I was forced to sit upon a bench before a marbled statue in an art museum. Through patience and boredom, I traced over the figure before me. It was a woman. Her skin appeared so smooth, and her existence so intentional. She was draped with sheer fabric. How one carves sheer fabric from marble stone, I would never know. She looked so beautiful and at peace. Was I at peace? I mentally scanned over myself. I felt the nervous pumping of my heart and heard the carbonic shuffling of the toast I had eaten prior. I glanced, but not too obviously, at my fingers and the hands they were attached to. I could see the tangled roots of blue crawl between each other and the millions of cross hatched lines overlaying. I looked back up at the marble person. She had no pumping or shuffling. No crawling or cross hatching. She was silken and at rest. I tried to mimic her. I held in my place. Unmoving, unthinking, just being. But the more I tried, the worse I heard my heart and the worse I felt my stomach. I heard my thoughts and my chest rise and fall. I was cursed. I wanted to be like the woman. But my homeostatic existence forced me to continue. I held my mind as I stared at the statue with envy. What an existence to live. Pure, uninterrupted stasis. True stasis. She only moved when moved by others. And even then, she was at rest within herself. No knowledge outside of her oneness. I looked inward again. I was forced to be here. I was forced to be brought here and forced to be taken away from here someday. No one even thought to ask me about the matter. Time is so limited. And here I was. Forced to be here and forced to be here, looking at this woman with more than I could ever have. She was beautiful, spending everyday within a single place being praised by liberal art students and school children who pass through this atrium, even though she did not exist for them. She existed for herself. She stayed within herself, her own scope. Unbound by time or place in her mind. Yet, we all were lucky enough to have witnessed her within her unboundaries. After brushing over her several thousand times, I noticed a chip within her pedestal. I became silently aggravated at the prospect of some lazy dolt who was given the honor of moving her to only do so uncarefully, or an ungrateful adolescent bored amongst the halls of everlasting pieces of geniuses’ minds. But that was just it. They weren’t everlasting. Not really. Not even she, as her perfection captivated for millenia. For the first time, I felt I was her, and she was me. As she has been idolized for her beauty, such as I for the people who loved me. She had a history, as did I. We both have texture and features of difference, but we were to lie in the same bed someday. I would fall asleep much sooner than she, but all things must lay to rest. Even if she spent her entire worldly being in protection, she would still be brought to a close with the setting of the Universe. Two immaculate sisters saying farewell, both so vastly different yet frustratingly the same. Though for both, the daughter of mass and the daughter of time did not cross each other’s paths. They merely felt one another through the beings within and around them that occupy the other. Mass felt time around her, as time felt mass within her. And thus, were one, with no knowledge of the other. I took the first breath I had acknowledged since I first sat on this bench. My eyes attempted to adjust to farther focal points of the rest of the building once I finally pried my gaze from the woman. So many other beautiful beings existed in this singular space that I had no idea about until now. I wanted to spend my time with them, before they had no more time to spend with me. A woman came out of the door to my left. She asked me if I was here to interview for the security guard position. I nodded. She invited me to follow her into the room, and I did just that.

