Ahmed Abbas Al-Tonsi's Poems

Ahmed Abbas Al-Tonsi's Poems Contact information, map and directions, contact form, opening hours, services, ratings, photos, videos and announcements from Ahmed Abbas Al-Tonsi's Poems, Poet, Maadi Sarayat, Cairo.

16/01/2026

A Poem To The Fig-Wood Ghost
********************************
I see now where the road intends to go,
A grey line bending through the silent fig,
To put a settled distance in our sky,
To take from you what never was yet mine.
Carries off the luster of our laughter,
The salted taste of all the gathered tears,
And every borrowed hour that followed after,
A harvest of the unripe, fruitless years.
The pain I should have carried, stone by stone,
I left to cool within another’s hand
A ghost of obligation, not my own,
To haunt a stranger in a stranger’s land.
I am tired of your visitations in my sleep,
That fig-wood chair where you used to sit,
The conversations that the dawn would keep,
Fragments of a dream that never fit.
I am done with what the twilight once called right,
The compass broken in the dawn bloom
knowing you was a long and starless night,
A locked and unused room.
But now, the morning light is much more bright.
The sunlight holds me with its ancient weight,
A warmth that does not question or forget,
And finds me patient in front of your gate.
I do miss you when the copper sun descends,
A slow submerging in the distant bay,
And the ordinary daylight ends,
Every day.
Yet tell me, how many stars have failed to climb
And pierce their watch above the apple tree?
How many shooting stars lost their time,
Uncounted because you didn't watch with me?
This is the way the heart becomes a shore
I miss you, and I don't miss you
I love you, and I don't love you
You are a wave of what I must refuse,
A tide of old sorrow, blue and deep,
That rises only where I choose to lose
The joy I labor long and quiet to keep.
I'll keep a space behind this stone wall,
A plot of shadow where the earth is turned,
To let a different kind of weeping fall
Where what is bitterly remembered, burned,
May become a seed the frost will hold.
And from this hidden ground, this silent, slow,
I'll make another song for you, but cold,
To let this pain go.

Ahmed Abbas Al-Tonsi

31/12/2025

Lost in Translation
********************

The compass needle drifts in its glass sea, pointing nowhere true.
My map is a thing of soft creases and worn routes, laid out on a table dusted with the silt of long stillness.
The phone murmurs, my old mentor, a memory of a frequency, a hum without a word.
It is just a tone we once tuned to, a calibration lost to the static of years.

I steep the bitter leaves.
The steam rises in a slow, surrendering column.
Outside, the city ticks its mechanical heartbeat against the window, measuring the hollows between intentions. A message glows: “Just checking in.”
They sense the unsaid thing, the cavern between my words and the storm it holds.

The kindness is a gentle weight.

Dusk taps its persistent spell on the glass.
I am an archivist of old campaigns, where love was deployed like armies and desires like ships, all returning weary or not at all.
I search the smudged sky for a fixed point, a pattern to navigate this inward sea.
Some days, the whole world is a translation of a text I cannot quite read.

And yet, I carry this cargo.
This vast and unmanageable freight of love for a world that bruises it, of desire for a clarity that shimmers just beyond the fog.
I carry it not for the harbor, but for the fellow traveler who will one day recognize the burden not as a flaw, but as the shape of my soul.
Who will take this weathered poem into their hands and not seek to redraw a single coast, who will trace the frayed edges and say the wilderness here is beautiful.
Who will let the symphony be cacophony, let the dream be vast and ill-fitting, and love the vessel not for its efficiency, but for the sheer magnitude of its sai

Ahmed Abbas Al-Tonsi

30/11/2025

The One Last Song You Did Not Know

Your presence is a careful absence.
a space where the dark and past can't settle.
But you did not know this yet, or maybe you know
Your morning phrases, the serious minor key,
your silence, a branch against the stone,
are the quiet at the storm’s center.
But you did not know this yet, or maybe you know
And I...
I will learn the common theory of the missed steps,
the breath held in an empty room, surrounding my song
I will cheer you when you fall,
When you crawl, and when you miss your ex
When you arrive, as one greets a season,
Such as an iterative, metaphorical reality.
Yet there will come an ordinary moment, I'll not be there
frost on your windowpane, a cup grown cold,
when you should know,
My existence there with you was metaphorical.
A linguistic matter to me.
A translation.
And nothing more.
Just as living our quiet, iterative life together
should be, for you, a matter of metaphor only.
And nothing more.

