Quzzical. Questioning. Eccentric. Evolving.
I want to open up to nothingness
and wilt away my feeling skin
see it shed like feathers and be happy of it
this is a metamorphosis
flying with iron wings
rather be a meteorite
that can cause craters on the moon
fuel the sun — raise mountains from flat beds
a gardener of the waves of the oceans
and the corals excavated from the sands
the dunes of richness and the ferocity of the valleys
being fertile in bone and soul.—
what I feel is an aperture of sunlight
sliding in from my curtains
blue then silver then flashes of green; slants of gold
in the morning light, my mind half-awake, feeling
half-dreams and half-premonitions; tucked between
loose blankets of my dream and reality
not bothered by the critical analyses of politeness
my heart desires to be voracious, selfish and rude
like a gladiator in an arena or a highlanding bandit
robin hood tongue; stealing from the egos of the higher ups
and giving to me and others like me — what I feel is a rigid happiness
in isolation.
it comes up my flanks like water on the banks
like reeds and flowers on the bay
tying my short hair with flowers and flowing skin
with thorns and petals
a rose to be desired and has desires
has the weapons and fortifications of an emperor.—
my heart has swallowed a large pitcher of sadness
pre-summer days quote in heat
and sigh in zephyrs like commas
in a run on sentence —
building up my bones like a house
or a locomotive; both nano and steam
evaporates through the lines
of osmotic transcendence
quiet was the night
adjusting the windows
as the rains come hot and sleek
like predators hunting for water
and my eyes thirst dryness
like a line smoothed by clay
my mouth antagonises me in silence
but I don’t turn the page —
what is a lost cause? I think trust
or trust blindly? a thrusting motion
reminds you of juvenile dreams and
naive conceptions — love sings over the hills
canopied by clouds and conceived heaven
love sings over the earth
only the desert welcomes the monsoon
if my heart was paper, would it be easier to write the codes?
to relearn myself in small accents like apostrophes and periods?
would it have been easier to write down some commandments
that never altered; set ink as stone and made it roll so it
gathered no heresy of moss? — shanties of sand come climb
and crumble but never swayed the reign of those staunch routines
automaton of apathy; pincushioned by wavy joints of empathy
never fully light or fully darkness: just a fruit with many seeds
like a rose with many thorns. Beauty is a trait that can defy kindness.
Why should I javelin throw my self when others watch the macabre
in a seated box in the opera of their own lives?
hearing something like rain fall down like it has pockets to fill
feeling partly tired and partly smarting from a wound
there is no chime that elopes with the blow to the heart
knowing the quiet I trace it like a scar,
a skin that should be immaculate
I sigh, whimper and whisper
the wall is broken; pain can’t keep me down.—
I think for the past few days I have been feeling a certain alienation from people. People are not logical. This is something I have learned both the easy way and the hard way. But, this is not a treatise glorifying emotions either. Emotions can be pretty messy and difficult to express so we use shorthands of violence, anger even lust and betrayal to compensate our lack of syntax and our lack of right verbs and nouns to talk about these things. It does not have to be English. It happens in every language. It happens pretty much in mainstream cultures. We are not really taught to cultivate language. We are taught to cultivate solutions and information. The latter is not a bad skill. It is also needed. However, emotion and logic going hand to hand makes more sense.
People can be brutally honest and hurt someone and that is a valid reason to critique emotions. You know why? Because unless someone is being a douchebag I don’t think we have enough of their life picture to be over exceedingly mean to them. Especially, if they are our friends and we posit some value onto them. Friends can demand things — it’s normal and it shouldn’t exceed a limit either. There are basics, we have our own etiquettes. I think what we don’t understand is that even when we are coldly logical it is a painful surgical procedure without anesthesia. We can logically tell people their shortcomings, or why we don’t like them but have no clue what their positionality is. Most of the time when we dislike people we are also subconsciously, but logically, trying to overcompensate for some lack in ourselves. We feel jealousy that they get it, or, anger that they not getting it reflects our own propensity for not getting it. Our lacking.
Going back to language and skills of deduction, the reason I skirted on emotions and logic is that people aren’t 2+2=4 nor are they (a+b)²= a²+2ab+b² nor are they (a+b)³=a³+3a²b+3ab²+b³ they can all of this and none of this on the same line. It is hard to accept that but it’s true. You can give your level best to people to have them turn on you at any given moment. I noticed why. People are either ungrateful, scared, jealous or insecure. And, when I say people I am not pushing me away from that. I am not putting myself on a pedestal because I am a person as well. I am sure that I also come across as brash, small minded and stupid at times. However, I think over the years, I have tried to be patient with people. The sad thing is, people are not necessarily patient with me. When there is a one sided dialogue on patience: meaning you are being patient and the other person is being mean or you are showing them they behaved badly and instead of being responsible they tell you what you said meant nothing and sums up nothing, it becomes pretty frustrating.
A good way of showing these sides of frustration is social media. People nowadays also abuse social media to make a point that they are disappointed or angry with you. When they unfriend or block you, it does become problematic. There is no way to contact them or tell them you are sorry. Usually, it also makes you feel like a creepy stranger when you were not. Even at times it makes you feel as though they are treating you as they would an abuser. It becomes really sad because when you haven’t been toxic with them or vitriolic with them it becomes an issue. I come also from times when stuff like this was hard to do because basically when you before had fights with friends you could be absent from each others’ lives for a while and then make it or break it with perspective. Nowadays, I think that also goes out the window. People get mad at you and make a statement about it which is hard to overlook and may add fuel to fire and make a hot mess.
