31-01-2018 (Starlight)

The day passed like a still-life dream and I sat, between my hands, like a perfect potrait of love and loss. I held myself together like a jigsaw of touches glued to hollow bones that he'd placed on my skin. I was real in that moment, only because he'd touched me.

His fingertips have invented me like Braille and he has written the odysseys of his spirit on my wrists. His lips have discovered me like the lost land of Atlantis drowned beneath an ocean of self-doubt. His light beats on my drum-heart like the sun, and i open up like a sunflower chasing his charisma.

It's been a while now, he painted a constellation between my arms and...then drifted away like an astronaut chasing the stars on the dark tarmac of the sky...
.
He is here...just gone to buy me a jar full of starlight.

30-01-2018 (Grief)

I have been left stranded at a crossroad like the ghost of a man unable to find the way back to his grave. Alone like the blood moon in the night sky; sad enough...beautiful enough for you to write poems about. And yet, if you ask me how i feel, i'd have no words to describe my languid obsession with this pain. I'd tell you that I've no more reproaches and regrets and conceal my palms behind a veil of defeated lies and half-truths. the only confession is that i'm disappointed by my frailness and my feelings.

I wander through the dark alleyways of repressed depression, to resolve myself, looking for somewhere to set the anchor down into the ocean of time, but i find myself sinking instead. Water dancing between all the four cardinal points; water drowning my shipwrecked lungs; water flooding my eyes...stuck with the only realization...how alone I am in my suffering!!...how miserably alone...

30-01-2018 (Memories)

My early morning nightmare drifts off to a place that i wished I'd never return to. A place that is, actually, a memory. And, like a time traveler, I bounce back to my past, thinking and rethinking the possibilities of what could have been; unaware of the future that I'm losing with every moment that the second hand sweeps over my clock-like face. A future lost in negligent verbs...

Every now and then, I catch myself lost in the dimension of time, moving anti-parallel to its flow, looking back at the memorial of love that I'd erected, that now lies buried in ruins. And, I, like an archeologist, excavate each bead of memory lost in time, and turn it into a necklace that I carry like an albatross around my neck.

29-01-2018 (Loss)

When i tell them that i've lost everything, they don't realise that i have,
in fact, lost my will to live. Burned it on a hearth made of
broken twigs that were once the subtle happy semblances
of smiles i lost into my amnesia. Today, i stand open and ugly
in my nakedness, as a sculpture carved out of suffering
stuck with le maschere of tragedy and comedy
that I carry on each face. I keep holding onto my thin
gladrag skin pasted on to the body of a leper.
And when i tell them that I've lost everything,
I've, in fact, lost my own self...

28-01-2018 (Tedium)

Here,
home alone with
the whispers of my
imaginary friends
locked inside my
closet ears,
it's the same day
again,
just a different date.

Monotony has settled
like ash on everything
i touch. My books lie unread,
my journal missing
another date,
paint drying on my
paint brushes;
and I...
I feel dragged down
by the weight of
tedium: a sooty
numbness reminds me
of my inner stagnation.
I feel it at times,
my soul withdrawing
into a singularity
at the center
of my chest;
a burden
that only i must carry...

27-01-2018 (Monologue)

I still hold words in the reservoir of my thoughts that find themselves unable to seethe out of my teeth that hold those words as prisoners in my mouth. there's so much that needs to be said. Words and voices...millions. I try hard to dismiss the unruly accidents of language in a vague attempt towards a safety that silence provides.

The fear is real...

I might be thrown into the cascading flood and be washed away into the uncertain. I'm shaken and scared but, I've not exhausted my words nor my pain yet. It is still as palpable as my pulse; a constant reminder of my heart's weak keening.

Misery is my love child and i shall nurse it with sorrow and brine. i shall breathe into it the air that the tide of my chest breathes into me. I shall hold it together and i shall let it grow over my tombstone heart like a patina of moss. misery...is my only excuse for madness. i can never let it go .

27-01-2018 (A letter)

Today, let's suppose that i write a soul into this flesh and pour into it consciousness of the lost existence, that once belonged to me. Erase the denial off my palms. Lets suppose, that today i write about my longing and set myself free.

Neither of us remembers how i ended up here sailing rudderless between two shores of despair. Battling the quagmire within and without. but, here i am nonetheless. The same woman, with the same heartache.
I've so many things on my mind. i am a breathing reminder of questions though I hardly remember the whats that need to be asked. But, today, let's suppose, I give up my questions and accept the unscripted answer that lies beneath this detachment, the answer that is 'life'. The life whose meaning I lost somewhere in my escapism, like a forgotten flower breathing its scent into the yellow pages of a forgotten book. Lets suppose, that the flower is dead now and doesn't matter anymore.

As I stand here, a majestic mess, my hands still clutch on to rent fabric, holding on to it like a dying man would hold on to his breath. the fabric that we wore on our bodies like a smile. the fabric that was once 'love', woven into my body like the network of capillaries that now carry the remains of my longing from my heart to my lips. And here, let's suppose that today I write a river and drown my tears into it where the estuary becomes the ocean. The ocean births the cloud. the cloud mourns with rain. and the rain drenches the world with my words.

Today, lets suppose i write to you, would you read?

27-01-2018 (Nostalgia)

The lost grandeur of autumn days haunt my winter mornings with a mist of demise. As the leaves fall from heaven like dew drops into her petal-like mouth, I lose myself to the thirst of a man lost in an ocean of salt and sand. I tell myself that she is gone, the dew drop has dried into its reflection. But, no man can know thirst like i do.

It's been days, but I met people today, The same people again, with their morose masks on, in the masquerade of denial. Wandered with them past faces I will never see again. And, with them, i died the death of my desires and reincarnated back into the surfeit of my suffering. I, having yet again forgotten the semblance of my sorrow, plunged into my self-made darkness of a deeper dismay, lost memories and days of blackout. The sorrow shall survive, the sorrow of life, the sorrow of negation.

Dismissal....
Say, the spring is alive in me...

And, I'm fine....as fine, as this claim can afford.

26-01-2018 (Somnolence)

Sleep, till your willow branch bones forget what the sun does to the dancing leaves.
Sleep, till your shadow retracts into your body and you become one with The Other.
Sleep, till these words lose their meaning of hope.
Till your lost loves vanish into the miasma of empty space.
Sleep, till the echoes fall silent in your memory and you are free to weep into the inner ocean of your tearful silence.
Sleep, till you flood your consciousness with the defeat of longing.
Sleep, till they forget who you were, and you forget who He was..

21-01-2018 (Betrayal)

My heart...the Trojan horse

Last night was harsh. Should I blame the music that brought memories, or should I blame the memories for haunting my music? Or should i curse the night for being so dark, and the moonlight losing her blue virginity on my window panes. The treacherous contrast of light that made the darkness crisp and harder to survive.

My mind is lost in questions, that seek no answer but a reassurance. The 'if only' verbs to which i lose parts of my longing. I don't know...

Should i have let you go when you forced me to leave and burned down the effigies of letters, that i hide beneath my tongue, promising a love that lied?

My days are a monotonous gray, my nights streamlined blue, fragmented pieces of leave me to reach out for you every moment, even as i write. Every now and then i find myself lying collapsed on the floor; barely holding myself up living up to vital signs that betray me to feign a life. Still in denial, still lost in hope...unable to believe the loss that has carved a name on each wall of my chambered heart. A name that echoes in the silent murmer of my chest.... Jasim