Ahmed Abbas Al-Tonsi

10/11/2025

The Unsent Drafts

It becomes an old winter, a tarnished coin,
found in the pocket of a midsummer coat.
A simple phrase, a wind that has no name,
turning the pages of torn, unsent drafts.
In a room as vast as night,
the wind does not just blow, it remembers.
It lifts the dust, which is the dust of desire.
The moonlight is not dry, but thirsty,
drinking the pain from the absent gazes.
Outside, the rain is a slow procession
passing through fields where black magic
was left to grow wild among the weeds.
And now, this joyful pain,
a stubborn plant that grows by the window.
It climbs the old frames on my wall,
a mystery whispered by a map
that has become the endless desert itself.
It is a poem without a title,
discovering the kiss that was never born.
My notes, like dry leaves, will turn.
They will lick these inked and troubled thoughts
upon the geography of your form.
Not with a pen, but with a spear of light,
polished and naked, that never misses its mark.
Within this silent night, these simple, restless words,
I am not writing. I am painting your presence
on my new white bedsheet.
The colors bloom like Christmas, like sin,
like ink stains that take root and grow into a forest.
My whole being is a moth
circling the blaze of your fire.
My devotion to your quiet, enclosed moments
is a wild vine with an endless, savage thirst.
So rise, then, your wings are not metaphors,
they are golden and they are wild.
Fly once through these gloomy clouds I call my own.
Let the flood come, not of water, but of kisses,
with screams that are so loud they stitch
this long distance of days and nights back together.
Come, fill my empty pages, these broken lines.
Bring your wild lust, your profuse, unending light.

Ahmed Abbas Al-Tonsi

29/10/2025

Fertile Lies

My world didn't end with a shout, but with a slow coldness,
A frost that settled on the sills of a shared bedroom,
Where the world was narrowed to a single, silent table.
We were two different soils, bound by a practical root,
Planted in the same season for want of other seed.
We were not built with words, but with the lumber of routine.
The walls were straight, the roof was sound against the rain,
And inside, we never mentioned the constant, absent breeze,
The scent of another orchard that clung to her like a ghost.
That first year, the air between us grew a second skin
Not a touch, but the detailed map of a touch’s echo,
A geography of what is poured but never drunk.
She was a field I believed I was taught to cultivate,
A territory of quiet mornings and surrendered glances.
My love was a poem of faith
Her body, a scripture I misread in the generous light.
My hands, a patient river smoothing a stone for years,
Learning the cool permanence of its form, its hidden veins.
We were two clocks wound to the same false hour,
Our mechanics ticking of duty and settled dust.
Then came the truth, a leaf from a blighted tree.
The truth, not a knife, but the geology of the cut
I was not the sun she turned toward, but the dependable shade.
I was the sturdy bridge chosen for a safe crossing,
While her eyes always swam in a distant, faithless sea.
Her refusal of my seed was not a barren truth,
But a fertile lie.
Her soil, a sealed vault,
Dreamed of a different spring, a different sap
A harvest for the phantom who broke the ground of her,
Just as she broke me, the one who watered stone.
Now I see. I was the serious path, the available winter.
My love, a hearth-fire she sat beside for warmth,
While her heart was a stubborn bulb sleeping in the dark,
Holding the image of a treacherous sun,
Waiting for a light that would never come for her,
As mine would never now come for me.
This is not the promise I heard, but a careful desolation.
We are not two, but one and a hollow.
I am the gardener of a garden that longs for another's hand,
Tending a love that was always a solitary event,
A phenomenon that occurs where a river meets the salt of the sea
And is changed, forever, into something it never wished to be.

