20-02-2018

My soul is silent today

19-02-2018 (Realization)

It was a simple realization, standing stark naked in front of my eyes for the first time, like a watermark left on everything I looked at. And though I tried hard to negate it, I couldn't dismiss the fact of what I'd found.

This new friend, in my head, speaks to me even though I refuse to talk back. But today, I had to listen to what he said. He told me truth of my suffering, and i was baptized in a fountain of his realization.

To be honest, now, I don't think anything is wrong with me. I'm perfectly fine. I thought that I was looking for someone to love me. But, could I have been more wrong! That was a false notion that I'd been feeding myself for years.

Today, I finally know what I want. To disperse that immense ocean in my heart as rain for someone who deserves it, that singular anchor which can hold the ocean still. I just...want to calm down the storm raging in my blood and gift it to someone who can keep it. I don't want to be loved, I want to be the lover; the giver not the receiver of that supreme emotion.

And, that is my Redemption...

18-2-2018 (Redemption)

My life has gone past the point where I understood what it meant. I have stopped trying. Time passes by me like a beggar and I, having nothing to offer, stare at it silently till it moves forward leaving me behind. My pockets are filled with remorse, and so is my heart. This heart, that i don't use any more....any less.

At times, when i try to fathom my thoughts, I feel that there's no redemption for people like me. And, as long as I'm alive, i shall suffer. And, if there is a life after this one, I'll beg for the second death.

17-02-2018 (Regret)

I, who had made myself believe that one should strive for love...that we should bend all reasons to be with the beloved, now sit here exiled from the only place I could ever call home. Having cut off the umbilical cord that joined my soul to my body, unable to see my mother who lies dead by my side. I feel submerged like an iceberg in an ocean of self-pity, only a part of me above the water to let me know how miserably alone i am in this vast expanse.

i call to myself the vestiges of memories and try to replace them one by one with objects. The lamp by my bedside is the time when we had our first coffee in the city cafe. the coffee now tastes like the lamp and the lamp is nowhere to be seen. My paint-brushes are the times when we sat by the lake feeding fish. I don't paint with them anymore because they are the fish who, now, starve because no one feeds them. I don't know what i mean when I say this. I am displacing my memories, so now they live with me in my room, hidden in my closet, in the sketchbooks, in the guitar, in my books, in the floor and the ceiling fan- in everything around me because, i can no longer hold their weight in my head. They surround me and that's fine until start speaking to me. I...know...that...I..failed.

My room is a memorial and i sit like a fossil of love long-lost in the midst of ruins. inactivity has settled like dust that i breathe into my lungs, it's trying to kill me.. i didn't strive hard enough. i didn't take risks. i was too weak to fight and i will probably die with this regret clenched between my teeth, leaving me unable to speak....i didnt try.

15-02-2018 (Solitude)

Some days are hard - when you feel unwanted like an albino cloud drifting across the desert sky. A shooting star dissolving in it's own trail... Like every step forward is another step away from your being, like you were walking towards the oblivion of a shadow space where nothing can be seen...a place that doesn't exist.

Today, in the morning, when i left home, unaware as to where I was going, sitting on the front seat of a cab, i thought about how meaninglessly my pursuits become me and i lose myself in the bargain. I found myself chronicled into a poem written in a lost script. No one knew that I was a poem. Astray... like a feather resting its head on autumn leaves having lost its flight.

I sat in my emptiness for hours looking without knowing what i was looking at, past the facades that strangers put on display on their faces like a dream prisoned in a glass orb. I was perplexed by the absolute simplicity of the creation and, yet, it's immense illusion of sophistication. Everything, it seemed to me, could be reduced to two words...I don't know what the words are but I felt them like the air.

 I guess, we all want the same thing. We all hold the same desires in our prism hearts

...the desire to be seen...

14-02-2018 (Love)

Every day, I meet people in my timeless journey on the road; people ready to barter parts of their selves in exchange for a smile. A picture stuck in my mindscape...that finds residence beneath my skin as a memory that I wear at all times. At times, after the sun sets, i try to put on those memories like masks on my face and try to enact the expressions of impressions left on my mind by the beauty of strangers..

I think, I fall in love too easily and too intensely. I love people. I love them to the point where it becomes a palpable pain inside me.

Oh, where to keep all the faces I have seen!! They live inside me like dreams that I, having dreamt, will never forget yet can't fully recall and I carry them inside my pocket-book heart between pages like a flower.

Yesterday, I dreamed. Today, I met dreamers, and I let myself dance on their palm like a black swan. There was a distant melody floating through the ether in wisps. I kept dancing till my knees hurt, and when I could dance no longer, I sung...the song that translates every language....

A song that was....love. 

13-02-2018 (Remorse)

I am hurt by the fact that I broke you...

I am sorry

11-02-2018 (Trauma)

Memory is being unfair to me...

