The World Is Too Full to Talk About

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“to be lost is a kind of leaving
and poetry rectifying life
rectifies poetry's echo”
–Bei Dao
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One
I cried a lot yesterday
as I realized there was no revelation to be had
through poetry
poetry is only a way to calm
the fever of living
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Book I: The Worst is To Sleep Through a Life.
“No, I’m not afraid of Death
or strife of injury or accidents
they are my friends” – Sufjan Stevens
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Death In The Family
It is the end of October and the weeks have passed by
like some mellow monotonous waterfall.
I begin to shed the coat around me
in which I was for months submerged
I cleansed my brain of images of your face
there is no place for you anymore
I raised your tragedy inside my chest as if it were my own
and woke up one day to the sound of having never been any of the things
I worked my whole life to become.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
my skin and tongue burn into something
hideous and fossilised
I pull out some book of poetry which is
older than this entire city
and think of what is and isn't mine.
In the circle around me, one after the other
things fall apart.
this sand and dirt and burning sun
the humanity at the core of our being
your body as something continents away.
a thing which is a joke to dream of
the total collapse of every wish I wrote into
the story of adulthood.
** * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Tomorrow I wake up for the animal
which rises impulsively
and lives alongside terror, an unmovable neighbour.
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Recurring Self Portrait
I seek beauty and it speaks to me
yet I find my self suddenly mute
every word I utter is barren and
devoid of authenticity.
I’ve stolen some life for my self
and inside of me I hold the theft
I feed on it secretly, swallow alone
holding back from regurgitating the unnatural
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Could you or him or anyone
with some homegrown beauty
calm this soft invisible fire
resurrect me from the ashes
introduce me to some sweet and quiet living?
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
Eaten by cancer
my skin and tongue transformed
centuries ago
beyond restoration
today I am unrecognisable
and fall back and forth
on some insignificant ocean
* * * * * * * * * * * *
I am awakened by the voice of my mother or sister
or some long forgotten lover
into the fast paced quick to die living
limp again, mute again.
waiting for things never to come.
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A Blue Sky Glimpse
If ever man is defined by anything
It is by his inability.
I am helpless to my failure to carry the rock of love rested
Inside my chest, pull it out through my mouth and give it a voice
I hope somehow it radiates through my coat of skin and is seen
As is the way of things, I am born with a gnawing incompleteness
A loss always of the structure of a home, a loss that is common
Somehow made to think one could conquer pain
How do you conquer your own bones?
How do you remedy the structure of your being?
The first drop in the womb was sorrow
And always it will be that way
My eyes have adjusted to the colorlessness
of living in a country like this
but brutal to give the prisoner a window
and every now and then I can see
and it makes my outline crumble
One day I will disappear
Everything I struggled against and for
Whatever stamina defines me is so infinitesimal
It will disappear without putting up a fight
But it isn’t personal; it is the nature of man to mean nothing
It will not be a sweet relief the way I dreamed it will
In my anxious fantasies before sleeping
It will be quick, unfelt, unseen, and common.
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Born To Die
In our backyard I am a stranger
my limbs don't fit amongst the flowers
Plucked out, skin exposed
cousins and aunts swarming our home
walking forward anyway
I dissapear into drawers, under rugs.
every morning I fold this love which is a tumour, a cluster of cells
this uncontrollable growth, tuck it in the back corner of my heart
thousands of walls between us
I try to remember my parents’ house
my childhood friends
scents of school cafeterias
something to remind me of who I am, with or without you
it is all, all of it
wrapped in hate
I resurrect the partition
retreat into this box of nobodyhood
there was never a time where I could have had you
but unknowingly I built
a giant tyrannical castle
which grew as large as all my fears
every brick is made of this cluster of cells
Built on shallow water, bound to fall apart
I rebel against my flesh;
a secret pregnancy, a spot of shame
my love for you resides in the back room of my body
its muffled sounds fill the whole house with a joy born to die.
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C'est tellement mystérieux, le pays des larmes
This morning I woke up detached.
I, rummaging inside my body, had no relation to the being I was
perceived and expected to be.
I washed my face and walked straight to the living room where my
mother, crouched and miserable, sat with my sisters
when we had a moment to our selves she said to me:
"when you went away last night, all night long I thought of going into
your room and looking through your things, finally I couldn't handle
my letting it go like that. I mean what kind of mother would I be? i
walked into your room and you were sleeping, quietly squeezing the
pillow. your face puffed the way it use to when you were five years old
and slept next to me. I felt terrible at the way things unravel, walked
out of the room and cried instantly"
it's such a mysterious place, the country of tears
I handled things with a frightening absence
at an instant I almost visited the country too but it did not feel worth
the trouble
I knew that however I was painted before in my mother's blurry mind's
eye I am not painted as such anymore.
it is painful to see someone hate themselves for the way you simply
are.
