with all there is

by Nicholas Karavatos



I’m having a hard time
recovering (from)
my _____hood

still kicking
myself behind the curtain
still listening

to the ocean in
a pillow
and the traffic

_____hood is not
enlightenment
is not the reward

wandering the nature
of reality
hasn’t made me happy

I just thought
I’d be God
by now

pull the cover up
over my memories
of lives not lived

grand vague intentions standing
on what suffering amounts to
not hunger and thirst and shelter
but the agonies of time and space

I’m pulling out
the issue from
my shadow bag

spreading the situations we
lay down together and
get warm to the idea

I have every face
of every day to look
back in the eyes of


About Nicholas Karavatos


Nicholas Karavatos was a manual worker by day and a poet-musician by night before going into debt to complete his formal education. He is a graduate of Humboldt State University in Arcata and New College of California's Poetics Program in San Francisco. Expecting to be fired any day for subversion, he is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. He is reading in eleven cities this summer in the western United States and hopes his employer will consider it “professional development.”




Dervish it