Man Randa Ze Maikhana

Man Randa Ze Maikhana echoes Az Man Begurized in its structure of warning: the speaker turning the love song into a caution sign. But where that song presents the speaker as a man incapable of the love offered, this one presents someone who has been expelled from the only place that would accept them.

The tavern (maikhana) in Sufi poetry is the last institution that accepts the lover rejected by mosque and social convention. To be 'randa' — expelled, banished — even from the tavern is to be beyond all institutional shelter.

'I am a ruined house — flee from me. / I am that flood of madness that has come down from the mountain with fury.' The self-descriptions escalate: not a difficult person but an abandoned building; not troubled water but a mountain flood; not harmful but a destroyer of nests. Zahir delivers this accumulation of self-damage without self-pity — the tone is almost matter-of-fact, which makes it more devastating.