Tehreem Ali's Blog

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Our shoreline speaks of night; we can’t hear it but we can see its mouth move.

I am at the ready for god, but let’s be honest.

I gloss over the jetty, watch a seaflower hold its breath between the rock;

I hold my breath to move between the veil.

Miracles, we sing.

Death only happens to the living;            even the quietest corners

pale away. We grope at rooms of mirrors, through tufts of flora,

for the rose of Jericho. Let me tumble to resurrection &

stop me from sleeping all day. I have barely seen the sun. I won’t wake up

until I have forgotten the scent of absence. There is an obscene goneness

in my palms.

Somewhere on land we dirge through the malaise. I am nothing

more than a girl who cries on balconies

at this point      at this point I am nothing more than the balcony.

I gaze at the petals; they gaze at my wound.

I’m so wound-bound.      I’m so lost to the vanity

of staying. Stay.

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We ritualize death by living, we are always building our quiet.

That I might vanish into the sea,

that you might, that blue blackens into white.

That off might slip the glorious gown of Time.

We are hallowed, a silent process moving from earth to salt to body

and back to earth.             We call it divination

as though the mystery is separate from the body.    We are the mystery.

We borrowed the body. I wear a crown, I draw father

into the sand, and wait for the blue to come and collect him.

Now my small wish is gone; now it becomes mechanism, now it becomes

an infant of great, bleak sorrow. A sadness so tedious we build heavens for it.

I am a heaven but I only know this in glimpses. I call these glimpses

prophecy. I call grief my nightwound; it evades my holiness,

that I break for death and hurl myself at its throat,

that I think I am separate from the great golden womb. Such pomp.

I continue speaking to the quiet; it eyes me from the horizon.

I will raise it, I will leave here before it leaves, and then it will leave.

I won’t know it again.

More girls gather at the shore to speak to it. They are wounded by

the same afflictions; obsession for the dead. There is an ancestral hum

of suffering we cannot escape,

cannot speak to,

cannot pull from the maggots of time.

It’s name is the silence; there is no language for it. We are not the shore,

we are the tide.

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There is no glorious secret. Death is an overripe fruit.

Smudge the room if you want, but our hurt haunts the house.

We keep the dead ill. Dress for them,

wear our wound in daylight, rot of love and ego.

What is this pale stone I hold in my chest? Is this my life

or something sinister? I am tired of thinking of the dead. I have left

myself behind. I say, stay here with me, though I’m already gone.

I am hung up on the angel that could never know my name.

The eroticism of why, why, why; I come for the answer.

Sanguine and absent; the necro dazzles in stories of heaven.

Me I have no heaven; me I wander. Please come home.

Please come home. Please visit me in the garden. Please come home.

It is never full, my spirit engine. I fill of rabid rattles and

tubes. I have become the blood between the cracks.

I go to the pew for you, and for you, and you,

and am strung up in the rafters. What holy, what wing.

Such a waste of a girl, such rumination.

I am obsessive. I contain nothing but the replay.

I am blood and blood and replay. I am please don’t go.

I am toss the windows open, but I am windows closed.

Nothing comes in, no one gets out. Arrange the flowers.

Arrange the guests. Stand up and watch them stoop.

Lick the water from the font and swoon of god.

Lie to me in love. Let me think

there is something else.

iv.

Oh gladioli, there is nothing else

you and I,

and the box

If I keep you in a box on my table

If I keep you in a box

If I keep you

She’s magic, guys. Check out her magazine:

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Boredom has a colour. It is a pale blue. That’s why the sky is of the same shade; the stars and every other heavenly body can only do much to entertain it.

Chaos has no colour, contrary to belief. It’s an amalgamation of souls. Souls of everything and anything. Combined, the concoction that results from the coloured souls gives a silently gray shade. That’s why the world is a pale picture.

Together the two fashioned life.

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Just for the day, just for one

Inconsequential flicker of a human day,

I wish the drapes would fall

Over the sun. My cold skin

Is a confession of that life lived,

Chewed and then spat out.

The results are always floating

In the same stale air.

Them lovers suffocate in that air

With their skeletons rising up.

And jumping out of their skin

To chop mine.

This laser vision puts their souls

Alight and bare before me.

Stopping to gulp it down –

Wight of truth,

Cognition traces reality like

Sketch marks around coins.

Their eyes are conspicuous; ears

Brimmed with fake labels;

Skin glowing with marks of

Ownership. Seeing them move

As their truth winks at me

Gives papercuts on my brain;

A rawness campouflaging its surface.

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Yes, the room was spinning.

Like a blind pagan circling

A false altar,

It kept spinning.

All it proved justice to

Were the shadows stuck on my walls.

The spinning power gave them

A force to latch onto my

Lecherous pores you see.

Little by little, my pores inhale

Them blue shadows.

There’s barely any room left for air.

Come down, what is she coming down with?

They can’t tell…they almost never can.

Convulsing in a killer’s lap – my days

I can’t trace the path they vanish into.

Like snow settled for too long,

The underside of my nails

Houses the debris of demons –

Everyone’s demons.