* * * * * * * * * * *
My mother is a world of it’s own
Walking narratives, I project the chaos of my inner civil war
Unto her flesh
I write poems about her because I cannot speak to her
Because I always cut through her inadvertently
Or out of necessity
And she sits quietly and waits for the blood to clot and dry
I have heard people say your mother never stops loving you
But a mother is an organic being which tires and sleeps
Aches and dies
I carry my mother inside my self
Ever since I was in elementary school, alone at lunch breaks
Crying at the thought of my self forcefully expelled from our home
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Every day
I carry my mother like a small blemish on the skin of my heart
And go on working and smiling and eating.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Had I not come from the core of her bones
I do not think my mother would have ever loved me
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The Epic of October
(1)
It always only lasts a while
some seed planted, dies alone in the grave of the womb
never becoming some flower or fruit.
I talk to you for a day or two and imagine a world in which I could
love and be loved without fear
I cannot write you anything
expression has stagnated as in our world
death becomes a growing business
and images of bodies devoid of inner life
reduced to bags of blood spilled on the floor
invade our daily living
when I was dancing the other day I thought of you
I pushed my arms inside my heart and used force against
some abstract movement I am totally helpless to
I begin to love you despite my muscles rushing together, in a state of
emergency
I think of my mother and her tyrannical love, her sadness punches me in the gut
and I stand paralysed.
you, like everyone else before you
some I spent months, some years, thinking I could love
are absolutely unaware of this embarrassing fire inside me
I push it farther inside and wait for it to die
always I am trapped inside the animalistic urge to fulfil the purpose of being. to
love and fuck and grow
and the cruel, unmoving odds of ever finding something true and beautiful
* * * * * * * *
For you I cannot remove my skin
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change my tongue
become something authentically beautiful
my nature is passing nothingness,
a people unheard of for centuries dwelling alone in the desert
* * * * * * * *
Today I laugh with you and you laugh with me
and what once was death in the centre of my being
is now hollow and quiet
you call me beautiful and the words swim across
my entire body. It disappears with every exhale.
a fleeting sweetness.
And I return to my monotonous oneness.
(2)
I wait always
but the waiting is long and tiresome
and my bones, one by one
pack up and immigrate out
of my ever rotting body.
(3)
This year too has passed
my heart is dipped in cold milk
and the wounds are slowly closing, my skin is young
blood still warm, body coated in sweat,
there is still much life to live
I take your secret death and secret resurrection
and put it next to me on the nightstand
every night it falls inside my dreams and invades this tiny space of
living
I live swollen with the heaviness of having to carry your
grown man’s body inside of me always, walking through the corridors
of this university
sitting in my parents living room. you are always large and heavy .
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increasingly I am beginning to understand your outlines
I have a better image of your childhood.
I know moments in the summers of your youth
sleeping in your grandfather’s house in the west.
The red sea is large and smiling. Smiling at you!
A full life! a secret song in the afternoon when everyone is having
lunch
and the sun comes in so large through the window as if it shines only
for you
when you were fifteen it was clear that God loved you
that same year a few cities away I was the same age
my skin was different, it looked different and smelled different and I
understood
things pass by, glide by painfully and fast and before you could stand
up to speak it has already died
Though I barely saw the sun and never saw the sea, I lived too inside
my sisters room, and wanted so desperately to enter my mother’s chest
and wear her skin
so when I looked at her so perplexed, it would not be such
(4)
poetry is not a quest for the truth its an attempt
like all art
to embody and capture tyrannical, inevitable suffering.
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Birthday Song
Sitting on my chair, my mother feels around my desk
she cannot look at me, I look at her easily
she touches my cup, my pens, a recurring attempt to understand
a wall has been resurrected between us and she knows nothing about me
knows nothing of the things I love, my favourite poetry, the songs I sing
the face of the man I speak to at midnight when everyone is asleep
always she is afraid to enter my room,
to see something she does not want to see
she asks me about the socks I wear, which juice I prefer
every morning she makes me breakfast, she wishes more than anything for the
four of us
to have a life which is calm and pure
I am the heavy and falling black stone in this house of birds
** * * * * * *
I cannot draw my enemy’s face and wonder if he has one
I cannot identify my own pain and shelve it alongside the pain of all my friends
even the desert is unwilling to parent me
the sun occasionally takes pity
** * * * * * * *
I am twenty-three today
I’ve gotten smaller with time
more a part of the rocks, the pavement
the space where it is impossible to speak
the pattern of my life is the act of happening
the make up of my body is piles of ordinary pain,
the world is too full to talk about
** * * * * * *
Neighbour/ Lover
I’ve braided you into my heart
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Philophobia: Strangers are easy to look at, loved ones are
museums of brutality.