10-02-2018 (Moving On)

It is fine, everything that is happening is fine; the people I met in the day, the words I spoke, the tears that I hid in my voice - everything is fine. I am managing myself even in such a volatile state, against my own expectations.

Things are starting to make some sense. The 'why's that I asked myself a year ago, are now  losing their meaning like a distant sandstorm of amnesia were erasing all the memory of feelings that I once felt. Now, like an albino heart, I feel nothing anymore. I'm handling myself fine...

At times, I tell myself that my life has probably started anew, now when I thought that it had ended. Though, I'm struggling to find a meaning beneath the darkening sky of my habit of holding on to hope. A meaning, that could explain the emotional catharsis that speaks in a language unknown to me...

...am I still capable of feeling?

This does not mean that I've made peace with what happened. This does not mean that the past was a lie. It doesn't mean that i don't want to go back, it just means that i can't and with this burden I am moving forward because, like everything else, I have to. I can't escape the unidirectional fluidity of time, my destination lies downstream no matter what I choose, no matter who I met upstream, it doesn't matter if I wanted to stay, my eventual destination lies at the end of this world and I have to let it flow because there is no other choice. Drifting; at times, willingly...at other times against my will but I'm moving on, an autumn leaf on the surface of the stream of time...

I hope we meet again in the sea..

08-02-2018 (Travelling Through Memories)

'Love is never enough'

(Everything returns to you...)

The road zoomed out like a memory in the rear view mirror of the car as I moved on, along the path of time, the cracking voice of the stereo playing the same old songs, now with novel meanings.

Dreams distant... Each U-turn up the coiling road livened up like another beginning as reminiscence kept losing consciousness. And I went on, a traveler lost in the vertical dimension. The mountain opened up like a slow creeper with the road branching out like capillaries of streams running up and down towards an unseen estuary. Flying, in the four wheeled carrier of desire, between the sun and the lake on the wings of mercury like a dreamer who keeps forgetting his name, drifting into space and solitude, every moment was a step away from you, every memory a dream.

I walked past the conifers that grew over the slopes like sentries standing on guard at the gateways of a place forgotten in ruins and, as I looked down at the expanse; the sulking lake, the charcoal road, the minuscule cars, moving noiselessly like ants, pulled, as if, by strings towards an endless destiny, i wondered whether I could see you from up there but, all i could see was a graveyard spreading between the horizons. A sepulchral memorial of all the fragile ceramic "forever together"s, echoing between mountain ranges, that broke on the rocky floor of destiny's betrayal that i carry within my eyes like ghosts. I see graves everywhere...and i keep struggling to voice the half written elegy on the face in the mirror....(why?)

'Love is never enough'.

07-02-2018 (Silence)

My journals are all about missing entries and unsaid words...

06-02-2018 (Whirlwind)

Inability comes naturally to me.

It's not the first time that I've been unable to write. It is another one of the countless days when my soul has refused to speak to me. And, now, here I sit with my teeth biting down on my tongue and my lips wandering for words in an exhausted expanse. I sit here drowsy with tedium, looking down from a veritable cliff of feigned indifference, at the surface of my subconscious that stretches out like an enormous ocean beneath the disguise of a mirror that breaks like waves on the shore of my memory and brings ashore dreams that I never could confess having dreamt.

It is all an elaborate lie...

I feel too much... I can't write today, not because  there is nothing to be written about but because too much needs to be said and as I stand, in the middle of this whirlpool of tumultuous emotions, my voice is sucked into the depth of the abyss where from no word returns to telltale the sorry state of my consciousness. The hail-storm of words rains down on me but I'm unable to gather the hailstones and frame them into a sentence. I try to string them like beads into a necklace around my throat but it chokes around my vocal chords leaving me unable to speak.

I knew, words wouldn't come easy today because I've exhausted all my thoughts in my desire for you. 

05-02-2018 (A Call)

My silence speaks to me in verbs;
days of not getting out of my closet-like room deprived of the sun, the half eaten apple browning by the nightstand, the matted hair unwashed since days, the stutter of words sinking down my throat... It speaks to me like an old sorrow of being on my own for a bit too long as I sit, companion bereft, with my silence ricocheting between my ears like an echo of the traumas that surface as scars on my battle-field skin.

My name, the Risen, has lost me as its identity because I keep falling into the perpetual darkness of words never spoken that I hide beneath band-aids now. Nobody calls me by my true name anymore, and I don't remember what it was but, i still exist as a reminder of it like a sticky-note left on a broken down fridge put away in the store-room.

I think, re-think, and overthink my fails, driven by the array of all the times i failed to assemble myself back into my body and as i lie fragmented, with broken shards of me left on the park benches forgotten in time, i ask myself what I should do with my homeless heart now.

