PART II: A GLASS CEILING DRIPPING WITH BLOOD

Mohanad Younis, of Gaza City;
Where the sand is stained with blood
As the world feigns pity.
Broken families, unspoken tragedies –
The order of everyday life.
He was born amidst chaos and strife,
To a divorcing husband and wife.

If life were lived in peace,
This dissolution would’ve been a release.
Not much more, not much less –
A family’s lore, a decision to digress.
In war-ravaged land, however,
One needs every helping hand,
Especially a soul that was so clever.

Such a curious, voracious mind needed to understand;
A furious, rapacious search,
Unexplained conundrums to unravel and unwind.
Why do we exist?
Why do we fight and resist?
Is it worth living with all these scars on my wrists?
Does anybody outside Palestine care?
Will they keep on watching?
Or will they be unable to bear?

Of this and much more Mohanad must’ve thought,
As he sat at the Marna House Hotel,
Smoking cigarettes, freshly bought.
A student at al-Azhar, a mild-mannered pharmacist,
A prudent man who would have gotten far.
An admirer of Bassel al-Araj, another victim of oppression –
An inspirer, a brother who alleviated his depression.
Hunted down and killed by the IDF,
Another pacifist murdered for being an activist.

One figure of many who died;
One of those who did not want to hide.
Mohanad wasn’t a resistance fighter –
He felt that such persistence did not make their burdens lighter.
Instead, he wished to make his mind brighter,
And perhaps have family of his own.

He was in love, and wanted to get married,
But life was rough, and warranted a future far more harried.
The final twist of horror?
Having the intellect to apply for University,
And deserving the respect needed to obtain a reply,
Yet not being allowed to leave the city.
That is the news Mohanad had received,
Hopes and dreams suddenly deceived.
Denied a right to education
Because he was born on the wrong end of a cruel fabrication.
The glass ceiling, dripping with blood,
Swallowed his hopes whole like a flood.

I want to apologise.
Broken relationships, I shall eulogise.
To those I know (or, knew);
Forgive my absence when you needed a warm caress and a hug,
But instead got frostbite, a torrent of snow or dew.

I am sorry for drawing a sword
When you were hoping for an olive branch;
I can be as thorny as an all-knowing lord.
I wish my heart was limitless,
And my kindness infinite –
I dream of love that is fearless,
And of joyousness completely exquisite.

Yet, that is not who I am –
I can be a calm ocean or a tempest,
A total commotion, or peacefully at rest.
I can be enigmatic and reserved,
Or, I can be charismatic, if the mood is reversed.
We are not good or bad;
We can be lewd and strikingly mad,
Or cunningly shrewd, or maybe sad.

We are the yin and the yang;
We all tend to sin, to our demons we hang.
We are objects of pure fascination,
In constant fluctuation,
A recalcitrant reconciliation.
So, I will say it one more time –
Look into my eyes, see through my guise.
I apologise to those who had no shoulder to cry on
And sought mine, when I was not there.
I hope you’re fine, and that someone showered you with care.

Is-solitudni hija inkredibbli.
Il-pinna tirtogħod jien u nikteb,
Estensjoni tat-taħwid ta’ ġismi.
Inħossni qisni forti imwaqqa’, inaċċessibli.
Xi kultant, nitħajjar nitfa ruħi għall-irkant;
Nagħmel patt ma’ xi dB jew xi Gasan,
Jew inkella, mal-mexxej, l-aqwa negozjant.

Mhux xorta?
X’fiha billi nilqgħu il-partit f’darna?
X’jimporta?
Mhux l-aqwa li mmorru l-fosos bi ħġarna?

Iżda, mhux dak hu l-messaġġ;
Minn dil-lejla siekta, nixtieq niehu vantaġġ.
Xtaqt neżamina għalfejn ninsab waħdi;
Qiegħed id-dar b’ommi u missieri sular taħti,
Iżda, minflok ninsab hawn, magħluq f’kamarti.
Mistoħbi, bl-iskuża li qiegħed noħloq l-arti.

Sħabi kollha xogħol jew isaħħarhom xi eżami,
B’hekk, ninsab nirrifletti, b’espressjoni gravi.
Fejn tobsor, li ta’ tlieta u għoxrin
Tkun weħilt go ħabs mentali agħar minn Kordin?
Ċella magħmula mill-ħsibijiet,
Joħorgu qishom ħalba mis-smewwiet.

Tgħix b’mohh mixgħul ġo pajjiż li jħobb id-dlam
Tħossok distint daqs tazza inbid aħmar li waqgħet *** l-irham.
Xi kultant, mejjet tkun biex titfieh;
Xejn ma jirnexxilek tagħmel biex tistrieh.

_________

(in English)

The solitude is incredible.
The pen shakes as I write,
An extension of my body's agitation.
I feel like a ruined fort, inacessible.
Sometimes, I fancy putting my soul up for auction;
Strike a deal with dB or Gasan (1),
Or maybe, with our leader, the best merchant (of them all).

Is it not all the same?
So what if we let the party in our household?
What does it matter,
As long as we go to il-Fosos (2), en masse?

But, that is not the message;
Of this quiet night, I'd like to take advantage.
I wanted to examine why I'm all alone;
I'm at home, with my parents a floor below me,
Yet, I find myself here, locked in my room,
Hidden, with the excuse of making art.

My friends are either working or bewitched by an exam,
Hence, I find myself reflecting, with a grave expression.
Who would've thought, at age twenty-three
I would be stuck in a mental prison worse than Kordin (3)?
A cell made of thoughts,
That come out like a storm from the heavens.

To live with an enlightened mind in a country that loves darkness
Feels as distinct as a glass of red wine spilled on a marble tile.
Sometimes, you just wish you could switch it off;
Nothing helps to give you relief.

Travelling royalty, a princess with no home;
Inspiring love and loyalty, everywhere she goes.
A radiant smile, captivating eyes,
Flagrant beauty, the kind that never dies.
A lover of life, an enchanting presence,
An overflowing fountain, wonderful decadence.

The princess met the peasant –
A man from a land where very little is pleasant.
Clawed a path out of the dirt,
Flawed, yet always hungry for answers,
An explanation as to why we’re all scarred and hurt.
Temptation incarnate, freedom given life –
Impartial, a storm about to deliver strife.

It was a spark worthy of Zeus’ thunderbolts;
Worlds apart, yet tolerant of each other’s faults.
Equals in their intellect, conjoined at their hearts;
Immediate and mutual respect,
Together, they could make the seas part.

The peasant got blessed by the divine,
The princess was impressed by the sublime.
Her, with her presence,
Him, with his essence –
Two people who, despite their charms, don’t fit anywhere else.
They found shelter in each other’s arms,
A respite from their personal hells.

Yet, the princess needed to journey once more,
An ending to a story that leaves the heart sore.
The peasant lay there, looking at his fields,
Reminiscing, bitterly sipping comfort in a glass.
He could do naught but shed tears, and think:
‘I’d give up every harvest, all my work and what it yields,
To have you by my side; you gave me peace and strength,
You made me feel like I can bend swords and crack shields.’

The princess could only stare,
Right at where his hand once held hers;
She could only think of the dare,
The night where they both let down their hair,
And think:
‘I’d give up the road, all my walks and journeys,
To have you by my side; you gave me sweetness and kindness,
You made me feel loved, breathless and weak in the knees.’

I demand to make my choices.
We are here to raise our voices.
These irreversible changes are locking us in cages;
These are real, life-or-death issues.
This is no show, and these lives are no Broadway stages.

Let's talk about decisions;
Let's put aside biased visions.
Let’s talk about who makes these decisions;
I’m looking at you, old white dudes in boardrooms.
Last time you took a class in ***-ed,
Gatsby and Daisy were just about this close to being bride and groom.

Let's talk about consent;
Let's use this space to vent.
Let’s talk about who has the right to judge;
I’m looking at you, anti-abortion crusaders.
Feeling threatened by strong women and their placards and posters,
Like they’ve got pistols in their uterine holsters,
Like they’re all daughters of the dark forces of Darth Vader.

Why do we insist on going to war with each other?
More importantly,
Why does our ****** education,
The root of this problem,
The rotten core of this issue -
Why does our ****** education **** so much?

Why do we talk about choice for a woman instead of the choice of men to respect a woman in the first place?

Why are we still debating?
Grown men telling women to listen,
It's absolutely infuriating!
Let's fight for rights and quit the hating.

