Something comes…
It comes upon the weeping of the wind…*

He once long ago licked love’s poetry into her eager ears,
He sang soft sonnets which soared and sailed over her curves,

She sat by the shadows of the alpine wood as he spun her hair,
She could hear his heartbeats resting and rising to a hypnotic rhythm,

His snarls slapped and scratched her cheeks,
His hunger addicted to her rose scented blood,

She now waits by the locked door of a weeping widow’s web,
She feels the air bristling through her shape shifting thoughts,

He who knew her killed her,
She who loved him loves him still.

He comes with the shadows of another dead day...

She hears fog coughing in the dark splinters of her mind,
It lingers and prowls on the edge of her haunted eyes,
The sharp crack of her bones screams through the night,
Her bruised silken skin drips with love’s betrayed blood.

He snakes into her soul and leaves the venom of his passion...

The night howls with each of her swollen sighs,
A silhouette of a rising nightmare fists into her face,
Her nose shatters into fragments from a story still untold,
The tongue inside her mouth drowns in warm blood.

He is the nightmare from which she will never again wake...

The romantic room growls and scratches her with impatience,
The white sheet crawls up her legs and wraps around her neck,
Her lipstick leaks down her cheeks and she twitches no more,
Outside in the sky of the night the moon bleeds into the clouds.

He smiles and wipes away her dead tears as her soul evaporates...

I place a gun to my temple,
My dreams lie trampled,
My mosque everyday burned and mocked,
My church fired with brimstone and rocks,
My synagogue scarred and tarred,
My eyes see through the false plastic masks,
My body my simple shrine,
My blood red as winter’s wine,
My head wears no crown and I am all alone,
I pull the trigger and kneel at God’s eternal throne.

The eve of my death shall be my coronation,
For although I lived and breathed it was but a lament,
I hid it well,

No one knew,

For pain did not upon my face draw its battle lines,
This garden of earth’s simple delights I found barren,
I go now to a place where the soul never hungers,

Now I know,

This was always the dream of my final resting place,
Under a beam of a cold weeping moon,
There I shall sleep my discarded life into the roots of a dead rose,

*This is home...

A husband without his wife is a desert without an oasis,

A man without a woman’s shadow is a man without a trace,

A marriage without passion is a rainbow without colour,

A child without a mother is a seed without a flower,

A home without a family is a ship without an anchor,

A beauty without grace is a diamond without a glow,

A mirror without a face is a ghost without a name,

A breath without a prayer is a life without hope,

A body without a soul is a well without water,

A search without faith is a hollow shell without the Creator,

A lover without the Beloved is a life without meaning,

A question without sense is an answer without understanding,

A hunger without reason is a famine without deliverance,

A palace without people is a king without a crown,

A country without peace is a cancer without a cure,

A sentence without mercy is a law without justice,

A nation without a dream is a song without a melody,

A singer without a voice is a bird without wings,

A painting without colour is black without white,

A night without sleep is a room without light,

A day without end is work without play,

A circle without a line is a shape without form,

A life without laughter is death without life.


©Rangzeb Hussain