I’ve tried very hard to exit the room my body is held in. My mother
and father owned my body, it was a symbol of shame. My school
owned my body, it was a fertile landscape in which catastrophe could
grow, my boyfriend owned my body, he owned it secretly, owned it in
allies, in small rooms, at unexpected moments, it was something to
bend and poke, elastic deadness that stretches to fit a need.
I tried very hard to secure a room of my own, a room of one’s own like
Virginia said, to have space for my body to be animal and solitary and
safe, to shed the concealing plastic off my skin, which tugs and mends
into a better, shinier shape, to let my body be oxidized and rot as all
living, striving human flesh.
If I could own my life would my bones stop collapsing unto me? Like
a building crumbling down daily with me walking aimlessly inside it.
If I decide to own
My life I will kill off all the surrounding love, it is the only way. Being
loved is a symbiotic relationship in which two animals rot in the same
room.
Daily I gather objects of memory and build a fortress, books,
notebooks, a business card, a dried flower. Scents of home to carry
through the industrialized cemetery, where young bodies purge and
holler for joys and forgetting, I could pull out my brother’s business
card, he is growth and health- always it feels as if I’ve lost someone
with whom life was less desolate, like a limb or a spouse of 15 years.
But it is alright, and if today I am ugly and find no love it is alright, the
hills are alive with the sound of music.
All day a dull compulsion to be loved makes it’s self known, seeps into
the half conscious desperate dreams of 10 minute naps on buses, a love
that is an anesthesia, a burst of scent in the grey nowhere, muscles on
bones, a way to move and connect. It is difficult to imagine someone
loving me if I am not even a full person with beginnings and ends, how
could one love scattered atoms? How could one love me if half of my
nerves are fried into oblivion? To be loved is a kind of horrid answer to
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a terrifying question, to be loved is to put on prescription glasses and
see for the first time that the world is neither fire nor ice, but is an
inhabitable adaptable place, it is you who cannot live non the less.
To be loved I must walk I must march I must dance to the tune of the
autumn wind in the trees and the car horns and the screaming ballad of
homeless schizophrenia, the original soundtrack of a world built on
human skeletons crushing human skeletons. To be loved I must adjust
to the scent of burning garbage on a summer afternoon and the rhythm
of the organic ecology of the pedestrian traffic, the clashes and rises of
the 20 odd languages spoken on top of each other, mandarin Urdu
Spanish English French Dutch Arabic a metropolitan inferno. To be
loved I must be alive in the middle of living, with visible outlines,
distinguishable from backgrounds; instead I have given up my body
for the comfort of a small world which does not pretend to be anything
but chaotic and absurd. Love is a choreographed balanced tango of
forward and backward which does not fit in my small room.
As I’ve quieted down the dull compulsions, a soft hazy image of you
and I by the beach, ice cream, and small a small hum, don’t be afraid
of loneliness.
A soft flame, not grey but magenta and full of sun.
The streets of my city are alive with a loud deadliness, a pseudoheartbeat,
music and depressants and stimulants, a collective quiet
beast with it’s poetry tattooed on the edges of it’s rough middle aged
skin, my city is a dead metaphor, a ball of dull fire and I’d like to live
or die but to pass through the narrow gaps between the bumping
bodies of human traffic, not touching anything not making anything,
not making a sound, quietly going home like a floating feather
hovering over the beating heart, catching some of it’s warmth in
silence, not going in but not leaving either.
Morning and night strangers bodies represent possible landscapes,
possible escapes, possible novelty that looks new and feels new and
smells new, landscapes which have no knowledge of the state of my
insides or my folds of loneliness of nameless reactions to utter doom,
strangers are easy to look at, easy to kiss, loved ones are museums of
brutality.
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Lust for Life
My lust for life is modest
you and I, cigarettes and coffee
no fear.
dreaming and plotting for some sort of liberation
for workers never dizzy with the horror
of their children’s hunger.
of the inborn, later stolen, human dignity
restored.
* * * * * * * * *
it took me some years
not many but some,
to understand the size of life
it fits on my bed, naps after work, the essence of living
it fits on a bench with a friend smoking a cigarette on a day swallowed by rain
listening to a song, 500 years old, still sung the same way
it fits in my lunch plate, filled with rice, vegetables, potatoes.
it fits inside this dead man’s dizzying harrowing book of poetry,
the continuous horrors of his home, the barefoot children, his pregnant wife, his
failing lungs
poems I read alone at night, there is life.