Women are resorting to desperate measures,
Whilst men walk away with fulfilled pleasures.
I adopt this tone gravely;
Women are jeopardising their safety, daily.

Is a living woman worth less than an unborn baby?

Picture –
The ancient slave
On one knee, hands in chains
From his dreams, he refrains
A soul destined
To follow his master
Like a beaten dog tied to a post.
The few who rebelled
Either died, or were expelled,
Outcasts for life,
Labelled as heretics, agents of strife.

The ancient slave
Was born a slave, a captive soul
Animated as a shadow, not a whole.
No freedom, no choice –
A voice
With its chords tied,
Its right to speak denied
Because slavers and a bill of sale said so.

Visualise –
The modern slave
The one who is born
Not with bonds made of chains
But of laws,
Of the systemic corruption
The incessant drive for consumption
And the illusion of freedom.
It is the modern slave
Who lives the greatest lie –
A purposeless drone who will die
Thinking he has lived
Because he had an affair with life.

A life fully savoured
Cannot be just this.
Working 40 – 60 hour weeks
A system that just reeks
Of exploitation,
Of the horrible foundation
On which everything we know is built.

Most of us
Work to eat, to provide,
No secret accounts to hide;
Most of us
Make enough to get by,
Maybe enjoy the weekend
When given the leave to do so.
Most of us
Have this affair with life
Living freely for a few hours
Like rain when it’s just summer showers
Brief flickers, drops of rain
Sprinkled onto an otherwise barren field of crops
Of which the main harvest is pain.



A few of us, however,
Endlessly profit and plunder;
The modern slave
Differs from his ancestor
For he chooses his master
And loves him.
He is conned
Into thinking his masters care
Allegiances are laid bare
Hands are cast in adulation
Rights undergo strangulation
And nobody bats an eyelid.

The modern slave
Caresses his chains,
Wears them like a badge of office
Distaste for dissidence of the state
Pouring out of every orifice.
The modern slave
Could learn and understand
Confront the shimmering illusion, the shifting sand
That is the realm of made men,
But doesn’t.

Rather than fight back
We consume the great lie like crack;
These made men
Will run our planet into the ground
Until it is no longer a home
But a graveyard made for us, by us.
These made men
Spin lies, smear the truth
Force them to mingle and interchange
Like mismatched lovers in a diner booth.
Reality has shifted
It has become unbelievably twisted,
Our perceptions are suffering.
Towards each other, we direct our hostility
Unable to grasp the possibility
Of a better way.

The modern slave
Is cosy in his prison cell;
The reality of the world outside
Is a structured, engineered hell
To be avoided.
So, we just build our own bubble
Outside of which
Our only, primary concern
Is how to get rich.

Life isn’t meant to be an affair;
Life shouldn’t be
Something we are given permission for
But a free pursuit of happiness,
A learning experience.
So, with this I will conclude –
Raise your fists in the air
If you are tired of living bare,
Resist
If you’re tired of a world that does not care.

My heart
Feels like a frostbitten cave nobody should ever go in.
My soul
Feels exhausted, drained and spread really thin.
My mind
Feels like its fighting battles it can never win.

I find my thoughts
Consumed with anger and despair,
Evil feelings who have created a lair –
A base of operations within my mind,
Staring at the world with a terrifying glare.

And yet, despite all this,
Nothing kills me more than being alone.
This need to experience humanity
Is not simply an act of vanity,
Or a call for attention,
But an attempt at reclaiming sanity.

We are the loneliest generation of all time;
Previous overlords used force to rule,
And whoever didn’t follow was lambasted,
Marked as a traitor and a base fool.
Now, force is merely a tool,
One in many of a lethal arsenal.

Social hierarchies are fake, sometimes downright farcical –
Now, we are divided and conquered.
Our communities have collided,
Our love for each other is drained and flustered.
We are armed with shields of prejudice,
Careening towards a perilous precipice
Of watching out only for ourselves,
With no room in our hearts for anyone else.

I just wish I could let go –
I wish I was an atom of boiling water,
About to break free and become steam,
I wish to taste of true freedom,
To at least get one, tiny gleam.
Yet,
I find myself weary, tired and trapped,
A torturous routine so well-travelled
That, at this point, I could say my brain has it mapped.

I close my eyes
And see visions of you I wish I could forget.
I wish I’d looked before I leapt,
Rather than live with this pain and regret.
I close my eyes, and see
Years of seeking somewhere I belong,
Brothers and sisters with whom I can stand strong.
Yet,
All I seem to find
Is people struggling with their daily grind,
Souls that are just as tired as mine, if not more.

And so, I find myself
Dealing with this constant craving,
Ranting and raving,
Hoping that this frosty cave is still open to reclaiming,
Hoping that my soul is still worth saving,
And that my mind still finds this battlefield worth braving.

My head feels like a visit to the cranioscopist’s,
Like someone bored through it with a drill.
Inflamed and ill,
Like the ego of a billionaire philanthropist.
Flashbacks of “You”,
Got me off my tracks and feeling blue,
Stumbling around in pain, without a ******* clue.

My neck is aching,
My body is shaking,
My ******* soul feels like it’s breaking.
Volcanic unrest, putting my heart to the test,
Got manic anger strapped to my chest like a suicide vest.

I’m the spectre of truth, a hard hitter,
Like that last, smooth drink that fails your liver.
A lone wolf whose claws are made of words,
A man grown bitter and whose heart hurts.

My legs feel heavy and tired –
Is it now accepted to not have energy to even exist?
For that certainly isn’t how we’re naturally hard-wired.
I don’t know how to accept the illusion,
There seems to be no solution –
I look desperately, amidst the confusion.
I look for similarly empty eyes,
For those who do see the lies.
The only truth left is this;
He who murders lives, and he who loves dies.

A mentality
Permanently ingrained, a lack of impartiality
A mentality of one tribe, one leader
Conquerors of all
Watching one denomination rise
As the others fall.

We see this
In our daily lives;
Competition is our focus.
The locus
Of our society
Is the proliferation of one
At the behest of many –
The most popular,
The most fashionable,
The most sought after,
The best of the best.

This ideology
Is a narrow, winding road
Fraught with many perils –
For example, in our education,
There is this infatuation
With the pressure cooker environment.
This toxic affinity
Of the extension into infinity
Of one’s mental ossification
Of the mind’s degradation
As it is appraised
By a system that is based
On the standardised quantification
Of the truthfully divine abilities
Of the human mind.

A system designed to create drones.
It’s basically a free-for-all;
A few get to be called the best
Whilst the rest
Fall through the cracks.
Those who struggle
Are risking getting marginalised
Or at least, probably penalised –
The letter ‘F’ blankly stares back at you,
Its power to grade one’s mental capacity
Wielded like Aaron’s Rod
Borne by those who receive it like the Mark of Cain.

The us vs them attitude
Arises from this system
A point of interest on the same latitude.
We built a world
That conditions in us
Not a spirit of co-operation
But one of aspiring to *******
The prioritisation
Of one person or group deemed fit to rule over all;
Be it a sport, or a work of art
A theory, a criticism,
Or a measurement of the schism
Between one political party and another
It does not matter –
If there is an issue, people will be divided.
Those of us who think outside these parameters
Those who dare look for intelligent, fruitful discussion
Are destined to a life of being given the side-eye
A social concussion.

Why must we compete?
Why is our life replete
Not with community spirit and a betterment of humanity
But with iron-****** regulation
And an inability to concede?
Why must we divide our resources
Not fairly and justly for all
But like a fire that scorches
Consuming all it finds
With no thought for the morrow?

Imagine
7 billion human beings
Not only co-existing
But actively seeking
To be smarter,
To consume less, to work harder
Not on commercialisation or profit
But on travelling farther
In the realm of human creativity,
On sustainable ingenuity
And the wiser administration
Of a planet we inherited.
Always, incessantly
We adhere to our tribe’s superstitions;
Our decisions
Are not exclusively ours
But a result of countless hours
Of indoctrination, of believing in entities
Not morals or principles – in our identities,
We conceive of ourselves as vessels that are imbued with what we consume,
Not with what we are actually made of.

How about
Instead of being sealed off from each other
We realise that it shouldn’t be us vs them
But us vs us –
A moment of introspection
A brutally honest intervention
To give ourselves time to realise
That mindfulness is an exercise
All of us should engage in.