Should i write? What is there to write about? And suppose I do who will read freedom into these words i trap in ink? I ask myself the questions that drift back to the blank shore of the memory of my love and its deserted shipwreck lost in the tenses; the past - a kaleidoscope, the future - a broken mirror.

At times, i wonder, If i write about the snow-flake reveries that vanished between the lines of my palms, would you read? If I spill my guts on the floor and ask you to assemble me like a ball of snow between your hands and make a snowman memorial of my hollow dreams, would you give me the warmth of your love again?

Would you read if i write...

04-02-2018 (To my mother)

I am a montage of sighs plastered onto a white-washed wall of a house no one visits anymore. A house that was never a house to begin with, but a morgue where they hid my depression among the dead bodies of my laughter and love. This is what I have always felt like, living in the no-man's land, with an alias, torn between the illusion of what I am and what I never was.

My mother thinks that I died six years ago when i first began to notice the wound marked on my heart and drew on my arm with a blade. My mother thought that I bled to death. That day, like every bird in a cage, my heart beat it's restless wings against the ribs and I tried to end it's misery. She thinks I've been dead ever since.

She doesn't recognize me now and calls me by a different name, a name that speaks of the pain in her cavern heart where my failed suicide attempts hang like stalactites that collapse on the ground of the pain in her womb.

I can't say; I probably died my death back then because I'm no longer who I was. I don't even remember. I'm the vestige, the dead skin of the person who lived within me, now having moulted its way out, doesn't remember its way to the memory it trapped in me - lost in the abyss of absence where even i can't find it anymore...

My mother complains that I make a museum out of my depression and put it on a display in fragile glass boxes. I do disappoint her, and she's probably ashamed of me. But how do I become the person she wants me to, and who does she want me to be? Mother, why do you care that in this lost crowd people might actually see me for who I am? Why does it bother you that they'll notice the blood oozing out of the words I write? Yes, I fight the urge to kill myself every moment, even as i speak, why does that not bother you, that such thoughts should ever have come into being? But, it doesn't matter because I don't.

I've learnt to talk like a stillborn child sinking into your graveyard arms, dead against my will... and even now, as this ink gets absorbed into my paper voice, i know that you'll never know what i feel

03-02-2018 (Conversations)

I did not notice when all colors were fading into the black backdrop of a pregnant silence till I became a  color-blind victim of the helpless sorrow of separation.

Our dialogues turned into my monologues in which I hid my denial and I kept calling out for you, cajoling myself into believing that my own echoes were your answers. I personified every trace of you left in the heart shaped box of my memory, living in a schizophrenic dream in which you descended, every morning, from the mountain of dawn into my sunset soul.

I can't deny the power of my mirage.

I hid your name beneath metaphors and when I complain about the sunlight being too harsh on my eyes, or the noise being too loud for my ears, I'm actually questioning why you left me to this fate in hollow the grave, where lies buried the treasure chest of my love, without leaving a map for someone else to find this heart and breathe into it another soul.

I complain to the rain about your betrayal and it complains to me about the sky that can't bear the weight of clouds in its womb and gives birth to stillborn flashes of lightening that sets ablaze the sylvan of nymphs dancing of the dreamers' palm. I get drenched in these conversations that turn into soliloquies when the clouds part and the sun shines again, confessing the only crime of my sinner heart...

02-02-2018 (Silence)

ﯾﺎﺭ ﻣﯽ ﮔﻮﯾﺪ ﺑﮕﻮ 
(the beloved tells me to say it)

I write...because the Beloved demands to be written about. I'm the pen that He is gliding with His lithe fingers over the piano parchment of my heart's yearning, filling it up with the stories of magic and the sorcery of love. Seven feet above the sky and dizzy in my vertigo, I walk on the tightrope of that emotion weaved into words. And I write even when I cant, because what are these words but a conversation between us?

...

Yet, I feel unable to write today - words stagnant at the tip of my tongue. I feel the anxiety of undoing grow in the lacunae of my longing. And my hands grope in darkness as I reach out for words that could convey my lassitude, but instead I find the charred remains of bonfires that set ablaze the Word armoury of my ardour.

I'm scared, my beloved doesn't speak to me anymore...

01-02-2018 (Demise)

I'm the remnant.

I'm the warm wet sand that the waves of his fingers kissed at high tide and then slowly withdrew to an eternal low tide leaving me by the shore like a breathless lagoon of brine. And now, as i recall his face, i do so without thinking of him, because that's how you witness tragedies, and he was, for that matter, the greatest accident of my life that left me amputated of the will to love and the desire to be loved.

My heart alight like a fortress at midnight. I can never dare to let the draw-bridge down to let love re-enter me like another messenger lost in time. The messenger who speaks of peace and holds a war beneath his helm. We don't speak of love here

I vanish into my prose as i hijack speech and hold words as a hostage in my mouth....play and replay. Yet i can't frame the words 'i' 'love' and 'you' in the same sentence....nevermore