The world has escaped me, you leave me no choice
The traces of my past swallows me every day a little more
I want to run and scream no body understands
Every time i smile i feel like i am digging my grave with my own hands


Words Of Harfouchism

I was messing around with words,
For people once messed with my mind.
Words carve truth
And sometimes are part of foul play.
Sometimes words are used in games,
Sometimes words carry wisdom
In disguise.
And all in all, words are human
They are flawed and they are metaphors.

I had a question
Of all the questions I have.
I baked it into simple bricks
To build symbolic sculptures with it.
But what use is a question
If it in itself is indecipherable,
Answers need a structured path to unwind.
I was looking for an answer
But I wasn't expecting one.
I feel most questions
Are there
Because they have indeed
No answers after all.

These are our constructed truths,
I used to say
When he used to accuse me of lying.
I always have a dark, dark humor.
But I have the luck
To meet bright people too.

I believed there could only be truth,
In absence of which there is a lie.
But the world isn't black and white,
White itself is of several colors
That serves together.
So who was I to question
The ways of the world?

Words from different mouths
Different they sound,
And different answers they form.
A house of cards
We live in,
Too light to sustain,
And yet some remain for days.
A blow would end them
And yet we don't.
We could build a whole world of it
And someone might as well try.
We deal with a deck of cards he said.

There is this big flaw
You must have heard.
This rebellion of bumblebees
Who fought over physics to fly.
Are nature's laws that sustain us
A lie too?
We deal with an illusion they said.

One card by itself can be torn to bits,
But cards appear too strong
When they build a sturdy skeleton
On their own.
Which one is the illusion
    -the one card that acts weak
     Or those in a heap, strong?
On behalf of the bees flying,
Of people revived after death,
Or people who survived poison
Or saved by the devil,
I have to ask,
If everything is indeed an illusion?
What exactly are we dealing with?

Then he came with the most important question of all
For what shall
We do with the answers,
What good does a truth do?

I don't have enough answers
It seems only questions.
Maybe in them hides answers
But maybe it does not matter
                                                   After all.
What did you pick?

(Questions exist because
There are no answers
                                      Yet?)

I don't cut my skin for 24 hours, then 48
Then a week
Then two.
Practise abstinence in all forms
No drink, no drugs.
I don't stop my body from jittering and convulsing.
I let myself cry in the shower
Shave my legs without thinking off bleeding
Rest my nose between my mothers worried eyebrows
Kiss her scarred palms
Rub ointment into her feet
And go to bed smelling of lavender and love.
I wake up early, walk round the greenery. I don't open my mouth for 5 hours,
Plant seeds in my mamas garden and meditate where they'll bloom.
I refrain from eating meat. I drink a glass of milk when I wake
A glass before sleep.
I listen to Beyoncé. I watch French films without the subtitles.
Plan holidays.
I whisper prayers into my sleeping boyfriends neck
I go a whole day without thinking about our dead baby.
Walk to the train station and read the newspaper and never once think about jumping in front
Of my oncoming train.

My estranged father posts a status on Facebook, a joke, about choking dominant woman.
I wake up drunk, my arm sticking to a puddle of dried blood.
Cut chunks of flesh out of my forearm and leave a trail from the liquor store to my fathers gambling shop.
The next day I have a sore head, a sore arm. I starve myself for three days and let myself throw up watery bile into the toilet.

I start again.
I don't pick the scabs from my arm. I let red circular scarred skin form
Draw badly designed tattoos and make empty plans to cover them.
I call my friends, tell them how much I adore them, how beautiful and special they are,
How I never want to live a day without them
They call me cheesy. We laugh and make plans but we're all so busy. We hang up.
I practise excessiveness. Make my boyfriend ******. Laugh loudly. Put on too much makeup and spend £50 to eat out alone.
I call my aunties in Guyana. Let them speak for hours about a 'home' I've never been too.
Listen to stories about my mother, and her mother.
They ask me hushed voices if I'm still ill, tell me my mother has spent hours crying to them over me.
I tell them my plans.
Tell them I have a boyfriend.
I am studying. I am working, and loving and laughing.
They sound glad. They put me on to my dying grandmother and she prays for me
Tells me in strong accent that her children show her pictures of me on the computer
She tells me I am beautiful, so beautiful, she tells me I look just like my father.
We pause.
Her voice cracks and she praises Jesus for my health.
We say goodbyes. I promise to make more of an effort. Tell her I will visit her soon. Send my love to everyone and hang up.
I start reading two chapters of a book before bed.
Revisit old poetry. Write new words.
Dream in colour again, sing in the shower again.
I drink a glass of wine with my sisters and fall asleep being held by them.
I mute my father on Facebook.
Now we can start again.

I CALCULATIONS

A bird from the window
Pecked at my papers
Lined with my scores.

Now trees are dead,
And papers are gone.
This is the computer age.

I will break it down for you.
I even made a list,
Would you like to count?

II THE LIST

1.This is the computer age              
    Of digitized proofs
       And

2.Authority attested identies,
     With participants' certificates.

3.Our own words have lost meaning

4.We are now vessels                     
With our definition stapled on screens
      And

5.Meagre salaries    
    Tagged on our foreheads.

6.We are our grades.

7.The given guidelines,
      Projects we finished overnight.
         We are the cheated test scores,

8.The printed marksheets
       From the renowned buildings.

9.We are a bunch of degrees.
      
10.We are a box of experience
     With a reciept of coffees we bought,
         We are a cv of what we did.

11.We are the said lies
        And

12.The stress calmed by mummbled slurs.

13.We are the second employee
        Shouted at.
          And

14.We are the hundredth consumer
       With company approved needs.

15.We are the salesperson with quotas to meet.

16.We are the owners
       Of a dying business,
         A pending debt.

17.We are the numerous people
        Of covered faces on the streets

18.And exposed bodies in the world wide web.

19.We are the constructed
         Digital photographs
            With deconstructed heads.
        

20.We are a bunch of numbers

21.We are a bunch of numbers

22.We are a bunch of numbers,

23.When did we become
      
24. A 0 or a 1?

People shouldn't even fit in a whole encyclopedia

And yet here,
Are you looking for a number 25?


III RESULT

Well I gave the papers to the bird,
She put it in her nest
And made it warmer.

You call me crazy
But I will always
Call myself a free bird.