It is easy to exist
Within the frameworks that are provided to us;
The ‘us vs them’ mentality
Is like sandpaper to one’s individuality.
We trim and edit our personality
To fit our group’s motifs.
It is much more difficult
To realise that nobody is going to fight for us
Except for ourselves
And that this fight
Needs to start from within.
All we need to do
Is learn how to say ‘No,
I will not be a part of this –
I will not be a serf to the kings and queens
Who blind your eyes, and steal your dreams.’

M’hemm ebda mod ieħor
Li stajt niddivina, biex forsi tisimgħuni –
Bil-Malti issa qlibt, jekk forsi qegħdin tinnutawni.
L-ewwel ħaġa:
Fehmuni għalfejn għadha tezisti d-duttrina.
Akkost li xi ħadd jibgħatni nieħdu jien u nirfes il-bankina,
Ser ngħidha!

Għax ma ngħallmux lit-tfal tagħna
Jifhmu l-imħabba lejn il-proxxmu
Minflok il-liġi inuffiċjali
‘Min mhux magħna kontra tagħna?’  
Għax ma nitgħallmux niddiskutu u niddibattu,
Forsi nċedu ftit, flok dejjem nċaħħdu u nirribattu?
Forsi immexxu bl-eżempju; flok immorru sa’ tempju
Nitpaxxew b’deheb misruq u b’moħħ magħluq,
Nitgħallmu nieqfu niskappaw u nistaħbew,
Wara wiċċ imżejjen falz, jew xi metafora.

It-tieni ħaga, u għalissa nieqaf haw’:
Fehmuni għalfejn lesti li l-futur taghna ninġazzaw?
Nikkompromettu, nidħlu fid-dejn,
Il-valuri tagħna nirremettu, basta fl-aħħar tax-xahar
Jidħlulna imqar dawk l-elfejn.

Qabli hawn oħrajn li dan il-kliem diġà qaluh –
Malta m’hijiex ward u żahar u kollox ifugħ.
Anzi, l-intiena tal-korruzzjoni tqanqallek id-dmugħ.
Jien ma ġejtx hawn biex immaqdar u nitlaq,
Nixtieq li nkunu konxji u nieħdu dak li jixraq.
Jekk inti tixtieq hekk ukoll,
Mela ejja ningħaqdu, għax għandna ħafna xoghol.

__________________

­[in English]

There is no other way I could divine
To make you hopefully listen to me –
You may have noticed I switched to Maltese.
The first thing on the list;
Can someone explain why (religious) doctrine still exists?
Although this may elicit someone’s anger as I step out on the sidewalk,
I shall say it!

Why don’t we teach our children
To understand loving one’s fellow man
Instead of the unofficial law
‘Whoever is not with us, is against us?’
Why don’t we learn to discuss and debate,
Maybe concede a bit, rather than deny and rebate?
Maybe lead by example; instead of going to a temple,
Awed by stolen gold and closed minds,
Learn to stop escaping and hiding
Behind a fake, decorated face, or a metaphor.

The second thing on the list, and I’ll stop ‘ere:
Can someone explain why we’re ready to ruin our future?
Compromising, racking up debt,
Our values we are regurgitating as long as, at the end of the month,
We get a couple thousand (as in, money).

Others before me have already said these words –
Malta isn’t all flowers and roses, and not everything is fragrant.
Actually, the stench of corruption will make you cry.
I am not here to complain and leave,
I just wish we’d be aware so we can get what we deserve.
If you want this as well,
Then let us join together, for we have a lot of work to do.

The sound of silence.
Peace after violence.

A mother’s browbeaten servitude.
A child’s coerced gratitude.

The world’s most prosperous nations.
Architects of the most dangerous machinations.

Economies like never before;
A life that still leaves you wanting more.

The embezzlement of public finances.
The settlement of a case’s nuances.

Two colluding entities declaring each other free of ******;
With ease, starving YOUR wallet until YOU are down on your knees.

The oath: ‘to protect and serve.’
The reality? ‘To suspect and unnerve.’

A cartel that’s in charge of the guns;
Like leaving a brothel in the hands of Huns.

The lie of representation in government.
The election, expectation of endowment.

Spending your life washing your master’s feet,
Then somehow being surprised by their trickery and deceit.

The mistake of prioritising convenience.
The finalising of our own, eventual obsolescence.

We are a species that will die
Clueless of our role in it, desperately asking ‘why?’
When it’s way too late.

A rolling stone, hurtling down a hill;
A smoke-blowing rogue, with infinite skill.
A bearer of ill will,
Tumbling down, in these demons I drown -
I'm just hunting for a thrill.

I am a man fully grown,
With a depth of thought previously unknown.
In touch with the void,
Cold like an android,
Floating through emptiness like an asteroid.
Open your ears if you want your mind to be blown;
Spoken word and a gaunt face is all I own.

Nothing to lose, went through years of abuse,
My body is a slave to my muse,
Helpless, an illiterate knave trying to read the news.
Wilderness incarnate, running amok -
Gunning with no luck, giving no *****;
I'm just here for the drugs and the carnage.
Hidden pain, glossed over with varnish;
The soul is deeper than the oceans and the seas,
Yet it lives in shallow bodies, heavily garnished,
In narrow alleys governed by the Grim Reaper.

Kick your ego off its throne,
Realise that the time we have is merely a loan.
From realities we cannot see in any degree,
Our souls have flown.
And thus, the stone stopped rolling.

PART I – BORN TO CHAOS AND IMPRISONMENT

Imagine –
Being born in a decade of hate,
Of fear of being attacked, front and rear,
Of sleeping with one eye open,
A present reality that is far from golden –
It is a nightmare of self-perpetuating terror.
Welcome to Palestine;
The land where the dogs of war
Come to feast and dine.

70 years of violence;
70 years of resilience.
Millions killed or displaced,
Homes vacated but never replaced,
Not even by those who got out alive,
Scrambling to rebuild, desperate to survive.
For how can you not be enraged and stupefied
When your country’s being erased
And hopelessness is causing suicides?
How can you not throw stones and riot
When your own government kills you
And then proceeds to alter the story or deny it?

That is the reality
That Mohanad Younis was born into;
One of many, a broken generation,
Born with a noose around their neck,
Betrayed and forgotten as a nation.
Desperation was an eternal companion,
A sibling, practically,
Always with them like the Colorado River with the Grand Canyon.

Mohanad was a bright, industrious soul;
A voracious bookworm, with the hunger to swallow a library whole.
Dostoevsky, Dickens and Euripides,
Amongst many others;
A young man who wrote his own tales,
Perhaps keen to escape reality,
Or encapsulate it if all else fails.

When guillotines rain down from the sky,
When prayers are said but your god(s) don’t even reply,
No author, nor their best tales,
Can overcome the missile storms and the bullet hails.
This will be the story
Of Mohanad Younis,
The beloved writer who killed himself
Because all else really did fail.

Burning bridges.
Originally, defined as follows –
Intentionally cutting off one’s retreat.
In the words of the immortal Caesar,
As he crossed the Rubicon, unwilling to concede defeat -
Let the die be cast.
A bloodbath that built an Empire,
Stretching wide, impossibly vast.
Thus, later meaning –
To alienate former friends.

Is it an act to be reviled?
Is it an act to be condemned,
An instance of passions running wild?
Or is it an act to be emulated?
A last resort when hope for reconciliation
Has been all but desecrated?

We need connections, hope and love –
We crave Ishtar’s white dove,
A blessing from ‘the Queen of Heaven’.
Yet, by the time the night’s hour numbers eleven,
Many of us are collapsing, battered;
Relapsing in toxicity, our spirit tired and scattered.

When our soul is shared with others,
It goes one of two ways;
With the right influence, it grows and flutters.
With the wrong kind, it falters and stutters.
Trust your gut –
If you get a feeling that says, Run,
Do so as if you were an Olympic athlete
And you just heard the starting gun.

Do not compress yourself
To fit the boxed-in view of someone else.
Do not edit or trim out a single verse
From the poetry that is your life.
Live freely, choose wisely,
Wield a voice that is steely, treat yourself and others kindly,
Stand ALONE if you have to.

In other words, some bridges need to be burnt;
Some lessons need to be learnt.
For sometimes it is better to burn the bridge as you retreat
Than to keep on fighting just to avoid defeat.
Caesar might have violently conquered all his opponents,
But in the end did it matter
When his own kinsmen were his assassination’s proponents?

