Aryan al-Said Khalaf's words have endeared him to many Iraqis, including Saddam Hussein - the poet says officials in the former dictator's entourage told him that Mr. Hussein was rarely in his car without listening to a reading on the stereo.
But Mr. Khalaf's popularity couldn't save him from being tor-tured by Mr. Hussein's Baathist re-gime, which hated his ideology. The people's poet, as he is known because he writes in colloquial Iraqi Arabic rather than the diffi-cult formal classic language, is a diehard Communist.
"Jail, communism and poetry make the dough from which you make the bread," he says, the poems spilling from his mouth like water. What is the bread? "Truth," he answers.
Mr. Khalaf, 58, has been observ-ing Iraq and writing his poetry for decades, and his current incarna-tion, writing in the Iraqi Commu-nist Party's daily newspaper and sitting over tea or beer with his old intellectual comrades, is not so difficult.
But unlike many of his old Com-munist friends, who suffered at the hands of capitalists, colonialists and fascists, Mr. Khalaf grew up in the lap of luxury. The plain metal desk where he sits at the party's Baghdad office, opposite the Tigris River, contrasts starkly with the wealth to which he was once ac-customed.
He and his sister grew up in ver-dant Qalat Sikur, near Nasiriyah in southern Iraq, an area which pro-vided him with the first inspiration for the poetry that he began com-posing in third grade.
"The green fields penetrated my blood," he says.
"I listened to the songs of the lover boys and lover girls. There, love was prohibited, but all the people were in love."
At his childhood home, he learned the tricks of the trade.
"My family's house was muthif," he says, using a special Arabic term for highly respected homes that serve as centres for religious and intellectual cultural gather-ings. "My father, Farhan, was also a poet and all the intellectual schoolteachers would gather at our house for poetry readings."
But it was his experiences with his childhood friends that inspired him.
"My eldest uncle wouldn't let me play with the sons of their farmer-slaves, but I did anyway," he says. "I had a good relationship with them and I could feel how their fathers were suffering."
He was entering the seventh grade in 1958 when he joined the underground student union, which opposed the ruling monar-chy. A month later, Abdul Karim Qassem overthrew the royalty and imposed military-nationalist rule.
The new government allowed Mr. Khalaf to express his Commu-nist views, but it also kicked his family off their land. While the poet's father was in Baghdad searching for work, his mother died.
Mr. Khalaf dropped out of school to help his father and be-came a day labourer at the Iraqi Construction Co. The wages were low, but the Communist Party had a committee there.
But when the Baathists came to power in the 1963, it was the be-ginning of a long, dark chapter for Iraqi Communists. Many were killed, and others, including Mr. Khalaf, were arrested and tortured.
"They cut my tongue," he says, sticking it out to show a disco-loured and deformed part in the centre. "But for me, it was my first school."
In prison in Baghdad, he met leading intellectuals and politicians. Listing famous old poets who sat with him in jail, he calls his incarceration "a turning point in my poetry. They were my teachers."
Released in 1966, he entered the University of Baghdad to study journalism.
The late 1970s were the worst times for Communists. The party was officially outlawed, members were executed and Mr. Khalaf was arrested again, this time beaten and tortured with electric shocks. He still has sores on his legs, and is missing a knuckle.
Today, with his nation starting another chapter, just like Mr. Khalaf, he professes to wish for nothing more than a democratic Iraq.
"Here in Iraq is an Islamic society and many different political parties," he says. "We don't want a Communist government, we want a country with all the colours."