So many poems
and stories
have gone unwritten
due to fear of not being good enough

613 200 Hours
25 550 Days
13 Cars
11 Jobs
9 Dogs
6 Surgeries
5 Children
4 Grandchildren
3 Marriages
2 Siblings
1 Weary soul.
No regrets.

I don’t want to
Open my mouth
Because I’m still afraid
The truth might come out
And if it does
If it really breaks free
You’ll see what I am
You’ll see the true me
The one I hide
With jokes and lies
I’m a terrible person
All jokes aside
You don’t seem to know it
You don’t seem to see
Even a glimpse of that person
That I know to be me
I’m such a good actress
I hide it so well
Cover it with a laugh
And you’ll never tell
You see depth in my eyes
You see love and emotion
But what would you see
If I ever did open
I can’t bear to find out
I can’t bear to show
The me you don’t see
The me that I know
If I let it out
If I let it be
I know for a fact
That you would hate me.

Break me again? That’s okay
It’s all good.
It’ll be okay
Break me as much as you want Ill recover

I never learn, I never learn
Keep mourning your ashes in the golden urn
You were the dawning sun opened wide
A purity I slaughtered for the god inside

I never fade, vague as fog, I never fade
Into the scarlet waters, I wade
Dusk weeps and deserted I wait
Wait, I wait, O timeless Patroclus, I wait

A thousand ships, all united, set sail
To free their heavenly queen and her veil
A thousand ships I could’ve let burn
Into the wretched battle had you not run

Rambles, rambles on this silent sea
Your extinguished heart will hear not a plea
You took all the humans in me along
This bleak divinity, worth not a single song

Never not do I hope, never not
I hope, I hope, in this despaired hope I rot
You lurk a painful past in my unseeing gaze
As rows upon rows of men I raze

In the halls of living, I search for your name
Your love-licked body I surrendered to my flame
I hear your starlit lips yell at me to stay
Achilles, Achilles, live, you ****** sun, they say

All my charismatic promises I forget
This wish, sweet moon, you shall not get
I tear then my heart in search of you
A river red as doom, and a stillness blue

I am here, Patroclus, now spare me this lone
My frenzied ghost screams soundless on
Our ashes kiss and kiss in the golden urn
I never learn, alas, I never learn

Frozen lakes, a little more do freeze
Frenzied lovers love once again
A bewitched battle we dare relive
A spear we’ll take, a spear let go

Such are the deathless hours killed
A thousand ashen folks forced to live
In ballads eternal, etched in stone—
No mourning, no worry
Shall dig us a way out of this dusk
No morning, no chipping sparrow
Betrothed to spring
No sleep awakens our drunken peace
No ghosts unfading in need of slumber

Withered we weep, withered still our waltz
Withered we love, withered still still

How beautiful is our desolation
How recklessly brave

Oh, what star kissed poems rush
Though the blood that gushes
Out of ravaged bones—
How lovely do we ache, how lovely go on
So profound is this torture and its pleasing touches
The breaths leave us for the blue above
And we, shivering, lie

But so, so beautiful we slay
So brutal stay—

Frozen lakes, a little more do freeze
The beaten bards out again on the streets
To preserve in blooms
A thousand wretched tales

Oh, how valour never became a being so well

I heard you like to sing
In broken, barren places
Well, I have found us a mansion
Old and rotten
And, say,
Will you not come over for a cup of moonlight?
I have built us a garden
With twigs and weeds
And hung up a swing
From the black, velvet sky
Will you not come by
In your wildest gown and brightest jewels
Bring along the gossips
Bring along the feathers
And all other abandoned things

Spare me the news of Palestinian wails
Or how a young girl was stolen
From a loud street
Put aside the talks of rising waters
Or how the things that are legal
Aren’t always moral
Do not bring along the laughs of explosions
That are known to bloom in
most arid of places

Tell me about the stars
Tell me the talk of the sparrows and doves
Or did that slender lady
Finally dye her hair green?
How are the dolphins?
Sing me the songs you wrote for fire
Sing of the ocean
And her fluttering veils
Make me forget I am not a gust

Will you not come by?
I have sought out a trapdoor
That leads to the purple forest
We will play hide-and-seek
In our frail, little world

They say the place
Was home to a lady who,
One day, washed her body
And hung it to dry
Will you not help me wake the dust
That sleeps all around?
We will hold a slow dance
With scared spiders and rats
Bring along the tired stars
and all other extinguished things

Bring along the debris
And maybe a ****** shoe or two
But do not bring the stories of still children
Or the shivering ones
Leave behind all the prayer mats
All of the prayers

We will swim in the shadows
And feast upon wilted blooms
Sing me the ballads of the clouds
I’ll sing you those in my head
And when, in the morning
The town’s folks will talk of the dead lady’s ghost
Swaying and singing
I will pretend the mansion
Never knew of us.