You are
My heart’s invader
An enabler
Of its desire to open up to you
Drawn to you magnetically
A living soul
Filled with passion and love
Animated
A spirit that is elevated.
This iron heart rusts
A corroded tool
Left in disuse, its owner played like a fool
Yet, somehow
The world isn’t such a terrible place
When I hold you in my arms
And gently caress your face.

I don’t know
Whether this insatiable need for your touch
Is sustainable
Whether or not
It’s a future that’s attainable;
I don’t know
Whether we will always be good for each other
All I do know
Is that I never want
To let you go.


This feeling was once foreign
A concept whose origin
Was swallowed by the sands of time;
An Alexandrian library’s worth of loss
An ancient civilisation’s ransacked ruins
Covered in moss.
Yet, somehow
To destiny I must bow
As I attempt to comprehend
This newfound emotion
Of wishing the hours would never end
When you are here.
I am now handing you
The keys to my heart’s kingdom;
This “falling” in love
This attachment
This instinctive need
To drink from your fountain
To greedily gorge myself in those moments
To relish your soul flowing through mine -
A chill goes through my spine
As I consider this…
The night
Doesn’t feel the same
When I don’t see you.

I don’t know what else to say -
I have been afraid of this day
For I don’t know how you feel
This is surreal
I find myself in a daze
Trying to fathom
How you get through the walls of ice
How you have me coming back like a vice
It hasn’t even been that long
Yet after being with you, my heart breaks out into song.
I am fearful of this day
Yet
I will never regret
Being real with you
This is who I am
This is how I feel about us
It is undeniable
The chemistry is indescribable
A surge of current
Polarises my insides
Every time
These two wayward souls meet
So, no more shuffling of feet
I am playing all my cards
Summoning the power of the ancient bards
To bring you this poem’s clime,
With one, last, hopeful rhyme
And the following words:
*“I love you.”

The fabric of human life,
An elixir of strife –
Passion is everything and nothing.
Passion
Is the sweat on my palms
Whenever I behold you in my arms,
Passion
Is the breathlessness I feel
Whenever my lips delicately caress yours,
It is the hunger inside
That I can only feed
Not with steak or fries
But, exclusively, with one deed –
The deed
Of opening up
Like a fresh pack of cards,
Exposing everything,
Concealing nothing.

I wish
It could be that easy –
I wish
A thin film of plastic
Was the only thing
Separating the cards I keep close to my chest
From your gentle fingers.
But,
It is not –
Beneath that spark of passion
Lies a great inaction
There is
A layer of cold fog
Swallowing everything up whole
And the only thing I can see
Is you, desperately
Trying to understand
Extending your hand
Into the void.

Sometimes I wonder
Whether I should build a dam
Instead of letting my river of emotions flow –
BUT
Your touch, your presence
Infallibly bring me back to that feeling you get
When watching a pyrotechnical show.
Spending the night with you
And waking up regenerated, anew,
Brings me towards this question:
“Who goes there?
Who
Is bold enough
To venture into this cave
This structurally unsound mess
This tavern of stress
That is my soul?”
The light of my heart intensifies –
Feeling, thought and action
Are easier,
If for just a while.
If you could only understand
How difficult it is to reconcile
All the anxiety
All the pain
With what I experience in your presence…

Imagine
Being in an art gallery
But being unable to see colour
Imagine
Being an unsung, fallen hero
A spent life, ended with no valour
Imagine
Having the mind of a genius
That is trapped in a minefield of anxiety, unable to speak.
All of this –
It is a mirroring of what I feel
Of who I am.

I am an individual
That loves the world and life itself
But walks through it warily
A shadow
Walking in the plains of the living
Aghast at the thought
Of permanently becoming darkness.
Stealthily
I am creeping out of this nebulous underworld
A process that will take time,
A tunnel wherein the light at the end
Is not yet visible –
I yearn
For your tender touch,
For your warm presence
To be there
When I finally crawl out
When I can finally walk
Steadily, on my own two feet
A man made of solid steel
Who will bend his knee to no one.

Despite my misgivings,
Despite all this maddening rage
I have towards the world
I also think of things like old age,
The crumbling temple of our youth –
In truth,
I do not see myself settling
I am investing
Not in a house or a bank loan
But in a better world for all
A sacrifice
That will only lead to immeasurable yet the noblest of hardship.
But,
Until then,
Until push comes to shove
And I am still willing and able to feel and love
I will just content myself
With waiting, and hoping
To see you again.

PART I – AN EXAMPLE

Mohamed Bouazizi –
A name we should never forget;
The name of a man whose loss
Is one of many we shall forever regret.

He did not want much;
All he wished for was an education,
A proper house, warm to one’s touch,
The right to make a decent living
A humble being, never taking too much yet always giving.

Mohamed Bouazizi
Was a man who never had it easy;
His story profoundly echoes among us all
A tragedy fuelled by greed and corruption.
Put yourself in his shoes –
Fatherless since he was three,
Working since he was ten,
The right for education stolen from him
By his own, cold nation.

It is difficult to understand
What it’s like
To be buried beneath the sand,
Just like that.
Mohamed had to quit school
And support an entire family
Essentially, reduced to a tool
An instrument
For financial gain;
Eventually, he was unable to take the pain
The humiliation
Of having his only means of remuneration
Confiscated and destroyed.

So, incredulous and angry,
All he had was one final attempt at diplomacy,
His penultimate demand to a governor with no soul:
“If you don’t see me, I will burn myself.”
His produce, his vending stall,
His scales – all taken from him, accelerating his fall
Into desperation,
Into deliberate, self-immolation.

Every authority that was supposed to be a protector
Instead acted as a horrifying molester –
Mohamed
Tried every route he could possibly take
A brave explorer confronting snake after snake.
Alas,
He reached his breaking point,
And true to his word,
He set himself on fire –
December 16th, 2010
Was the date when his ire
Could be contained no longer.

I am.
That’s it.
I am not in your parameters;
I am not defined
By what I make
At the end of the month.
I am –
Spawn of this earth,
Of stardust and chaos given birth.

We are.
That’s it.
Not our countries, nor our flags,
Not the imaginary lines and borders,
Not our laws, or self-assured orders.
We are –
Sons and daughters of Mother Nature,
The fruits of her beautiful labour.

I am.
It is this belief
This sheer conviction
That universal respect for all life
Is key to avoiding strife.
That is what should unite us all.
To answer
The now ubiquitous question
“To be or not to be?”
I would dare say,
”We have little choice,
My dear Prince Hamlet.
The moment we borrow our first breath
We are, already.”

Even though
Many of us
Have been under siege,
Oppressed, hushed up,
Manhandled, cuffed up,
Generations of families
Lost forever
So a corporation can get contracts
To rebuild their nation,

EVEN though
EVEN more of us
Have had their souls ripped out
And left
To stumble around with no purpose,
A life in service
To faceless overlords
Who will drain and absorb
Not just us
But the world in which we came to life,

EVEN THOUGH
All of this pain,
All of this greed
This amalgamation
Of hate riding loneliness like a steed
Has been infesting us
Since time immemorial
We still are.

We
Are here,
We
Can be the tip of the spear,
A vanguard not bent on blood
But on refusing
To look the other way and obey
When the world which we breathe
Our air, the food we eat,
Our health, our spiritual,
Immaterial wealth,
Are taken, abused,
Packaged, used,
Spent and then left,
To rot and pollute.

This is why
Not enough of us
Are fighting whenever we can;
The resistance is there
Its strength lies
In this belief, a steady hand
That fortifies.
Action,
When taken
Like a swift, decisive arrow,
Like the forlorn will
Of thousands of millions
Of souls lost, of children
Washed ashore,
Of blood and gore
Spilled for a billionaire’s gains,
Someone’s profit margin;
When action
Is taken as described
When that rage,
That void inside
Is realigned,
Re-aimed,
Recalibrated to hit
Not an innocent soul,
Or a friend, or any
Of those who are
In the same gladiator pit
But those who built it –
Then,
Then we will all get to be.

No one ever told me it would get so lonely.
That there would be no one home, waiting to hold me.
Is there another way? Can someone please show me?
I look like I’m swimming, but I’m drowning, homie.

No one ever said that everything is a lie,
That wars should be waged without asking how or why,
That we all live in a corporate-sponsored pig-sty,
Where protesting nets you a Colombian necktie.

No one ever mentioned the predatory interests,
Nor the dimension of mandatory contingents;
Never thought I would hear of “peace-keeping” armies,
Nor of these deceitful, political parties.

What we were told as children was very different,
Like a testimony that’s too inconsistent.
I remember hearing about true liberty,
That the world aims to eliminate poverty.