* * * * * * * * * *
I am born and I will die in a place not made for laughter or growth
a place whose building blocks is anger and a hatred of the skin
and always I thought I had to wait, life was too large for this body and this city
it took me some years to see the commonness, banality of life
and when I finally realised I had loved you in the most private way
I understood the size of life. a song and your face for a week. You cannot ask
for more.
all things are passing and small. you cannot ask for more.
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The Insistence of beauty
it appeals to the basic human fear of not only death but the second death of
having been so forgotten that you never were, all the forces demanding and
loving and trying so hard no longer have names or sounds. it appeals a second
time to me, personally, for as long as I can remember I have wanted to be an
artist and it comes in the way of my humanity. demands of me to split in two,
observe my self, become my own subject, be brutal with it, glorify it, splattered
in vanity. I am disgusting but it is necessary to understand. it is unnatural; it
asks, and fails with a frequency that is cruel to the ego, for one to become hyper
aware of things one was never meant to look at and will never understand.
striving for detachment, I always unravel around the insistence of beauty "it's
always too late to argue with beauty..beauty isn't nice. Beauty isn't fair"
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Victory Song
You cannot control your body,
you cannot control planes of war flying from your side of the border to the next
though you lay out all of your skin like a carpet and offer it to your friends
across the border
it shields no skin, fills no stomach
you cannot control the agony of the faces of children too small to know the
words
you cannot touch and bend your mothers pain when she looks at you becoming
what she cannot control
to be alive is to be a spectator to the consecutive convulsions of living
you can box your swollen heart and offer it as a gift to all the bent and the
suffering
it shields no skin, fills no stomach
** * * * * * *
I still have not called that woman I met at the gallery
the paper on which she wrote her phone number has been in my pocket for
months
my eyes are blurry and blind looking at her, a monument to the way things exist
anyway, despite
it is not so easy to erase traces of life
I bought the flag from her, I did not have enough money or I would have bought
some for all my friends
her number is with me on my lunch breaks, in afternoon naps, pulsating with
shame everywhere
** * * *
Every morning I know I have woken up inside a swamp I made my bed
there is dignity in this filth that I have found nowhere else
what’s a little hate anyway. I have built my shelter inside the suffering of others
and it is too late
there is no escape.
** * *
if we had one victory song I’d have something to sing for all my friends
and the little boys selling flowers at the stoplights
but inside of my lungs there is no music, only the continuous echo of defeat
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Mishima
I am a seed incapable of growth
rain and cows and sun and pushes and pulls to get me to become alive
and beautiful
but I remain buried in the damp nowhere
I have tried very hard to be good to you and to everyone
I am sorry. I’d like to be loved. but it’s only a matter of time before I
am no longer
overwhelmed.
art is cruel in the way that it serves as a memento, a continuous burst
of stimuli so that you could never forget the hurt. I wish I’d never
heard music.
if I’d never heard music I would have been able to live as an animal in
spite of the world, music arouses your horrible humanity.
music takes a picture of your insides and spreads it out before you,
makes your body dance to your own ruin.
I am a seed incapable of growth I can’t write you any poetry
I can’t apologise eloquently, I can’t show you your beauty. I can’t be
lovely to be around.
all I have is a box filled with years of attempts to redeem the way I’ve
never been able to look away from my self.
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Prison or nowhere
my body is a museum of attempts
stretch marks from that month I gained 7 kilos because
I was becoming someone else and it shattered everything
I tried to stay put, stay calm.
Ugliness is a byproduct of survival, ignorance at times, a byproduct of
a physical or psychological inability to learn. I cannot be around you
because its hard to sit in a chair amongst chairs and speak when
addressed and march at the same pace the same tempo, follow the
unwritten rules of the human society, it’s hard not to be outwardly
overwhelmed.
Today I realised in full burning colours the predominant nature of life,
the animal’s instances, the bleakness and unlikeliness, how much love
is for the most part a nice feeling prison and how it’s even harder to
live outside of it. Very few people get to have homes, most of us live in
prisons or in the barren nowhere
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Sea and Solitude
(1)
in the 90s, you and I are children
you by the sea, me in the city
your mother holds your hand, my father carries me on his shoulders
could I somehow conjure up some word, some thing to explain this
wordless sensation where your skin becomes my skin?