You know, this woman
Never fails
To astound me

She is mixing the ladies’ fingers
Chopped and fried
With sautéed, spiced onions
And I watch
As she dips the pan
Toward herself
And all the oil runs over
Like a lost child
At the sight of his sister
In a crowd

With the other hand
She pushes those vegetables
Into the awaiting ***
Places the pan aside
And grabs hold of the ***
Twisting her wrists
Working up the magic

She flips the greens
Over the crescent onions
Mingling them up
And in front of my eyes
She has cooked up a dish

Then she spins the wheat dough
In between her fingers
Nimble as a dove’s beak
Tossing it from palm to palm and
All of a sudden
It is a flattened sun

She turns it around on the griddle
Before exposing it to the flames
It rises, rises, then falls
A breathing thing
And
Goodness be ******
She doesn’t even burn it
Not a single mark
She cooked the sun over blue fires
Turned it into a moon

I wonder how she does it
My mother
Master an art she doesn’t even like
While I—
I fiddle around
With my pens and brushes
The smug blankness

Of neglected canvases
And unfilled pages
Mocking me of a fairy-light child
I could not become—

Mischievous little moon
You are beautiful
I wonder if you know
Though you’re often told
(You know
You can take that hood off
It ain’t cool
You look like a squished football
or an orange rotten from one side
No offence)
But really, you’re beautiful
It is strange
I have words, but none better
Yet beautiful is so much
Mustard flowers
And bluebirds
That girl down the street and her bright-pink smile
Mother’s laugh
Myself too,
Sometimes

But I do not mean that.
I cannot compare you to Arabian Jasmines
Or Sapphire stones
You’re beautiful
unlike all
I think everything’s like that
sigh

But there’s this moment
In the middle of a breath, in the middle of a day
Unbidden
It sprouts sturdily out
Like a Morning Glory seedling
In the midst of a Mint shrub

When it drizzles
And I lose my body for a while
My eyes fixed
At the knitted pattern of the chair
Mother places scraps of stale bread
For the crows to finish
And little brother, not so little now,
Rants about his Minecraft battles
The dragons he defeated
And forts he conquered
(through massacre, but let's not talk about that)
He complains about the sun
(It is not square, and, well, it is real)
Mother complains about his complain
And, vaguely,
I hear the traffic
Four storeys below
That of cars and bikes
Gossiping and giggling
An ambulance
wailing

I think
Someone might be in it
Wincing and pleading to go faster
Or maybe silent, a still god
I think
I still have my test to prepare
I think
Whatever
**** the test
I think
That darkened bird
And its undeniable existence
Is kind of offensive  
But it’s pretty too
Rich purple peeks through that night
Blue and gold
And silver as well, a little

Mother talks about my climbing rose
That’s taking over the balcony railings
And a kite soars by
With a hoarse hiss
I think
Did I sleep last night?
Was I awake?
Perhaps, it was a lingering in between
I think
My brother looks so much
Like that crow
I think
****, dude, he really does

I voice this epiphany to him
And I get a smack
He gets one back
‘Cause mama didn’t raise a sweet
Frail butterfly
But, dude can he hit
I hit him again, which is unjust and dangerous
one must not meddle with little brothers
But mama couldn't groom the idiocy out of
Her daughter
I think
You've tickled the snoring beast
Now flea, you idiot
I run, he runs
Mother squints up in the sun
(Look who came to see the show)
I run, he runs
I laugh when he stumbles
And falls

Cement rough over his innocent skin
Clouds dripping on

It is strange
Those moments
I lurk through loudness to the quiet of my flesh
Then sneak into the noisy life within
And yearn for peace
All about
I flutter with a merry dancing
In my bones
And something weeps, weeps
Weeps on

I think you’re beautiful like that
A divinity I cannot touch
Nor see
A hymn I dare not grasp or
Or perceive
But I need not.

A laugh is not a pretense
I wanted to tell you that, Urooj
And maybe to myself too
Because I know you saw peeps
Of the vacancy
Nestled in my skin
And I too was acquainted
With your queer sorrow
That rises and falls
With a schedule of its own
We saw the jolly winds flirt with greyed trees
And heard many a strange talks
In golden fields of youthful wheat
And mustard flowers alive

But we ran too, didn’t we?
I pointed to the slender tree far, far away
Count as I go, I said
And count you did as I rushed
Rushed clumsily on
My feet twisting in troughs
Eye-lashes fighting dust
Twenty, you shouted, as the tree grew
But I barely heard
my body singing a battlefield

You stumbled through the ploughed soil
Hardened through suns
Crushing the remnants of harvested wheat
beneath the flat soles of your sandals
(who wears those to a field?)
Then more
Through soft, chestnut soils
Trying not to damage the baby onions
And I laughed through my burning lungs
A smoke piled up in me
Yearning to gnaw all away

And we licked the gusts singing gossips
Of sour, raw mangoes
Then relished the cool water that
You forced the earth to puke
(I still don’t get how that hand-pump worked)

And I know you sneaked along a wilted rose
From your sister’s grave
And wept, quietly sniffing
Seeing her in all the birds I pointed out
All the leaves dried to immortality
In my notebook
I too treaded through rows of childish guava trees
And struggled to will my ghosts away
I too got stranded in the insolent rays
of the dusty sun

But we joked still, didn’t we?
And when, on the way home,
I reminded you stories
Of the silly children we once lived
Your laugh glimmered all around
And mine mimicked

And the radio was ****
So we swam in our own private silences
Got lost in the rowing birds
And I know, at some point,
All the dead days
And all the rotten mangoes
Seated themselves in the car
Along with us and our shackled beasts
And the villages and the stalls and empty fields
Ran past in silence

But we had laughed
When the restless winds nearly sent me
Tumbling down the tree
And we had laughed when
The freshly-watered soil tried
To **** us under
And a laugh is not a pretense
Urooj, a laugh is not a pretense.
I wonder if we know.