We weren’t taught to understand, digest and think;
We follow the invisible hand to the brink.
We did hear that anyone who works hard, gets there;
Then why are we starving whilst working our bones bare?

No one ever prepared us for this **** right here.
No warning about how life hits like Everclear.
At least, now I know how ****** we are.
Drinks are on me; let’s **** up the bar.

Sumer, the people of ancient Mesopotamia.
Known to us as nascent humanity;
Spreading across the world quickly,
Like news of a calamity.
They existed thousands of years ago,
A civilisation truly gifted,
Knowledge of whom many of us forgo.

They were but one shade in a kaleidoscope of human presence.
Kings of the Fertile Crescent –
Establishing empires or mastering commerce,
Starting fires or learning to converse.
Mankind in its infancy,
A bloom of activity and artistry.
In our attempts at deciphering our history,
We turn to the relics of their poetry,
Discoveries that are a historian’s ultimate victory.

‘The love song of Shu-Sin’ –
The world’s oldest, known reference to love.
Written thousands of years ago,
Possibly older than we do know.
It is a rite of marriage, a recital;
In it lies a passage, one that needs a revival.
It is about a vow that we have now twisted,
An exquisite message that leaves one’s spirit lifted.

The bride promises the following to the groom;
To act as a refuge when all that seems to loom is doom and gloom.
To caress, love, and soothe.
To savour beauty and intimacy,
To be like honey, sweet and smooth.

The king - a man who was thought divine,
A man whose life was valued more than yours or mine,
A man who could eternally wine and dine –
That man was still no sultan to love.
His heart was still in the palms of his beloved,
Their naked frames intertwining, arched and cusped.
His hold on her is not one of force,
Nor a promise of power,
But rather earned in due course,
Like the development of a beautiful flower.

I grieve beyond words when I think
Of how love, nowadays, is on the brink.
The glue that holds life itself together,
Discarded by many, like an ex’s letter.
I look at the eyes of people I’d love to be with,
And in their expression, I discover a graveyard of sad memories.
Scars that feel indelible, past histories -
Souls that look like war-torn territories.

I look at my own eyes in the mirror,
And see a starving spirit, growing thinner.
I see a window for restoration, becoming slimmer.
Sometimes I hopefully wonder – is there a glimmer?
Is there another hungry apparition,
On a desperate search for heavenly admission?
I seem to have forgotten how to love,
And do not know how to rid myself of this condition.

This violent sadness,
A self-devouring source of madness.
It is an Atlantean endeavour,
It is pure, jaw-dropping terror.
It is this dense weight that I carry -
Snap out of it, hurry, do not tarry,
For my shoulders quiver
And my nerves grow tired and bitter.

Please, hurry;
Wake the **** up.
We don’t have much time,
And up to the mountain’s peak
I wish to climb.
Do not delay;
Every moment wasted
Is an inch further towards necrotic decay.

Why could you never understand?
Why did you never want to cross into uncharted land?
Why the need to cocoon in one place?
Why did you resort to making me hate my own face?
This road, this journey that is life -
I will live it on the edge of a knife,
In between the worlds of peace and strife.
With the soles of my feet,
I shall run on burning coals, exposed to heat.
Within the corridors of my heart,
I will host freedom as my eternal mistress,
And make my life her work of art.

A sun that never quite rises,
After all this, I feel like a discoloured iris,
Like a struggling butterfly,
One that does not want to die,
But does not want to live, either.
I don’t know
Whether you’re lying to yourself or me,
But all I know is that of these hateful chains
I wish to be free.

I will now walk alone, towards the balcony,
Ready to jump and spread my wings;
I wish to fly alone,
For the skies have no queens nor kings.
I am who I am,
A soul, permanently on the lam
And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Liberté, égalité, fraternité.
L’ homme est né libre,
Pourtant partout il est enchaîné.
An eternally torturous question,
Oozing out of our minds like an infection;
Are we all equal?

Perhaps not when it comes to skill;
Some can lead, some can thrill.
Some can cook, and therefore feed;
Some can run, some can read.
All of us can do something –
No standardised test,
No uniformly assigned competition
Could ever possibly measure
This unique treasure,
The human ability to set off on an endeavour
And achieve astounding feats.

So, then –
Are we born equally endowed?
Perhaps not; should differential talents
Be stimulated, encouraged,
Voiced aloud?

A resounding yes, a thousand times yes!
We should only accept being under duress
When of forced labour and working to exist
We start hearing less and less,
When that concerted effort is directed
Not at striving at surviving
But at truly living, not just slowly dying.

Truly living is about doing what you love,
Being able and free to do so,
Learning that which you don’t know
And expanding that which you do know.
This is not our reality –
We are all born exactly the same,
Yet the country you were born in
Hell, even your family’s name,
Are things that determine
Where you will be positioned
In this foul, ***** game.

This is where we aren’t born equal –
In our right and access
To freely engage in the pursuit of happiness.
There is a seedling of potential in all of us,
One that can be grown –
Let it be known
That all seedlings can become a mighty tree,
If given the following three:
A space in which a fertile mind can be cultivated,
A community in which love can be propagated,
And the freedom to exist without being incarcerated.

In my dreams,
I saw a grove;
Farm animals walked around in a drove.
Birds fluttered and chirped;
To me, it was strange,
For these animals seemed unusually free.
The sky seemed eternally blue,
The blades of grass a vivid hue -
As I lay to rest beneath a tree,
I heard an enchanting voice,
A chorus of sentience vibrating in harmony.

Given the choice
To sit there
Or walk towards this mystical source,
This musical, human recourse,
A cry for help perhaps, sounding like a tune of despair,
I felt moved.

So, for what felt like days,
I walked.
As the enchanting voice got clearer,
I approached the figure of a woman.
This sonorous presence
Heard my feet crunch on a bed of leaves;
Her body was coated in this essence,
Life itself
Seemed to flow out of her robes.

As soon as she turned to look at me,
A slack-jawed mortal, in disbelief,
I found myself flooded with relief
When she stopped singing,
And said:
“Welcome home, son.”

I finally understood
This grove that smelled like pine and wood
Was home to someone ethereal.
“Mother?”
I asked, the anticipation and the confusion
Being too much.

“I am not the Mother
Who brought you to Earth.
I am Mother Earth, your home and life-giver.
I am the air that you breathe
The earth that you walk upon
The water that you drink
And the fire that you misuse.”

Upon this stately declaration,
I felt this manifestation
Of shame and sadness.
“What ails you, my child?”
She gently asked,
Sensing my emotions.
Steadying myself, I said:
“For years, I’ve held these notions
That as humans,
We should be guardians of all,
Both the great and the small,
Creating life and mourning death
Not wasting a single breath
Until our children
Inherit a world that is better
Fixed by solutions that were deemed the most clever.

Instead, I failed you;
We all did.
Instead of respecting you,
We abused you.
Taking you for granted,
Our plans we mercilessly supplanted.
To our species
You were a conquest
Another addition to the dominion.
I am sorry,
Forgive me.”

Her immortal hands
Reached out to hold mine;
A kaleidoscopic ecstasy of visions
Gripped my very soul,
Suddenly, in tune with life as a whole.
As I felt this blissful connection,
This divine intervention
Of the infinite briefly meeting the finite,
She said:

**“Son,
Don’t let your apology weigh on your heart.
It isn’t Mother Earth you should worry about;
It’s your future that is in doubt,
Not mine.
When the rivers run dry,
When the air becomes sickly,
When the earth is scorched
And fire its master,
When you are all destroying each other,
I will survive, you will not.
I will find a way to thrive
As your cities crumble and rot.”

The fortress is the mind,
The esoteric experience is the key –
Remove the interference, amass the will to break free.
Your body is merely a shell,
A medium in which to dwell.
It is your soul that you must look for,
Stashed away behind that locked door
Which leads to your heart's dancefloor.

You will sift
Through years of conditioned thought -
A painful journey which is, nonetheless, a gift,
One that leads to greatness being wrought.
It doesn’t matter if you’re deeply distraught,
There’s always a source to elicit;
Seek it and relish it,
Speak through it and embellish it,
Be unique and cherish it.

You may find your soul
Hidden beneath a veneer of hate –
Be it reserved for yourself or others,
It is an ugly twist of fate
When the fires of rage outlast logical reasons,
When we unshackle the cage and let out our suppressed demons.
Our connections to each other get severed;
We become nothing more than another failed romance,
Another love-sick storm that has been weathered.
We sob silently because of loneliness,
Succumbing to society, numb and emotionless.