(2)
I had waited so long to live
I thought something larger was sure to happen
but I was already living, laughter was all one could hope for
something beautiful every now and then
and to prolong periods of painlessness
or at the very least, a pain which was bearable
I woke up alongside corpses of desire
yesterday I wanted you to be mine
I wanted to be yours and the want was woven into my muscles
the want was seen on my skin
the liquid coating my eyeballs was full of wanting
still it never happened
I, like a fetus growing outside the womb
could do nothing to stop the natural brutality of living
trapped within this shapeless unshakable inertia, I remain the same
all the cities on the island too look the same, built the same way
to be cages, cycles of subjugation, midnight monsters that swallow you whole
the workers under the afternoon sun, their skin and bones turn to stone
the women falling inside of themselves, occupying only the corners of every
room
I felt with you I could speak this language born inside of me which I have
uttered to no one
this overwhelming tide, rush of heat to the head, the chest suddenly becoming
soft
all taste in the mouth turns to ashes. I thought I could break through this
unbearable flesh
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I walked back to my room and fell asleep, that night I dreamt I had gone back to
school
the red sea was flooding the Arabian peninsula and students and teachers alike
were drowning,
along with chairs and books and lockers I was underwater
I had no more power than a table, under the sea we all were the same dying
breed
I push this power inside by body
this fantastic ability to suffer, but over and over I am reminded I am not angelic
and could not wish hard enough for an end to misery
(3)
It always hurts me to travel away from the sea
and every time I am faced with it, the sea speaks a feeling that sweeps me into
its great stomach
I remember again and again
No king is greater than the sea
my heart, in all its tyrannical agony is no larger than a fish.
whether or not I had ever loved you dissolves in the vastness of this cool and
enormous water, large enough to swallow the cadavers of every love I’ve had to
put to rest
(4)
You had come to my city some few years ago, we saw each other but I didn't
know it was you
If I showed you the contents of my heart, that it is stacked with images of the
suffering of the world
which I treat like my own poisoned blood, will you finally see me as one who is
willing to fight and be annihilated by your side for this thing larger than our
arbitrary coming to life?
you have torn apart all the roads which lead me to you and today I sit in my
home attempting to reshape my day which previously held little spots for you, a
daily road built to and from and around you, around your name, your voice,
your body leaning in a chair
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I am not sure what made you so ardently want to erase me out of your life, what
ugliness you saw in me, but I have swallowed the pain and it will soon die.
(5)
your grandfather was a fisherman, mine was a farmer
both lived with back ache and loved their children but struggled to express
this love which lives at the very edge of their raging skin
despite all my instincts I love your body lying down on your childhood bed
despite all my instincts I love the sea by your house, large and uncaring
(6)
I am an animal pushed and harassed to be more
it repelled my blood, my skin fumbles to resist daily
looking only for some form of silence, love and food every now and then
when everyone is asleep I go to our dimly lit backyard
to smoke and talk to you
for months I tried to unravel before you, peal my self and sit int the centre of
the room
display everything I am and everything I’ve collected
something could fall inside the flesh of your chest and you’d want me too
(7)
city in the belly of the desert / city by the sea
all of us come from the veins of the walls of these crumbling houses
in these crumbing neighbourhoods where we are annihilated and reborn with
new names
I have grown now and walk calmly unmoved by the flames in my lungs
I read about the world as if the world is my own bones
I read about the world as if the world was some foreign, utterly detached being
tomorrow when everyone is asleep I will smoke alone and will not speak to you
I will think of your voice and live with the taste of iron in the mouth, the fresh
sting of torn ribs
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No Way Out of The Skin
on stolen grass we sit and smoke, stand and dance
I am happy for a moment and I am stuck inside this happiness
unsure if I should bottle it for later. Am totally paralysed in the face of some
feeling
which seems so noble
but is passing, its meaning escapes me
* * * * * * *
Today at once I understood the pains of the people
I felt the collective horror of it all. some was foreign and new and unbearable
some I had known since birth/ all of us born into this spot of earth at the bottom
of the ocean,
in total obscurity, understand what it means to be crushed.
in our mothers wombs we are assassinated and are born into this living without
life.
* * * * * * * * *
we thought we existed underneath our shirts but when we took them off we
knew
the regime was our skin and blood and bones. The government was the sun, it
was the air.
and when the wind carried with it sand from the desert, that too belonged to the
government.
in our bedrooms we were nobodies. in our bedrooms we felt complicit in the
crimes of the state.
* * * * * * * * * *
with three broken ribs you walk to work
pain is the undertone of life
the carpet of the universe is woven
and the needle is suffering and the thread is suffering
with total inertia, total apathy
the universe exists and you walk to work
** * * * * * * * *
My love for you died recently
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and this death is seen all over my body
I admit it was absurd to think something so beautiful could happen
so easily.
instead I take whatever happiness I can get.
** * * * * * * * *
wish after wish are laid to rest in the cemetery of adulthood
the days continue to pass quietly
people are left behind. the whole city transforms
I smile at the sun (my childhood friend!)
all sweetness is born to die
and I spend a whole day with my family
there is no way out of the skin.
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Homes, Lovers, Suffocation
Thinking of home
I try very hard to draw a picture of you and me
in this picture I am always a different woman
one less ugly, less afraid
a woman whose nerves are not a tangled electric heap
a women who exists easily.