Ahmed Abbas Al-Tonsi

25/08/2025

Cairo Butterfly Report

Last night, I dreamed a parenthesis of dust and light,
The kind an old poet might have seen in an alley in old Cairo
Not of children, but of their echoes.
They were reading to us from a book whose pages were the walls,
Their voices were a soft scratch of a jasmine vine against the window.
In the way of God's verses, the room was heavy with yellow butterflies.
They were not born from cocoons, but from the space
Where your sigh met the morning coffee’s steam
One settled on your shoulder, and you said it was a fairy,
another, a watercolor of the sea we never sailed.
We were in Alexandria, or perhaps a city memory built from its salt and fog.
We sat by a shore that was neither sand nor water,
But a slow, perpetual erosion.
We spoke of the absurdity of love,
We spoke of how life must be calculated against the headlines and the falling light.
When you argued with me about the politics of joy,
Your hand, a warm stone in mine, the only sure rebellion.
Our hypothetical daughter danced on the deck of a boat that was also our bed.
She was drawing not maps, but the exact shape of the silence
That follows the muezzin’s call, a territory without generals.
Our son was mending a net full of holes, through which
All the fish of the Mediterranean swam freely.
He said it was a treatise on futility.
He said it was enough.
The fear of disappointment was not a metaphor, but a scent you wore,
Like night blooming flowers, a perfume of possibility.
And our lustful wars were the daily ritual against the absurd,
A stubborn, physical grammar where no words for “diminish” existed.
We were making the bed a raft, and the room, a sea.
And when I woke, the butterflies were just the sun through the shutters.
The echoes had folded themselves back into the quiet.
But your breath was still the same tide against my neck,
and this Cairo morning, with its dust and its arguments,
is the only dream we are required to live.
The children we do not have are the most beautiful story we never wrote.
And this, my love, this life with you in its quiet, persistent center,
Is the magical, unreasonable, and perfect letter I am always reading.

Ahmed Abbas Al-Tonsi

25/08/2025

The Theory of Goodbyes

It began not with a decision, but with a slow rain
On the glass roof of the station at Alexandria,
Where the world was paused between departures and arrivals.
We were two separated poems bound by a familiar dust,
Written by chance in the same fleeting silence.
We spoke first of the rain’s lazy grammar,
Of the social sorrows of this city,
Of the absurd price of a book in Cairo.
We built a house of words with no windows,
And inside it, we never mentioned the other inhabitants,
The names that hung from our wrists like watchful weights.
That first year, the air between us grew a skin.
Wasn't a touch, but a map of a touch,
A geography of what is drawn in our coffee slowly.
She was a fertile field harvested by my eyes, by heart, and by lips
A province of muted laughter and gazes that undressed time itself.
The second meeting was an archaeology of desire.
Her mouth, a sentence I had been translating in my sleep.
My hands, a confession written in the language of tide
They learned the shoreline of her back, the hidden coves,
An archaeology of a pleasure so precise that it felt like remembering.
We were two clocks unwinding in a forgotten room,
Our mechanics singing of salt and second chances.
Now, each return is a leaf from a forbidden calendar.
We arrive as if emerging from a shared dream,
Our bodies recognize the old, sacred path.
We were dreamers building a sanctuary of our fragile poems,
The sun strikes our sweaty skin, the wet bedsheets
While I worship at the altar of her hip’s slow sway,
The liturgy of my breath in the hollow of her throat.
We were not lovers, but a single, recurring event
A phenomenon that occurs at the convergence of specific lonelinesses.
We are the annual bloom of a cactus that drinks only stolen light.
This is not an affair, but a parallel life, a river
that flows backward once a year to its source.
We have become experts in the physics of goodbye,
In the calculus of kisses that must last three hundred and sixty-five days.
We know this dream is grafting itself onto our bones,
Becoming a new spine, a more real reality.
We understand, without saying, that this will not end
In a tearful farewell on a platform.
It will end when the trains no longer run,
When the stationmaster is a ghost,
And the sun through the sooty glass
Is the last warm kiss on our closed eyelids
Before the final train