Let go of the poisonous fruit of anger –
Do not dispense vengeance in every sentence.
Do not love others
If you do not fully intend to love yourself first.
We must be an oasis to the nomad,
Quenching each other’s thirst.

Before doing so,
Just make sure you always know:
To fill up another’s cup
One must have a full glass themselves.

Stirring, snaking, coiled up in your soul –
Slurring, shaking, embroiled like an actor in a role.
You feel it rise up from a well of distaste,
With zeal, it controls you,
Suppressed anger flowing with haste.

Truth chips away at your defences,
Your uncouth hips sway off-tune
As your mind battles in the trenches.
You feel it, again;
An anger that shakes the cages it is in,
A battle for the ages, confined to the mind within.

It doesn’t have to be like that;
You shouldn’t have to bow down to a philistine
Just because their wallet is fat.
Stop the defensive, launch the attack!
Let the awakening happen, get the vermin off your back!

Be the message that ends this war on the poor!
Arise from the wreckage, and of this be sure:
You are controlled only if you act demure,
If your faith in what you believe is right
Lies cold, dead and insecure.

Youth to the fight!
Bring truth to the light!
All will be lost
Unless the fires of justice burn bright.

Mingħajr flus,
La tgħannaq u lanqas tbus –
Hekk qalulna l-imgħallma tal-passat.
Nesew javżawna *** is-serq sfaċċat;
Lanqas ħasbu *** kif il-moralita’ ta’ pajjiżna spiċċat.

Qawl li jiżvela realta’ kerha;
Messaġġ li tassew iġegħlek tħares lejn il-mera.
Mingħajr flus, aqbad u insa’ d-drittijiet!
Dak li qiegħed ngħid m’huwiex sigriet;
Għall-liberta’ tal-pajjiż,
Bkew l-ommijiet, u mietu l-missirijiet.

Issa, minflok, il-liberta’ tmur għand l-ogħla negozjant.
Sadanittant, tefawha ghal bejgħ, u gidbulek;
Qalulek li għal ġid tiegħek,
Huma u jidħku bik u jdeffsu idejhom ġo butek.

Bil-flus, mela, tagħmel triq fil-baħar!
Bil-flus, ibni torri ħalli jkollok biex tiftaħar!
Mingħajr il-flus, insa’ s-saqaf *** rasek,
Ara taħseb li xi ħadd ħa jagħti kasek!
Mingħajr il-flus, ara minn fejn ha ġġib l-ikel,
Kif ħa titma lill-uliedek mingħajr ma jkollok tfittex fiż-żibel.

Bil-flus, pero’, tħabbilx moħħok;
Mill-maġġoranza tal-poplu,
Tistħix tigi alabibżobbok.
Mistoqsija waħda għad fadalli:
Gheżież antenati li ġew qabilna, li messew xtutna –
Hawn x’għamilna lilna nfusna?

__________

(in English)

Without money,
You shall receive neither hugs, nor kisses -
That's what the wise men of old said.
They forgot to warn us about shameless theft;
They didn't think about our country's morality,
In decline.

A proverb that reveals an ugly truth;
A message that forces you to really look at a mirror.
Without money, forget your rights!
What I am now saying is no secret;
For this country's liberty,
Mothers have cried, fathers have died.

Nowadays, liberty goes to the highest bidder;
In the mean time, they put it up for sale, lying to you;
They told you it's for your own good,
As they laugh and dip their hands in your pockets.

With money, then, build a road in the sea!
With money, build a tower so you'll have plenty to boast about!
Without money, forget a roof over your head;
Don't even think someone will pay attention!
Without money, figure out where food is coming from,
How you're gonna feed your kids without dipping your hands in trash.

With money, however, don't fret;
As for the rest of the population,
Do not be embarrassed to admit you don't give a ****.
I only have one question left:
Dear ancestors who came before us, who touched our shores -
What have we done to ourselves?

Hello?
Is there anything left? Body heat, perhaps?
Is there a pulse or a deft heartbeat?
Any rough oceans of emotions?
You sit there, phone to your right,
Laptop in front of you, adjusted to the adequate height.

You’re motionless for most of the day,
Inebriated or mindless for most of the night.
Your only movements change channels,
You’re lonely, for your soul never travels.
You remain in the same place,
Occupy the same space, the same nook;
The only humanity you see, you don’t touch or feel, you simply look –
No interaction, only to laugh and mock like a rogue crook.

Your friends and loved ones are images on your phone,
It feels like solitude is all you’ve ever known.
You pose for the camera, but only fool yourself;
You close yourself off, you scoff at those who show emotions.
When was the last time you let yourself be vulnerable?
When was the last time you didn’t pretend you’re unstoppable?

Have you ever breached the barriers of your blindsides?
Have you ever gleaned beyond those white lines?
Please, take off those slave-forged shoes,
Run freely in the soil, you have nothing to lose.
Switch off your mobile prison cell,
Don’t let yourself drift back into this iniquitous hell.
Embrace your soul, peer inside;
Be alive, don’t cower and hide.

The one who knows;
A presence that radiates wisdom, practically glows.
Always an outcast, never welcome -
He who realises we have lost our way
Will eventually rue the day
whereupon such knowledge is gained.

He carries his knowledge
Like a doctor carries a lethal injection -
To the greats of the past, he pays homage,
Breeding a comradely type of affection.
Life is now politically correct;
He does not dare to incite or expect
Any resistance from anyone but himself.
He meets his friends,
and they warily avoid discussing
‘politics and such’ -
‘It’s too much,’ they would say
Of his ideas for a better world.

Semmelweis; a man ruined
Over sound advice.
A brilliant career grinding to a halt,
faster than the momentum
of a fallen angel hitting the asphalt.
He carried his knowledge like a shield,
Hoping that pride would yield
In the face of reason.

Yet, not unlike the infant who wishes
But cannot fathom or understand,
Cowards and base men alike
Dealt his career the final strike.
It is the curse of the gifted and the observant
To be outnumbered by idiots, mitigated and made to be complacent.

Hubbert and Zwicky -
equally well-schooled in their different fields,
equally ridiculed by their incoherent peers.
One tried to tell us of our greed,
Of how oil dependence should not be our creed.
The other of our unwillingness to discuss the unknown,
Discovering dark matter and having our minds blown.
Both were ignored for a very long time.
And then, to truly reach a clime,
There is the one who knew the most -
the bright, shining light of Nikola Tesla.
The man who dared to dream
Of a better world for all;
Free energy, a wireless world,
A better way forward was his call.

These men could be incorrigible;
Tesla was sometimes brash and incontrovertible.
Hubbert was weak and predictable,
Semmelweiss should have shouldered the crucible,
And Zwicky could sometimes be downright detestable.

And yet, they all had one thing in common.
They wanted to know more.
Not taking anything for granted,
They wanted to go where none had gone before.
Men of vision; whereas others sought convention,
They sought the untrodden path, the next great invention.

And, for all this,
Pain and dejection lay in store.
Some died alone, like an unloved *****.
The miserable company of ignominy -
Careers swatted aside without any dignity.
For years, the visions lay wasted,
Like an expensive engagement ring
When love has evaporated.

But then, the visions were eventually revived;
Other luminaries stumbled on them,
Awareness peaks after the source’s post-mortem.
Once truly invested in by those gifted with hindsight,
The souls of the deceased became twice as bright,
Their words finally acknowledged and proven right.

But, now we shall have to live with remorse;
Definitely not as it could have been
If we’d listened to the ideas from the source.
Value each other, keep your love pristine,
For it is an ugly, gruesome scene
When we don’t listen to the ones who know.

Analyse –
The difficulty which one finds in this rat race,
Attempting to materialise
Food in one’s belly
Electricity in one’s home,
Hell,
To even HAVE a home.

The state of the world
Isn’t what has made my pen meet this paper today;
It’s us I’m concerned about.
Hard-wired to be social creatures,
We ignore these features
Our lives focused on money,
Not enjoying each other’s company
Not even when the sky is blue and sunny.

And,
Worst of all,
There is the great truth –
‘Behind every great fortune there lies a great crime.’
This is not to say
That every rich man or woman
Should never see the light of day,
But, it is undeniable
That overreaching influence and concentrated wealth
Are unjustifiable
When we live in a world that fits all of us.
The worst part about being poor
Is the isolation, it’s your heart
Travelling alone, one with the moor.
So many missed good times
So many lost communication lines –
All caused
By this stratification
This intolerable alienation
This algorithmic separation
Of human beings.