I cannot imagine us together
my image of my self is always a solitary figure
though you reach out to me
it is hard to think that the goodness of your unfolding love
the blanket under which we hide our humanity
is something I could be given
in a world whose very backbone is misery
* * * * * * * * * * *
I have filled my notebooks with clumsy and mundane
animal pain. monotonous, ongoing, common.
like fire, anguish is an ancient phenomenon
devastating and ordinary.
* * * * * * * * * * *
“We retreat from the world
before it breaks apart”
we sluggishly separate our bodies from horror
and soon suffocate from the smoke
rising from a fire we tried very hard to escape.
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Book II: This Is The City You’ll Always Reach/ Unmarked Graves
Where Flowers Grow
“Home is where all your attempts
to escape cease” -Nagib Mahfouz
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I am quite sure you feel something very similar
I will dig up my humanity which tries always to slip into an unmarked
grave
I wish/ I knew how/ it would feel/ to be free
a sort of persistence against the external forces which try always to
deny your beauty and the beauty of others
Always one of you is below the line of human
I have arms and folding fat and bend forward with despondence and
radiate with love the way all human bodies do
my love grows old and dies in the locked room of my heart/my rage
festers and gives birth to cancer
* * * *
can I send you a message in a bottle that floats across the sea between
us?
I do not stand in a room opposite to yours and if my body is somehow
cut from your body I will dig a tunnel from my window to yours.
we have fallen under heavy waters, you and I, I see the marks of
drowning on the sides of your mouth, it is similar to mine. The skin
ferments for decades, it forgets what it means to stretch arms or fall
asleep.
a spirit is a metaphorical representation of a rush of blood to the head. I
no longer live with the possibility of forgetting, of detachment, of quiet
family life, and my blood hardly moves or moves too fast. I am quite
sure you feel something very similar.
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Cities of flesh
Like a falling leaf on an autumn morning, all dead things fall to the
ground
I, on the other hand am a floating deadness, with a body stuck between
two realms.
how can we watch our bones grow if there is no sanctity, no dignity, no
worth, nothing to preserve about a human life?
all of our bodies stretched into pastes splattered across city streets,
painting buildings the colour of rotting skin
an entire country smelling of rotting flesh, of nations asleep.
I hold a baby girl in my arms and my head spins. It means nothing to
be alive, it is to be the daughter of the cruel god which is the passage
of time, we thank you, oh passage of time, mighty lord of all creatures,
for taking our skeletons and thrusting them into the ground.
making us into food for earth, only in death can we belong to
something.
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Ashes in an Ocean
The lifeless motions of my city taunt me
Lights flash and cars pass and people enter and leave in silence,
In bodies built to project shame, alienation.
It taunts me how it feels as if I am stuck inside a meaningless gesture
Aimless motions sun and moon and sun and moon and sun and moon
Forward backward inside outside, scattered sand and eyes closed
Laughter with your friends, holding your palms up to your chest and
manually pushing back the outbursts,
The daily excess nothingness devouring your chest like mean, acid
burning hunger.
Smoking a cigarette with your friend, getting yelled at for indecency
The indecency of a human body existing visibly, the indecency of
doubt and pain and motions not precalculated but human and
spontaneous.
The indecency of not policing one’s self into obsoleteness.
The indecency of falling asleep without expectation.
How could I speak to you?
You don’t’ understand, it is alien to you to live like a shadow
It is alien to you to be a single, crushable dimension
To have anger as useful as ashes scattered in the ocean
A symbol of what it means to dissolve into nothing
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Waiting for the sun which cannot seem to greet us
Love as a form of bullying, swarming every space I’m in
Everything we venture to do is a contract
Nothing comes without condition unconditional love
Is a cruel whisper in the ears of a baby that cannot hear
Or hopes to hear or hears and knows otherwise but hopes what he
knows
Is untrue.
I cannot have a home that envelops me
Either it is my own but is knives to every bit of exposed skin I give to
the world
Or it exists around me indifferently and is temperate and inhabitable
I’ll say it clearer and louder
No home no love for me
Only few get to have what is promised to many
I want to rebuild my home, surgically remove the molds and place
instead
Flowers in bloom
But I am one and wear coats of fear.
Instead the young build homes not out of the wood of trees that spurt
Involuntarily, naturally, accidentally from the very same ground our
ancestors
Disintegrate into
Instead the young build homes out of borrowed, imported plastic
Sweet and full of music and places to sleep
A human being will build a place to laugh in always
So then what is the purpose of hoping that our homes are ours truly
Isn’t it enough that we have places to sit and eat?