Ahmed Abbas Al-Tonsi

30/07/2025

Insomnia as a Widowed Train

Beyond the veil of sleep, where anxiety prowls like a jaguar in the nursery of unborn dreams, I burrow.
Pillows rise into the Moqattam slopes, and I,
A fossilized child, hide from the devil of poetry, that breath-hunting specter coiled beneath the bedframe,
Its scales rustling with the patience of centuries, waiting to taste the salt of my sneeze or the tremor of a stifled cry.
My soul is not my own, it is the abandoned gaze of the boy I was, preserved in the pages of forgotten afternoons.
That gaze seeps into the present a slow,
Inevitable stain soft as the silence suspended between the A and B flat of a rusted music box’s lament.
Time, in this hour, is not a river but dust motes adrift in a sunbeam cutting through a shuttered room.
The thoughts,
They swarm like locusts hatched from a childhood jar left uncorked,
A thousand thousand winged possibilities, neither ascending nor descending,
But trapped in the liminal vertigo of my grandmother’s disused stairwell.
There they spiral, weightless yet heavy as regret, settling upon each worn lullaby step like the ashes of unspoken stories.
Those stairs, her spine turned to timber, groan beneath the burden of memory’s steps.
I do not rail against this wakefulness.
No weariness, wrath, or weeping claims me, only a quiet inquiry, offered to the indifferent night.
Has this midnight train, this steel-souled nomad sighing across the plains of oblivion, ever strayed from its iron path?
Or does it, too, dream of a water tower’s embrace, a silent signal light burning red that says, Rest here?
For rest we crave a temporal oasis.
Time to weave nests from the gossamer of what might be.
And sleep… ah, sleep!
Even we who stand sentinel like the ancient fig tree in the square roots clawing deep into the bedrock of being,
Bark scarred by a hundred seasons cannot forever defy the pollination season winds.
To lose our leaves is not defeat, but the silent, necessary surrender before the green return.
Autumn winds scour the soul clean. We stand. We shed.
We wait. The train’s lonesome whistle cuts the dark a question mark against the indifferent stars.

Ahmed Abbas Al-Tonsi

30/07/2025

An Elegy for a God Who Chose to Bleed
To Ziad Rahbany
Inside the niche of shattered tomorrows,
Where silence hangs like a strangled hymn,
I pry open the coffin of comfortable sorrows
With keys forged from your unbroken rhythm.
And find your shadow
A road of lightning and scarred earth
Where gods kneel to taste mortal dirt.
They called you the prophet of the fractured light
A fallen meteor wrapped in storm and skin,
A heretic stitching hymns from midnight
Whose bones were cages where wild truths had been.
To me, you were the unspoken alphabet
Scorched on the eyelids of dying suns,
The architect of thunder where they’d set
Altars to silence, loaded with their guns.
My music, my poem, chokes now
Notes like broken teeth spat on marble floors.
You taught the void how to roar and rise,
A symphony of fireflies in the mass grave
Of surrendered bones and vacant eyes.
I scan the static machines that weep black oil,
Engines that dream in sorrow’s rusted moan
But hear only angels folding iron wings,
Resigned to rule this bloodless, polished throne.
I saw you walk where cities bled black rain,
Neon-eyed demons sipping liquid prayer
From gutters where the sacred turned to stain.
You walked among them, haloed by raw air,
Blessed their cracked horns with paint torn from stars,
Gave them your colors. They wept rust and spite,
Then smeared the ruins, shattered prison bars
With constellations birthed in acid light.
You thrust a brush in me, "Now make them SEE."
My canvas bleeds each stroke a silent scream,
Angels plucking out their halos, wild and free,
Devils who rock dead sparrows in a dream.
The borders burn. Which ghost now wears the crown?
Which exile is the god this world shot down?
This world? A morgue of polished, gilded lies,
Its soul sold cheap for pixels and warm screens,
Its fire entombed beneath electric skies,
Forgotten how a real rebellion screams.
They queue for o***m dreams, soft and deep,
For half alive sighs in a sterile stream,
While you, celestial thief who stole from sleep
Still bleed fierce truth into the poisoned reality.
You stood where mosques lay gutted by the wind,
Whispered to storms like a barefoot priest
Carving new gospels on the broken skin
Of earth herself a sacrificial beast.
You saw the sky nailed naked, pale and thin,
Oceans choked on plastic, blood, and scorn,
Prophets called madmen for the sacred sin
Of speaking rage where shattered hope is born.
You did not blink.
And now, blindfold ripped away,
I witness angels scrubbing blood-soaked robes
In rivers thick with poison and decay.
I see caged children, dreams hacked into code,
Their lullabies sold as data streams.
I see gods shivering, strung out, cold,
In alleys where compassion froze to ice,
And monsters draped in suits of stitched-up gold
The hollowed verses of dead love their price.
You taught me awe’s raw, unforgiving tongue,
But left me chanting psalms to concrete ears.
You lit the lantern where rebellion hung.
Now I walk cities of glass and mirrored fears,
Past saints who pawned their wings for gilded sleep,
Past preachers vending tickets to the void,
Clutching the flame you swore the dark would keep.
You taught me war, not steel, but truth deployed
Like scalpels gutting comfort’s rotten core,
A sacred rage no void could ever destroy.
I fight still ink, breath, with all my blood’s roar
A soul that tears the bandage off the wound
To show the cancer thriving in the light.
You are gone.
Not gone.
I taste your rebel breath
When justice lifts her fist against the night.
I see your thumbprint on the lips of death
Where rebels rise though rising breaks their spine.
O God who bled! No grave dares cage your ghost.
You taught us how to burn not ash, but bloom
To forge a sun where darkness dared to boast.
Though the song now bleeds from every gaping wound,
Though voice cracks raw from screaming at the stone,
I SCREAM your name into the throat of dawn:
The myth who walks beside me, clad in bone,
The God who chose to bleed…
Will never die
Ahmed Abbas Al-Tonsi

