My head in riddles,
poisonous snakes latch onto every thought,
every feeling, leeching out every essense of
purity until I'm left dry in thrist.

I feel the pressure of the acids pulsating through
every nerve of my living body, slowly torturing,
paralyzing me from the inside out.

But I can still feel the dim flicker of light,
the one feeling, the strongest of them all,
hidden the deep in the caverns of my exsistence.
I will crawl with my fingernails, with every
last breath to reach this light.
I will bleed before I allow myself to become
paraslysed into darkness.

These devious creeping shadows will be cast out,
the abundance of light will take over, I will be free.
I am ready to step into self liberation.

All you need is a Vision
and Will Power to make it happen..
You don't have to see It..
Just Feel..!

-Shahzaad-

I wonder, if in everything I do,
there is a guiding light; standing
apart watching me, to beguile
the shadows of a starless night

Would duty impart importance
to the fact of its existence; would
the light assuage those hurt by
callous burden as it should?

Endlessly creative as only true
emotion can be; but held at bay
by the things we are trained to
ignore by what other voices say

Could it be that no matter the
cost, what is right will save me?
Or is it only providence who will
judge the dim light I cannot see?

Throughout our childhood, our grandmother would turn to us,
in her yellow-lit kitchen, brandishing a rubber spatula or meat
tenderizer to warn us against falling to temptation. She’d witnessed
too many good people disappear into what she called
a consumption of the soul,

              and as my cousins licked sugary batter off their spoons,
no one could have known that one day the candy-coating
would melt from their eyes to see their mother
for what she had done the last six years that now showed in her trembling hands, glossed vision, and a temperament that splashed into anger, flowed into melancholy as easily as she had found herself downing bleary bubbles at the brim of a precipiced fountain.
She was promised her very own message in a bottle, and this keep-sake

manifested in cousin Libby’s dreams, floating down a wine river
that gushed from the slashes in her mother’s wrists. Somehow I knew
these nightmares were born from warm and heady “sleep well”s
mumbled from across the darkest of rooms which held so many glass
ghouls with names and strengths so real, they even scared

my grandmother into silence as she stirred the pecan pie for Easter dinner. She offered to let me lick the spoon clean, but I simply
asked for straight sugar instead.