Lines of scar tissue trace from the edge of your lips back to the end of your teeth. You run your tongue from one corner to the other. Right to left. You can’t be the only one to have this. Your desire to probe another’s orifices has close to overwhelmed you in the desire to relate to other people. Was this normal? When the fan runs wind over your skin it crawls to create peaks and divots. As they fade, one patch remains on the outside of your forearm. You pick at every little one until the whole population turns red to purple to green. Was this normal? Your teeth poke holes into each other. A corner of a molar no longer holds up a roof and with your tongue’s help you can just barely make out the inner cavity. It felt like porous webbing. It reminds you of the animal skulls you looked at in your biology class and their delicate nasal cavities. Looking at those cavities used to make you very sad. Was this normal? You once had a hangnail on your hallux. They had to numb your foot to break under your skin and pull the left section of it out. It took twice the amount of anesthetic for you to not feel it. It felt good to know you were being mutilated.  Was this normal? You always felt a dip in the upper back of your head. You once heard that newborn babies had a soft spot in that area of their skull, but that the hole closes as they get older. Pressing on yours incites headache. Was this normal? You once formed a cyst on your thigh. It did not want to be drained like its smaller companions that littered your back and face. You are determined to remove the blemish. You dig around the outsides and press inward to find the source. It seems deeper than you thought. You continue to scratch away at the layers of skin as you start to bleed. It doesn’t really hurt. You just want to find the cyst. After about thirty minutes you give up. You’re not really sure why you couldn’t find it. You must have took at least an inch into your leg. Was this normal? For weeks you slipped in and out of lucid dreams. You only got up to use the bathroom, check the news, and take your medicine. Some of the dreams were enjoyable and others less so. You almost started to forget which world was more real, but it all started to become unsettling. Even when you didn’t care where you were, every state felt as if it were decaying around you. And when you did care, the panic caused you to start to shake. In quiet, disabling anxiety, you spun counterclockwise to the world around you. You grabbed the razer from your shower. You gently rubbed the blades against your forearm. Erratic slices cut through the outermost dermal. There was no blood, just redness. It was only to make sure you were still there. But it wasn’t quite right. Your arm was there, but maybe the rest of you wasn’t. You had to make sure. Was this normal? You raced the blades up your arms, over your chest, down your torso, down and down. Certain curvatures ran strange and caused blood to pearl to the surface. Others barely upset the dead layer. You looked at yourself in the mirror. You always felt like your face didn’t look quite right. And right now, it was the face of some sort of estranged family member. Was this normal? You gently glide the razor sideways across your face. It’s the most sensitive yet. You remember some random piece of trivia about the temples on a human head. You start to slide the hand razor to the right side of your temple. It doesn’t hurt as much as you thought it would. You experiment with more and more pressure until blood starts to arise. The little bit of it running down the side of your face made you feel the most comfortable in your skin for a long time. You start to rotate from your forearms and your temples and your stomach and again. You’ve forgotten about the dreams. You’ve forgotten about the world. You’ve forgotten about the trivial division between reality and non-. You’ve forgotten about normalcy. You feel good. Was this normal?

You need no hardware
across the zero’s span.
Only software will do
to land you a full
360-degree run.

A little null punch
but gives you
a colossal rise.
Run around the null
the way to go is digital!

No dark, no light
And no extremes the Lord has made.
No rights, no beauty and no fights.
The only are: the null; the one,
And every bit that dwells since then
Is built upon a hierarchy of a mind
Of a man.

His eyes gleamed and played in his eye sockets, like marbles on a playground. When he spoke, he waved the arms of a worn windbreaker. Dried ***** pooled down the center zipper. This was a man who stopped to compliment my boots and not my face. Or skin. Or purty smile. The wind encircled us and almost pulled the cardboard with a toothy model on both sides out of his dried finger tips. His niece insisted he carry that thing around. If only she had given him an entire billboard instead.

When I saw the gaunt streetwalker, companion of the sunrise, keeper of the bottle--he had enough to live off the recycling from years--he reminded me of the naked frightening people we are when we peel off the fifteen layers of skin, disrobe, and dismantle our pride.

Stricken by the absence of color,
and the absence of rainbows that once sung to me.

Nullified and numbed by the irrationality of my ego,
and my hatred for sanity.

These are punctured wounds by the hands of the stained glass,
as this shattered hourglass speaks gibberish to me.

I'll take all the blame,
it was all my fault anyways.

As if my world wasn't trippy enough,
the only thing standing in my way is you.

So let violence sing one last time...
Scream for me poetry.

///

*we can’t see that the null has a space
one day we will see it face to face
you are waiting here for that call
now we are trying to cross on that high wall

and who is calling thee?
you will not be right here
when I will be there on the line
spaces will keep us when our body will be fine

they will be checked out our passport,
then i will know,
i have no visa at all
and all my false will curse
so I will not get the pass
there will be only the holy verse

again, I hear who are calling thee?
today, he is standing alone on the no man’s land
i know, I did not make any real fund
and i will be bound to keep my passport on the empty hand

and who is calling thee?
where there is a lock I see
where is the key?
who is moving and where is she?
may be she is paying the fee

again the sound is playing for thee,
the end point null is the ultimate bar
when you will not think that the null point is an err
and you will not find any way to move so far
on the other hand they should be locked you into a Jar

do you know about the null think?
the null has an own existence that it will be shown

you are waiting at hell where I will be gone
when we should be punished
and then the judgment will be finished
where The Space of Null never be vanished

///
@ Musfiq us shaleheen