I wish I could gift you a beauty all your own
Without shame or fear
For now we will live our imposter lives in our artificial states
I’m afraid the alternative seems to be
a sort of bottom of the ocean stagnation
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Guns Cant Kill What Soldiers Cant See
The act of birth wouldn’t plague me so much had the fabric of the
world not been robbery.
Continuously, you rob and are robbed.
Continuously you are put in situations that force you to shave off your
humanity to fit in places impossibly small, and your bones are so thin,
They fall apart.
Alone inside the cubicles of my being I am not anything or anyone
Men who rob me of what they abundantly have cannot live inside the
cubicles of my being and I never utter their names or think of their
faces
Only there am I human in the sense of fruit squeezed of its essence
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Bodies and words.
Beauty is not native to this soil
I clash against it as I force some artificial birth
of home grown poetry, fruits, all my own
but find my palms, every time, empty.
I could name the growth which existed and continues to be
I could recount the verses, hundreds of names for clouds, deserts, plants
scents of burnt wood, songs of lost lovers
Yet I find for others
there are trees, the open air, fire at midnight at the heart of a brutal winter (some
comfort!)
I only live from room to room.
Every afternoon,
Men gather around in cafes
Drink heavy bitter cups of tea and smoke cigarettes
eat sweets made of dates that fall from trees which are the mothers of
otherwise deadly deserts.
Talk of the weather, all the new and old ways in which the world is falling apart
and laugh bitterly, loudly
About the thought of their own demise
But in those little dwellings of humanity there is no room for me
When my body sits in a room the curtains must be closed
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The percentage of fat in my chest
The curves on my hips
Are an abomination that cannot rest in cafes
Along with men with tighter leaner bodies
Skin on muscle on bones is the way to be without shame
Men stare like you are scenery which has no eyes to stare back
You are the most loathsome wholesome thing
To be lifted and stepped on.
Inciting lust in cafes is a capital sin
and if they are made of sand you are made of hate.
* * * * * * * * * *
He told me
‘the blue dress you wear is brutal’
it broke his bones to see me
so beautiful and young
with flesh and fat to fill his palms
I love his love I love his lust
I too lust for him
But my flame, unlike his
Exerts no smoke, no smell
lives inside my womb, internal, unseen
a soft heat which burns no one
inside our room he and I together
drink the coffee of our ancestors and talk also of the weather
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the sun is crueler than ever
he holds my palm inside his and it is not empty
our room is small and outside of it we fall into our bodies
strictly made for separate things and separate places
with him perhaps at times i can be both owner of my body
and without even a body
but still most days we walk the streets in bodies distinct
and become things entitled to different soils
his is fertile and mine is dead seeds planted in dead ground
yielding only stillborn things.
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etween thought and expression
The days are so quiet
a sort of fabric that grows thinner with time
everything hurts less, I am smaller and am moving closer to the centre of the
box
and nothing can touch me
today I hear only the echo of pain
I walked to the pet store,
I walked to the flower shop
there is not much walking in my city
the sun was soft and I was listening to a song from long ago
no one spoke to me, I hadn't spoken in a while.
I was alone completely with the the mute motions of this city with which I had
no common language
I talked to someone new
some man, much older
I liked the sharpness of his eyes, it was a different world
but even that was futile
they come and go and nothing touches my heart
and I do not even come close to touching theirs.
It came to mind that I was alive now
and no longer waited to live
I sat in the room which was always my destination
unimpressed by the colors of the wall
the arrangement of the furniture
I took a nap on the couch and woke up delirious
I wanted to write a poem for all my friends
who carry with them bags of suffering, swallowed slowly
festering inside their abdomens
a poem that is an apology, a shrug
‘between thought and expression
lies a lifetime’
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Self/ home
My existence is very small but it matters a great deal to me
I’ve tried very hard to keep it within the scope of every other living
thing
an answer to a question
but my body is filled with fatigue, under the skin there is lethargic
swimming fatigue
Isolation is so small, hardly visible, a pupil looking just a bit farther
than you’d hope
eyes just a little dimmer than usual, arms hardly lifted.
the entire desert of my country between me and you, but I engage and
am dying
to be alive today is to try to fill the time with some meaning, with
prayers of passing, with
prayers of, passing the time, of sleeping and waking up, ending the
school year
getting a job, learning nothing, trying to understand and alleviate
human pain as if I had power but I have power
borrowed power, fathers pockets into the hands of others, I hope it
feeds your child tonight.
I push my arms into my own chest, my own spine, rearrange the
insides into something more human and beautiful and living.
Living because of the tendency, the inclination, the bend towards, the
natural bend towards a death, a slow
invisible, incalculable unobservable death.
