“All Praises Due To Allah”

An Interview With Brother Yusuf Salim

The music is just a vehicle. I can look around and see better musicians all around me who aren’t getting all the publicity that I’m getting. That makes me realize that it’s not the music. The music just puts me on the stage in a position to reach out. My real profession is human relations. I just happen to play a little piano.

The Terminal Restaurant

The Terminal Restaurant never looked real. Built like a small outdoor building indoors, and with its neon sign over the front door spelling its name in red, it made the place look like a movie set.

Prepare To Die

It’s an ongoing process of opening to life. The more you open to life, the less death becomes the enemy. When you start using death as a means of focusing on life, then everything becomes just as it is, just this moment, an extraordinary opportunity to be really alive.

Call Them By Their Names With Passion

“Name and form” the rishis call it. “Function and form,” biologists reply. Parallels accumulate. Coincidence perhaps, but I am forced to wonder. How much power is in a word, and can I make it mine?

Stories

Along the banks of the river Sharaim hang silver bells that dance in the wind. The bells have always been there, and man has always heard their gentle melodies while travelling upon that river. No man knows who fashioned the bells and arranged them along the banks, for the bells existed before man’s curiosity came to be.

Entering The House Of The ’Lord

For the first time I wonder if I have gone too far, overlooking too many potential danger signs in this landlord/tenant relationship, and maybe I should ask for my money back, take the lease form from the wife’s hands where it is lying and tear it into pieces, but then I decide that I am as worthy of two walls of windows and a murphy bed on swiss avenue as anyone else.

Selected Poems

Time After Pentecost