Take me back to the beginning
In love with everything and everyone
Living with my soul thrown into the wind
Slurring my words over the phone
Sleeping with nature
And kissing flowers
Breathing clean and clear
It was easier then
More peaceful then
Counting stars until they turned into clouds
Outrunning due dates
Take me there

I have travelled a thousand miles
covered myself in thousand styles
kissed the sand and touched the wind
loved and been loved akin
embraced the good and yes, I've sinned
lost sometimes and sometimes I win

one thing I've learned from the journeys made
by becoming a jack of all trades
by having scars of journey on my skin
by letting new experiences in
yes, I've learned this thing for sure
nothing is worth living for

© Ali Ashraf

Nostalgia is the little girl you see drawing on the sidewalk with colorful chalk.  Her favorite lollipop flavor is watermelon.  She also likes cotton candy and Blues Clues (she sings along with the theme song and yells “pawprint!” and “clue!” to her TV).  She is the girl who lives in the big blue house at the end of the cul-de-sac.  She wears silly bandz from her wrist up to her elbow and makes all the other kids want that limited edition glow-in-the-dark piece of rubber.  Nostalgia is a gets a little sad when she falls and scrapes her knee.  And sometimes― sometimes, when she breaks one of her precious silly bandz, or loses one of the jibbitz on her blue crocs, or doesn’t want to wake up in the morning but has to anyway― she gets a little sadder.

Nostalgia doesn’t really know what she’s going to be like in the future.  She wants to be a pet doctor, as she calls it.  She wants nothing more than to not be sad, but who knows who she will turn into.  Bitterness? Grief? Wistfulness? All she knows is she will eventually turn into someone else.  Nostalgia just wants to keep her silly bandz, keep playing in the woods, fake sick in bed, and never move out of her big blue house on the corner of the cul-de-sac.  Nostalgia never wants to grow up.  Does she really have to?

The world is grey.
Well...slightly more so now.
The nerve endings have healed.
Yet the numbness has lingered.
I stumble on my own feet getting out of bed.
Is it that hard to believe I’m simply.
Average.
I get more lost with compass in hand.
Although I can tell you how to find north.
Theoretical knowledge always worked in school.
But my life mentor is absent.
What happens when there is no teacher in gym.
A bunch of kids wandering the grounds.
Some fighting.
More aimlessly wagging their tongues.
Trying to figure out the social heirarchy.
Then there is me.
Smoking a cig at the edge of the property.
Day dreaming of past events.
Even then I secluded myself.
Unknowingly laying the ground work for the next ten years.
Countless routines repeated with different faces and surroundings.
Sometimes even the words would transition into the other.
In those moments I was living faux dejavu.
Losing my mind to my own reflections shadow.
If only I had read the letter My past self had written to my future self telling present me to listen to the mistakes I already made.
Maybe things would have been different.
The possibilities is what destroys the intellegent mind.
Not pain.
It’s the “why”.
The only question that will truly have no answer if asked enough.
And I can’t seem to stop asking.

Cover my body with a sheets made of silk
Imagine me walking amongst the daffodils
Under  a silver moon light
Lie there and watch
Hear the wolf's howling
Watch me coming to you and ask
"Shall we sleep or shall we sing
Or we shall weep for those whom are
no longer here? "
You said nothing, my dear.

You took my hand and quietly said
"I'll play for you the song you've always wanted to hear."
The man was holding his harp next to his chest and quietly his fingers the strings  embraced. He closed his eyes and played.
"What a beautiful song, I have never listened" - I said, "That it made me forget.. that I should let the man with the harp go away."



"Wake up, wake up!" - the man said, holding my hand.
I heard his voice in my head:
"It's just a dream."
"What a sad dream... " - I though,
"Such a sad poem I wrote",
"What a distant memory of a melody..."

pouring rain
falling down
your cheeks

cleaning up
every bit
of sadness
left
in your
fragil heart

I can warm you like a
cup of tea on a winter's day,
I can chill you like a
winter in the U.K.
I can lift you up and
send you reaching for the stars
or I can make you feel
the weight of a thousand pulsars.
I am the worst feeling in this paradigm,
while, at the same time,
I am the best feeling you can conjure;
I am nostalgia.

There was a time I wanted to go home
Rainbow acid pop in my grip
and grilled chicken in my gut
a power to pull my lips sideways
for a wistful smile.
I lie now at the base of a grave
sharing my chicken with worms
and snakes!
And snakes with their ugly fangs
rob me off my pop
and the evergreen beauty I thought infinite
Lost in my eyes
gone with my tears.
The fair land of my heart
barren of any light to harvest,
And I'm degraded through the mocking
momentum of life..
If there was any path to home at all
One to the rainwashed windows
and one to the tender fall
I would go back and stand tall.
Left to the hands of time,
Right, it is lost! There is no path at all..