Do you know
What it feels like
To ration things you need
To feel grateful for every sip of water,
Every **** of ****?
Dying on the inside
Every time someone asks
‘What are you doing tonight?’
Tonight
I will be trying to traverse this never-ending tunnel
Attempting to reach the light
At the end of it.
Tonight
I will be trying
To keep myself together
Without letting all this weight crush my soul.

If we are to base our society
Our everyday life
On the concept of wealth
Then we must preserve our health
We must ensure
That not only one or two families in every hundred
Are able to survive and endure,
But all of us.

This lack of balance
This Roman phalanx
Of men and women in mass unison
Working and toiling
Hours upon hours of labour
All attempting to obtain favour
With their masters –
For what reason?
I would rather get hung for treason
Than work for someone else.
I am tired of being sore
At the end of the week
Unable to obtain the stability I seek
Simply because the pyramid scheme
Demands it to be so.

I am a kindred spirit
With all the revolutionaries of the world
The divergent, the insurgent
The activist protecting his country from business interests.
On some days, I lose hope
On some days, I can barely cope
Because there’s so much to deal with –
So on those days
When loneliness and poverty mix together like a lethal cocktail
The tree of knowledge I shall hail,
Its flowers I shall consume,
Its co-evolution with man I shall exhume.

THE DILEMMA OF A GENERATION

Mohamed Bouazizi
Represents not just the struggle in Tunisia
But of an entire generation –
His life was a consolidation
Of a series of injustices
Of economic apartheid.
After all, let us not hide
And call this tragedy what it really is.

Mohamed’s life and death
Was one of many terrible examples
Of the depth, the breadth
Of the gap between the rich and the poor.

If you think to yourself,
“I’ll never be that desperate,”
Think again;
You are fortunate
If you’ve never worked and worked until your fingers chafed raw
Yet it was not enough.
You are sheltered
If you’ve never experienced
The yoke of the owners of the world.
You are blind
If you do not see that we have ‘freedom’
That is built on top of mass graveyards.

This yoke
Has served to choke
Not just Tunisians,
But everyone who was not born with wealth
Or the opportunity to make it;
The millennial’s dilemma
Is common across the globe –
Do I lose hope?
Do I succumb
To a life of fast money and being numb?
Do I stop caring, focus instead on the life I can enjoy?
Do I ignore the stolen livelihoods, hushed, covered up and coy
Do I fail to think about the exploited labour
Of suffering human beings,
Of the ****** of my country’s neighbour?

Do I simply sidestep my knowledge of all of this?
Complacent, lacking the will
Unaware, perhaps lacking development of the skill
To realise that our world is dying
Not a slow natural demise
But of humanity-induced suicide.

Or do I, instead,
Pull up my sleeves, avenge the dead?
Do I sacrifice my well-being,
My opportunity to reach that thin demographic of the population
That fragment of the nation
Which lives a life of luxury,
In order to change the world around me?
Do I go against the swirling, swishing current of life
Give up all opportunity for power, leave this society that is rife
With abuse?
For if I don’t,
The sick world we were born in
Will perpetuate its unholy cycle of sin
I will be an instrument of that process,
Whether through complacency or an excess
Of loyalty towards the state.

If I don’t fight back,
If we don’t fight back,
Who will?
Our stillborn children?
The posterity that will be born
To a world that has no clean air,
A world that is built to be unfair
A world that separates people like an algorithm
Those above a certain monetary threshold
And those below it?

No.
It must be the millennial who fights for rights,
Before they are sold off completely and stocks run out,
Before men and women in power with infallible clout
Turn us all against each other
And make us destroy ourselves.

One, bright star,
In an otherwise dark sky.
That is what you are,
And now I know why.

Much like a star,
I could only observe from afar.
You were always there –
Radiant, with a certain flair.

I witnessed as you overcame nightmares,
As if you had the energy of a thousand solar flares.
Forged from unstoppable chemistry,
Leaving earth scorched with phenomenal synergies of energies.

I always saw you through this lens tinged with admiration.
Head and shoulders above the rest, a jewel of all creation.
I felt inadequacy by comparison, extensively -
I never respected myself enough,
I gave myself to people recklessly,
People who turned me cold and tough.

And so, our paths never crossed.
A faraway star you remained,
And over our friendship I casually glossed.
I was always coveting unspoken fantasies,
Never realising I was sheltering under broken canopies.

Perhaps you also had this thought.
Perhaps from afar, your own insecurities you also fought.
Never have I hoped with so much suspenseful delight
To see two stars collide;
I wish to fill up the darkness of this universe with light,
And bridge this divide.

Now that I’ve realised
I no longer need a canopy,
All I can think of
Are excuses to seek your company.

‘Playing it cool’ – defined as follows:
Lacking visible emotion as a rule,
Trying to avoid looking like a fool.
In other words,
The pretension that your heart is merely an engine,
That it is clear you feel nought beneath your veneer.

Of all the people I meet hereinafter,
I shall ask only the following:
I am no lord or master,
No unduly glorified *******.
Thus, with that in mind,
I hope your true voice is mustered,
And it no longer becomes difficult to find.

Please, if you are around me,
Don’t play it cool –
If you need to, DO act the fool,
Do display your emotions, **** the rule.
Do not taint your soul with undue restraint,
Do not hide behind platitudes vast and wide.

Cry, be bitter, rage if you must!
Never say die,
Be a hard-hitter or become a sage one can trust –
Open up those clogged channels,
Feel it, as your soul unravels!
Cherish it, as an adventurer does his travels!
Only a fool would be slow enough to conceive
That the act of playing it cool is something I believe.

PART II – THE CATALYST

Mohamed Bouazizi –
He who lived as a prisoner of poverty, and died a martyr.
His last moments
Were eighteen days of a comatose state,
A body burned all over, twisted with hate
Hatred for those who chose
To oppress and control, to steal and cajole
From people who could barely afford
What one needs to survive.
Mohamed
Died as a symbol of resistance –
It was his insistence,
His dissatisfaction at living like a slave
That served to dislodge
The Tunisian nation from its slumber.

Suddenly, the agonising death of one man
Was all that was needed to ignite a revolution,
It was not a solution but rather a convolution
Of pain that was already existent –
He was a catalyst of sentiment
A man who gave up his life so everyone else could open their eyes and realise
That we are all victims of a system that does not care.

“Farewell Mohamed, we will avenge you,”
Is what the people chanted.
Like a nest of hornets
They angrily took to the streets
A populace enraged to this day
Eight years of delay, a delay
Of justice being served, of the dire recalibration
That Tunisians now demand
Of their corrupt nation.

A god –
Or ‘the’ God,
Or a whole plethora of gods;
Refer
To whichever of these nominations
Your perceptions prefer.

Entire cultures,
Cultivated in distant lands,
Some born to arid, desert sands
Some born in the cold, shivering,
Desperately clinging to warmth with trembling hands.
All of their scriptures mention
Beings deemed otherworldly,
Masters of the universe who would only address
Those who they deem worthy.

These gods were beyond reproach;
With deference one must approach,
On bended knee, offerings at the ready,
A stream of prayers and supplications,
Coming slowly, surely, steadily.

One God
Seemed to be hell-bent on conquering others.
According to religious leaders,
Responsible for pitting brothers against brothers,
This God, as we’ve been told,
To us his kingdom in heaven he has sold.
If we pay our dues in worship and obedience,
We will get to live happily, grow old,
And enjoy life in Heaven.

This God, apparently,
Wished for the attention of all –
Other temples must crumble and fall,
Differing cultures are simply wrong,
Their moral fibre is weak,
And we are strong.

The great lie, an illusion now ageless;
One God to rule all, a resolution that is baseless.
Really, God must be a corporate banker –
Spreading all over the world like a cancer.
Think about it;
War has been waged in the name of God, no?
Well, it might shock you to know
That wars generate insane amounts of debt
And guess who’s there to reap the benefits and collect?

Ah! The penny dramatically drops, the dots suddenly connect;
Who issues the money we depend on?
Who is responsible for economic castrations?
Fluctuating values and inflations?
Causing debt ceilings to collapse on top of entire nations?
Certainly not any God who loves living beings.
Clearly, bankers are now God;
Living in palaces of gold and ivory,
Pillaged, precious metals and gilded thrones,
Whilst people have to deal with austerity and loans.
Dictating policies, a niche of power,
Funding bloodshed, settling scores,
Sometimes both sides of the conflict,
Just look at the Napoleonic wars!

