This was an excellent and long essay on the current surreal state of Iran (one of my many pet fetishes):

www.nybooks.com

Autumn lay your mapled hands over me, and cover my pining skin
Till April with her delicate scent, douses this parched keening skin.

Night, quick, shorten your stay. And you winter, slough your white skein.
For towards paradise, I want to row her on the boat of my thrumming skin.
Hush, all you leafy orchestras of the west wind! Please stop your swishing din.
For only on tiptoe do the Beloved's fingers shyly sneak over my eager skin.
Rose of Sharon extend your ancient shade over me and my smoldering twin.
Afterwards in the markets this question, "Who has so branded your skin?"
And Sashi, who woke you up last night with the insistent whisper, "caress my skin"?
Was it the rain on the window, or she who now lives within your bombed open skin?

It is evening, early fall as I write this. I was incapacitated by a terrible sense of longing an hour or so ago, so much so that I couldn't make my fingers clutch a pen and write. This was till I dug up Mickey Hart's "Around the World For A Song", and went on a trip.

The beat took me in no particular order to rainforests and the dying music of Kauli tribe of Brazil, high mountain plateaus and the throat chanting of Tibet, the Gangetic plain of India with the madness Zakir Hussain can cox out of two drums, the Ojibway firecircle chants, the folk rythms of Sahara nomads, the massive wall of polyphonic rythm thrown up by a master drummer of Nigeria. What this music did was take me to that drum that beats within myself, and listen to it again closely.

Go listen to this album, and feel the rythm.