Holidays shopping is complete, and shipping is happening already

 Here's to hoping that the friends and...well...friends, enjoy all the poetry collections sent out to them.

As keen readers of the blog will know, the books say they're by "Hafiz" but actually they're not written by the old Persian Sufi Master, they're just credited to him. The real writer of those works is Landinski, possibly one of the greatest lesser-known mystic sufi poets of our time. He is Hafiz and Hafiz is him, without Hafiz there would be no Landinsky, without Landinsky Hafiz would be but a shimmering ghost today. They're translations, spiritual, of what Hafiz was and stood for. If Landinsky were to be put in the 13th Century Shiraz today by a magical time machine, there is no doubt he would be the predominant poet of his era, eclipsing, dare I say, Hafiz himself.

With that context, I urge the reader to ignore or forget completely the distinction between the two poets, for they can be occlusive rather than revealing. To see the picture fully, consider them to be part of one great tradition, one great tree of thought and philosophy. Appreciate the poems with that in mind.

I read a couple of them, and they're so so so goddamn great, all the popular 'Hafiz' poems only or quoted elsewhere are from either of the poetry collections I sent out. So pithy yet so on-point. There's many poems about love, separation, spirituality, friendship, finding yourself, dedication, submission.

Hope it inspires and incites my friends to do things, improve their lives, be closer with their loved ones, be more open to the world around them. Smell the spirit of humanity like they smell the fragrance of flowers.

And that's...it. All I gave away were those poem collections. Hope they enjoy those, really. It was easy for me to decide, everything else would have be perfunctory, unnecessary. After all, what better a gift to a man than a gift, to his own heart, huh? Shit, that's good, that's going to be a poem in the next post.

Ta-ta!