pitching its eternal tent around us.
There is, here, a present not embraced by the past.
A silken thread is drawn out of mulberry trees forming letters on the page of night. 63

Ismael used to come down among us at night and sing: O stranger, I am the stranger and you are part of me, O stranger.
The desert vanishes in the words and the words ignore the power of things: O lute, give me back what has been lost, and sacrifice me over it. 68

I don't want to return home now, the way the Crusaders returned.
I am all this silence between two fronts: gods on the one side, those who invent their names on the other.
I am the shadow who walks on water.
I am the witness and the thing witnessed, the worshiper and the temple in the land of both your siege and mine. 83

Who am I? This is a question that others ask, but has no answer.
I am my language. I am words' writ: Be! Be my body!
And I become an embodiment of their timbre.
I am what I have spoken to the words: Be the place where
My body joins the eternity of the desert.
Be, so that I may become my words.
No land on earth bears me. Only my words bear me,
A bird born from me who builds a nest in my ruins
Before me, and in the rubble of the enchanting world around me. 91

I left myself to itself, a self filled with the present.
Departure emptied me of temples. 92

This is my language, my miracle, my magic wand.
This is my obelisk and garden of my Babylon,
My first identity, my polished metal, the desert idol of an Arab
Who worships what flows from rhymes like stars in his aba,
And who worships his own words. 93

Who am I, without exile?
Stranger on the river bank,
Like the river, water binds me to your name.
Nothing brings me back from this distance
To the oasis: neither war nor peace.
Nothing grants me entry into the gospels.
Nothing. Nothing shines from the shores
Of ebb and flow between the Tigris and the Nile.
Nothing lifts me down from the Pharaoh's chariots.
Nothing carries me, or loads me with an idea:
Neither nostalgia, nor promise.
What shall I do? What shall I do without exile
And a long night of gazing at the water?
…
we have become weightless,
As light as our dwelling in distant winds.
We have, both of us, befriended the strange beings in the clouds.
We have both been freed from the gravity of the land of identity.
What shall we do?
What shall we do without exile
And long nights of gazing at the water?

Water binds me to your name.
Nothing is left of me except you.
Nothing is left of you except me -
A stranger caressing the thighs of a stranger.
O stranger, what will we do with what is left
Of the stillness and the brief sleep between two myths?
Nothing carries us: neither path nor home.
Was this the same path from the beginning?
Or did our dreams find a Mongolian horse on a hill
And exchange us for him?
What shall we do?
What shall we do without exile?

113, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise

We travel in search of nothing, but we don't like trains when new stations are new places of exile.

180, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise

If it were a bridge we would have crossed it already,
But it's a home, it's an abyss.

105, The Adam of Two Edens

They returned to houses inside themselves… 184, The Adam of Two Edens

It was only a dream.
They knew and dreamt and returned and dreamt.
They knew and returned and returned and dreamt.
They dreamt and returned.

203, The Adam of Two Edens