/
my home rejects me like a body rejecting it’s own organs
tragic and common enough to be a natural phenomenon of living as we
are
i float awkwardly, no soil to set my foot in, it’s horrid to lose ones
dignity so much
to be wanted nowhere.
I apologize for the sent of shame eroding out of my body, it smells
awful but is
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a natural occurrence and nature is not always beautiful, but we assume
it is so we assume all which we find uncomfortable to be unnatural.
But it is natural to be as displaced as I am, it is natural to be in exile. It
is natural for an organ to move from one body to the other if only there
was a body which hosts me as a vital kidney because I am vital and I
do serve and I do clean and I do work within the machinery of life.
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To B, before he has left
I do not know if poetry is any more than a compulsion to let my inner
life seep through my skin like grease unto the floor whose scent barely
marks the room, if it does at all.
daily I am falling asleep in a room where I married a whole society of
dreams that commingle and taste sweet but stay always distant enough
to leave space for wishes of death.
I wish to be loved by you as if being loved by you would absolve
would solve would fill would end would change my very genetic
coding the tendency of my flesh to suffer my natural inclination to be
alien to be foreign.
I wish to be loved by you because we are beautiful even when we’re
vain and when we stumble and when we try to reclaim the human
dignity for a youth trying to fight the walls of a building built so some
could have more room to breath than others. I wish to love you even
when you won’t speak to me and i wonder if i had been mapping out
scenarios which have no counterparts in the real, visible world. I wish
to be loved by you because for once i would like to be both stripped of
an awareness of self and body and blessed with a hyper awareness of
my own individual beauty. I wish to be loved by you because I’d love
to show you a misery that isn’t a burden, only to show you, only for to
not hide. Poetry to me today is a way to reclaim what is yours and
mine and the children’s and my grandmothers and his and theirs, the
possibility of ending the suffering.
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The Disappearance
(1)
A great hundred-year-old siege took over this desert and its’ people.
Their vocal cords were snatched out of their necks and everything they
make is ugly and everything they whisper is ugly as they’ve been force
fed stagnant death since formation, birth, soft infinitesimal growth. An
entire industrialized desert of doom where bodies swallow bodies and
limbs go stiff from sitting for years.
If I could prove to you that blood runs in my mummified body would
you wake up in horror? That you have kept me in a tomb for thousands
of years as I have sung to my self some songs of the living, covered
my body with insects, and thought every now and then of the sun
which belongs to no one.
(2)
once I knew a man who was a fold
he was a fold in the sense that he was something soft and curled about
its self
I lost my grasp on anything around him
I felt like a tiny little fish motionless in the quiet and dangling pacific
ocean
I felt like the sun was melting in my liver and bursting through my
insides
he was everything and everywhere
but life
in it's stubborn tyranny
will lay down it's fences
and I could not find his face and could not kiss it
one morning he told me
"it gets tiresome to fight
lay down our red flags and white flags and
even the idea of a flag
become
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so small almost a hiss
almost a whisper almost
extinct"
and I felt us both fading into the oppressive yellowness
of the rotting walls of the kitchen
(3)
I am alone in my resistance (you have no chance)
I resist alone (no chance at all)
everyone resisting resists alone because to resist together is to bring
about mass murder (don’t throw)
and we would like to sleep in our beds tonight (your life away)
for decades thousands of deaths have meant nothing, what it means to
individually, uniquely suffer,
to sing, to kiss your mother
on the cheek/ all the things which make you beautiful(!)
meant nothing/ are scattered and disappeared.
(4)
we will pluck the teeth out of our children’s mouths and give them to
the king.
happiness is synonymous with being alive. No one family is happier
than the other.
I’l box my anger and put it in the back of my closet, let it fester and
seep through tiny holes
warm air through my nostrils. I am alive only arbitrarily. My sense of
ethics dies. it is hard to be good.
(5)
In Edward Said’s last interview he talked about being overcome with
disease, being unable to read or play the piano, his body’s mechanic
urge to buy books conflicted with it’s inability to read them. he no
longer wanted to talk about the middle east, he did not want to have to
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defend always, he no longer belonged in america, all his friends were
dead.
(6)
I am a vessel of incommunicable language, of childhood memories, of
knowing I am going to die, of wondering if people know I love them, of
being embarrassed to tell them I love them, to stumble on my words. I am
afraid to be loved, I protect my isolation which is pierced by a song, my
favourite singer whispered poetry from the core of his humanity and he
breaks my isolation and I am for a moment inside the river of life and it is
cold and frightening.
I remember from months ago, years ago, watching films alone in my parents
living room, retreating back into a fetus, into a thought on my father’s mind,
I am as an absurd happening, an absurd suffering which bursts out of
darkness then defuses back to it. any world that is formed by a big explosion
is bound to be cruel and senseless.
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