16/07/2025

A Spear Into The Throat of Night
*********************************
Inside the box of living secrets,
Where shadows coil like serpents guarding truth,
I pried open the lock with rusted keys of forgotten prayers
And found an unexpected path
A road of starlight and scar tissue
To be reborn as a living god.
As a man w***e who slept in the shades,
Where touch was borrowed, never owned,
Where skin drank moonlight but never remembered warmth,
My poems, my songs, my savage desire
Hid like trapped birds
Behind ribs few bones in my chest
Caged beneath an innocent, passionate, childish smile
That cracked like porcelain when the world looked away.
Yet now, as a living god,
I wear divinity like a cloak woven of storms,
And still I did not lose summer’s honeyed breath,
Nor winter’s teeth gnawing at the edge of dawn.
I did not lose the skies’ cerulean sighs,
Nor the angels’ whispers
That curls like smoke through mosque ruins.
The wild, errant sea waves still chant my name
In tongues of salt and foam,
And winds from the north still carve hymns
into my throat, ice and iron.
Perhaps I lost
a handful of stars
Gloomy clouds now drift, purposeless,
Like ghosts of unkept vows.
Some holy songs turned to ash on my tongue;
Their melodies now bored holes
In the fabric of my silent nights.
My sins?
Oh, my sins remain
An old, noisy warlock’s relics,
Who forgot to cure himself
Of love’s sweet poison,
Of spells that bloomed like nightshade
In the garden of his pulse.
Fool to brew eternity in a mortal cup,
Then drown in its vintage.
Something unknown watches.
Always,
When we lie naked under the moon,
It's a silver scalpel peeling back our skin,
Do our demons lean closer?
Do dead gods scribble our sighs
In ledgers of light?
I hear their whispers
Like a memory drowning in its own blood,
Still gasping our name,
Still clawing at the walls of time.
I know that glance in your eyes
When dawn cracks open the sky's doors.
It is the first scripture I ever worshipped
My hell and my heaven,
Your crucifixion and my resurrection
Stitched into a single sunrise.
My death. Your eternity.
What is a god who bleeds?
Who kneels at mortal feet,
Offering bread yet begging for mercy for us?
No song, no poem in the turning universe
Can suture a wound made of infinity.
No hymn heals a god who falls
Not into love,
But through it,
Like a star through the throat of night,
Burning, endless,
Unforgiven.

Ahmed Abbas Al-Tonsi
16/07/2025

Address

Maadi Sarayat
Cairo

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Ahmed Abbas Al-Tonsi's Poems posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Shortcuts

Share

Category