Things will be clear
Once the origins of this system you properly hear.
Those among us who are truly bright
Know that a free life is the true divine right,
Not an inherited claim to the world’s money supply,
Not being in a position or of the inclination
To bleed an entire planet dry –
Those people among us
Need to stand up and fight.

REAL NAME ALTERED TO SAFEGUARD IDENTITY*

I know what you’re going through.
Aged nineteen, I wanted to die, too.
I can offer no consolation;
The world is messed up,
A fact that needs no arbitration.

All I can tell you is that you are not alone.
Listen to my words, ‘cause they’re about to hit home.
You need do nothing but be, just breathe;
Let love into your heart, again.
The mightiest tree starts from the humblest seed;
Let love take root, build its little den.

It is always darkest before dawn.
Life feels like you’re facing a firing squad,
And they’ve all got their rifles drawn.
Ten barrels of steel, pointed right at you;
You’ve been running for so long.
Eventually, they finally catch you.

Darling, killing yourself doesn’t solve your problems.
You won’t be around to care, but others will,
And seeing you go will turn them into stone golems.
As such, you just pass on your grief to your people.
They’ll find no relief, like they’re sitting on steeples.

Maybe, you hate the people who love you, or they’re **** at it,
So it’s more harm than good being done to you.
Very few of us have managed to figure this **** out.
In fact, many of us are straight-up *******.

That doesn’t mean life can’t be beautiful.
That doesn’t mean love can’t be bountiful.
Everyone’s too scared, though;
Trust is a taut rope,
And there’s very little hope.
I know that love and beauty can be scarce;
I know discourse is sometimes trifling, sometimes terse.

But darling, you mustn’t ever give up.
You are not crazy, nor are you insane.
The world is run by people who actually are heartlessly insane,
And they’ve built a cage to **** with your brain.
But please, don’t give up.

I hope this gets to you in time;
I wish I could say it’ll all be okay,
That everything will be fine.
But, it won’t be.
We are doomed to a lifetime of fighting back,
Either that, or just getting attacked.
I will not stand to suffer any longer,
Not without retaliating in defense, in kind.
Take my hand, for together we are stronger.
It’s time to halt the daily grind.

Contempt of court –
The legal term for a charge
Levelled against those who dare
Those whose emotions and criticisms are laid bare
In front of judge and jury.

Contempt of court
Is when one is disobedient, or discourteous,
In the face of a system which is injurious;
It is the charge
That snaps one’s knees into bending,
That makes your dignity cave
And one’s case never-ending.

To oppose or defy the authority of the courts
Is viewed as improper, an act
That will have you prosecuted by your own cohorts.
Fellow human beings
Tasked with the imprisonment of another
Brother turning on brother
As the wheels of justice turn and grind,
Leaving trails of lost lives behind.

Contempt of court
Is a feeling I find difficult to abort –
How can I respect an institution
That is responsible for the destitution
Of societal morality?
It is the court’s stated responsibility
To maintain order and propagate
Fairness and equality for all,
To scrutinise and investigate
Not just crimes committed
By men and women struggling to make ends meet,
Putting their heads together so they can eat,
But those
Who hide behind banks and get to foreclose
Not just our homes but also, our dreams and hopes.

If you want me to respect the court,
I want the court to enforce laws justly.
If you want me to respect the authorities,
I want the authorities to stop lying to us so abruptly.
If we are to have authorities and laws
I want sensible, sustainable laws, to be upheld everywhere
Not to be iron-****** with some,
A velvet glove with another.

If I ever see
A banker sentenced to jail
My respect for the court I shall hail;
If I ever see
A politician swallowing his lies,
Forced to live like us, and realise
The extent of the damage that they wreaked
If I ever see
An abusive or corrupt judge
On the other side of the gallows,
Locked up and told when to exist like a drudge
Then
Only then
Will I shed this contempt
Only then
Will I be content.

Do you feel uncomfortable in your own skin?
Here's a tip, from kin-to-kin:
If you don't fit in, don't fit in.
Simply, be.

The natural order of all things –
The love and joy that connection brings.
The beautiful smile of a human that feels loved,
That ear-to-ear grin that warms the heart for a good while,
The kind that makes bearing life’s chagrin worthwhile.

I bet you thought of someone, just now –
A face your mind instantly sought, somehow.
The language of love –
It is hardly expressible just through words,
It is only accessible through bridging two worlds:
The realm of loving your soul,
And the realm of accepting humanity as a whole.

Eyes that twinkle like stars,
Hearts that mingle in nights spent diving in bars.
The freedom to open your mind,
A kingdom of your own,
Away from the wilfully blind.

Give yourself a reason to live,
**** religion, be a heathen,
You have everything to give!
Let go of that which serves you not,
Flow with whom deserves to share your life’s plot.
Dance to rhythms,
Sing along to your favourite song!
Be colourful,
Like light passing through prisms,
Lose yourself in the heat of the throng!

Let your mesmerising heart shine and glow,
Let go of the overanalysing,
Let your fear head on over to death row.
Gladden the world with what you bestow,
Madden those who do not wish to grow.

The language of love, the syntax of affection;
The essence of life, its most crucial section.
To drink from its fountain is all that counts,
A divine link capable of moving mountains,
A storm to end all droughts.

I love how we could literally talk for hours –
Lighting a spark in each others’ hearts,
Figuratively glowing like meteor showers.
I love singing that one song with you;
You know the one,
The one we sang in the rain,
The one that always rings true.

I can’t stop myself from looking at you,
Not without this twinkle of wonder in my eyes.
Certainly not without this tingle that runs along my spine,
Not without a heartbeat so loud that it sounds like thunder.
You make me smile so much, my face hurts sometimes;
You take me high to places with better climes,
Spiritual spaces, elevation by design.

The signs are all there –
Lives running on parallel lines,
With no direction, no need to know where.
Unburdened, beautiful, loving care,
Sensations unheard of,
Dutifully calming like someone stroking your hair,
Hearts laid out to each other like we’ve got a spare.

I love how grateful we are for each other’s presence.
The word ‘hateful’ doesn’t even exist here,
It’s almost like you make me forget its essence.
Every second is a learning opportunity,
And you’ve helped me learn so many lessons already –
Maybe we should call our hang-outs ‘life sessions’.

I love how even a hug carries so much weight,
Momentous in its significance,
Enough to make my heart flutter like I’m late for a date.
I’m going to miss you so much when you leave.
Thank you for reminding me how to wear my heart on my sleeve.

Starving, bones poking out;
Unraveling, loans choking you out.
Carving a niche, trying to survive,
Struggling to find a meaning to being alive.

You lie in bed,
Thinking about the tears you’ve shed,
The sweat, the blood you’ve bled –
The tough times scraping by,
The close calls you’ve had.

Hunger, a nauseating pain;
What would you give up for a single grain?
You strain your brain,
Rack it trying to find a way –
Trying to find a way out of this life,
A life that is dull and grey.

Your soul does not see the light of day;
Your faith starts to shake,
You manage no more than a mumble,
Your beliefs start to crumble.
Concerned, disturbed,
Angry at the world, constantly hurt;
Cornered, perturbed,
Life is but a whirl, with death we flirt.

Cursed, deserted,
We thirst for that which we will not quench;
Dispersed, disconcerted,
The sewers of poverty air their stench.
You pull the covers up to your nose,
You shudder like a victim from an attacker’s blows.

The bomb’s flash is blinding,
Brighter than any kind of lightning.
The enormity of the mushroom cloud is frightening;
A monstrosity both terrifying and grotesquely enlightening.

The eyelids instinctively board shut in fear;
Adrenal glands working overtime,
More in this moment than a whole year.

Yet, eyelids seem useless,
For the reality leaves one speechless.
In this moment, you will see an X-ray of your own vessels and bones.
It will feel like a ghastly omen, like the earth itself shakes and groans.

And then, the shockwave hits, gut-wrenchingly raw;
A fallout so powerful, it might break the bones you just saw.
A cataclysm of impossible energy, an apocalypse that ends in sheer awe.

The nuke –
Admired and feared from afar,
Trepidation come alive, a door to hell left ajar.
The symbol of being forever at war,
Apocalyptic nature in its demonic core.
Loved only by its makers,
Hated by most living on earth’s many acres,
Respected by all.