The thing is we are not math problems or fragments of syntax or pixels on a screen or even a sum of hormones alone — we are people. We need to work on ourselves and others constantly and consistently. Yes, there can be fluxes but we are meant to fill them with other things. It is imperative we can be a bit more compassionate, open, loving and empathetic with people who deserve it. We gotten down our boundaries, how to be alert for creepy people, how to zone out in places we don’t need to be and we also got down how to be aggressive when required. However, we haven’t gotten down the other end. We need to master or even try to balance out both.
There is a reason I speak of balance in particular. We cannot always unleash our rage and jealousies on our friends who are not intending to hurt us or trying to make us feel low. This is one thing I tried to do. Stress and helplessly in today’s societies comes through work but also through social interactions. We are sometimes forced to be with people we don’t wanna be. We can’t always make a situation feel good even if we try. I get that, personally, I get that so much and I gotten angry and sometimes tell my Mom in a bit of a loud voice how tired I was of it all. Work can be brutal, horrible and also ungrateful. You can give your soul to a career, hours of excruciating brain and brawn power and not get a promotion or even have your pay reduced or even discourteously fired. But, I don’t think putting that on your real friends will actually help you in the long run. Rather, I think it would hurt you.
I talk today about personal experiences. I think I have faced a lot in the last two years that has made me pretty cynical about friendships. I realised the more older you grow up people look at friendship like a hierarchy or something that is just there. People have tried to use me and take me for granted. I don’t think I have ever made a person feel so low that they questioned their self-worth. However, people do this all the time. After a while, it becomes like as though they are just angry at who I am and how I behave. Maybe, they hadn’t expected me to be successful or even able to write these things coherently in a blog. The fact that I surpassed their assumptions of me may make them feel pretty angry and unhappy. Perhaps, they liked me being in the gutter, or being miserable or even being hapless because that gave their lives “more meaning”? When you think about it people can think like that. They usually are taught life is a competition of living good, making successes and playing hard some game of attraction. When people fail in those areas it makes others overwhelmingly happy because then when they look at the mirror they can Other you. They can tell themselves they are not you.
I just don’t really ascribe to this way of thinking. Maybe, that’s why people don’t always value me and do not want to be my friend to begin with—
walking down the path
exploring the stoned pavement
clinking of my boots underneath
tingled with my breath
the night is vast and the sky vaster
as I move along; trying to know the streets
near my temporary home
as if I am sewed on them as buttons
passing a bus stop a blonde beauty with
her phone on and a man suddenly says
“five minutes” to me and I just move along
not letting him ruin my sense of liberation
that straddles my lungs and makes me feel
one with omnipresent strings and stabilities
reaching a lane that only goes down to
liquor stores and convenience shops
where cars slope down hills and adjacent
is a island like a park with few people trodding
it is not past midnight; hardly evening,
but this part of the world knows winter
as a solace of the hearth; warm meals and
lustful covers and perhaps the odd shift
looking onwards — with its half hilly and
urban scape everything — Leeds is breathtaking.
when I walk back home I know I will receive a call
from Mom past so many miles and seas
asking me if I have eaten and asking me
why my usual routine was overturned
and I can tell her of my boots clicking on stone
and me nibbling a quiet dinner by myself
thinking of her and others; heater on
and forgetting if a moon had been out
walking with me as well.—
*feels like a companion piece to Mari’s You Within
A surrealist night journey that makes mouths living stars and the thread of existence like the line of a smile awaiting some arrival – beautiful Mari strokes again =)
Not a bad angle in thinking of writing and arts this way =)
Is it egotistical for the writer to believe they can create something worthy of someone’s time and attention? (as if that’s even the point) To create little or vast pocket universes, alternate realities, that capture the imagination and transports the reader to ideas and places undiscovered. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say, “rediscovered”; because there really is nothing new in creation, just newness not yet perceived. It’s all out there in the circular filing cabinet of time waiting to be found. So to even say that the writer creates perhaps is sheer egotism itself; what we really do is find and bring forth ideas, in distinctly unique ways, that already exist, have always existed in an infinite well spring of possibilities conceived and not yet realized. How conceited are we to think we ever held an original thought? How full of shit am I for even thinking this?
a blue giant branched out in my palm
feeling me the force of love
pulsating in the corners of my smile
universalising my cure to frailty
each page then resounded a letter
that was me in the finest form
filled with peccadilloes but also purities
and the horse did not come to bring apocalypse
of a degeneration but a prince who was I
fighting with my sword and scimitar
an oasis branched out in my iris
a solar system of planets and stars
in the constellations of my all my deeds done
and all deeds to come
finding that I was bracketed as the moon
with the definition of suns
I glow because my luminosity
is the only one who I can proudly state was me.—
there was a chasm of loneliness
and it bore my name
and I decided to fill it with tears
hoping to reach the surface
only sorrow did not quench that thirst
and my tears had to be hope bound
for what is sorrow if not a testament
to hope? We will meet unfairness and injustice
that is how human systems work
but the meta of you was designed not
to follow that rule. Believe in God or believe in greater dimensions
that supersede what holds the matter and makes you closer
to the holy
I managed to make my chasm a ocean
I made it into something fertile
for only I lived this life
and I know it held meaning
slings and bows now serve my soldiers.—
nothing seems to be more caustic
than the ignorance of being ignored
and the indifference to the genuine
the practice of selective empathy
that has the negative zeal of selfishness
the mistaken selves on the shelves
of some codified, communal and coefficient categorisations
that a human moulds to serve themselves
was I never good enough for you?
was I never a good friend for you?
did I not talk to you when no one would?
did I not give you time and also befriended
your sorrows as my own?
and took your phantoms seriously?
why did you whisper sweet nothings in my ear?
it is hard to gain the respect of someone
who didn’t know what was the denotation of love
and the connotations of the affection
that lay between my chest
I palpitate
but grief should not be my second sun
for the indifference in you
highlights my love
and the nth power of my being
knows that what I did was infinite.—