Indeed, I scratched them off their minds;

Now with that debris I can’t scratch mine off.

There’s no room under my nails.

They can never tell.

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‘This is what it must be like to be dead,’ she told me. ‘You see all your memories – both good and bad – turn to something that feels and looks like snow. With the next blink of an eye, the snow has hit the ground blissfully, and turned to ash.’

‘Why did you leave so young?’ I asked her. Too many questions were spilling from my mouth, with no time at all. ‘Rejection is too small an excuse to leave, don’t you think?’

‘You walk down this one path your whole existence. When the fog arrives, you look back and realize all the road signs are difficult to make out now. So you keep walking. The fog never lifts, nor do the road signs at the sides become any clearer to guide you. Eventually, you fall into a pit.’

‘You could have always gotten back up you know.’ I try to say more out of curiosity than as a hollow after thought.

She paused, smiled at me and said, ‘True. But when I fell into that abyss, looking up, I realized there was no fog to begin with. It was just that I had my eyes shut tightly all along. He and the kids had never been there too; just apparitions my fantasy concocted…I made them up inside my head.’

After the dream, the medicines they poured in my eyes didn’t do much either to unhook my lids from each other. Some are just born with their eyes shut tight, subject to nothing and no one’s ability to open them.

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Would you call it a disease? Diseases are anomalies or carelessness regarding health.

Would you call it an imperfection? Perfections conjured by the mind’s expectations are merely imperfections.

Would you call it an insecurity? Doubts seemingly existent or non-existent tend to become insecurities, laden with the weight of what to do and what not to.

Would you call it a misconception? The mind justifiably paints its reality to free itself from the cage of illusions and sometimes, ends up forming misconceptions.

Would you call it a stranger? Strangers can sometimes become the color in the gray of this world.

Would you call it a thief? Hearts and souls are returned in an altered form by the hands of a thief.

Would you call it a killer? Killers are saviors disguised as murderers.

Would you call it an illusion? The light of the moon cuts through the illusions roaming on about.

‘What do you call it then?’ he asked me.

‘It’s a leaving mark. When you sit at a place, your skin leaves a mark on that place – from the tip of your head to your feet. That mark comprises of words you should have written. It’s like the skin shedding its dead cells. But in a writer’s block, in place of dead cells, your skin sheds off words. So it goes; you walk around and there are marks being left behind you, tendrils of words left hanging in the air. You lie down and there is a mark left there too. You smile or cry and a sheet of words drips down from your facial lines. You run and an invisible whirlwind of words is leaving a trail behind you as you move forward.’

‘When you die, the marks of words left behind you hang in the turbid air of the world. People pick out their favorite words from these marks, leaving the simple ones in the marks. After a while, they start remembering you by those simple, monotonous words left behind in the marks.

‘It’s like having scars; the healed skin is picked off by these wild beavers called humans while you have to sleep in your grave with the insidious looking part of the scar present below the healed skin.’

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‘Give me the punchline.’

‘I don’t have one,’ she said lazily.

‘Then what’s your problem? Tell me from the top of your head.’

‘I think I don’t have a subject to write.’ She knew even as she said it that it wasn’t true. And she knew he knew it better than her.

‘You have a subject. You always have a subject. Having a keen sense of observation – such as yours – means you get to view everything in the world around you as a subject…from a stone on the ground to the masked people walking around like puppets crying on the inside.’

‘So tell me what your real problem is.’

She had no answer. It was as simple and as complicated as that.

When people are happy, they don’t want to write. Why would they stop having a good time and sit down to write? On the other hand, words come easy when the mind is a playground for the soldiers of depression and everything charcoal-colored like that. But that wasn’t the case with her. Writing was something she could and wanted to do in both happy and sad times.

‘Is it because you have too many subjects?’ he asked her, clearly not given up.

‘Perhaps.’ The ground looked more vibrant than her heart felt.

‘Or is it because the weight of battling the war within you is so tiring, it leaves you with no energy to think about what to write?’

‘More or less. But not quite,’ she answered.

‘Is it because the silence of nothingness is too loud to make out words your mind is uttering?’ he asked again.

‘Again, more or less but not exactly.’

‘Or is it because you want to be absolutely nothing, since that is always easier to fulfill?’

‘Somewhat…’ her ears were ringing with disdain.

Truth be told, it was a little bit of all these reasons.

Words are weapons, she told him. She needed hers to hurt her, because pain reminds her that she is real in this illusionary, temporary world. That she has to be real all through the way. So when her words come out and don’t feel like weapons that inflict the strictest amount of pain on her mind, she does not want to write them down.

And it was as simple and as complicated as that.

The next question would be so as to why her mind often didn’t conjure up words that were indeed weapons, but just fragile feathers that barely touched her skin and fell to the ground right after their birth. The answer to this would lead to further questions. So she closed the book and began improving the weapons she’d made so far.

Because it was as simple and as complicated as that.

[image error]We forgot. We took up the task again. The second time around wasn’t as simple as we’d hoped; there were too many blood baths in our rooms, too many graves lining our wardrobes and too little moments on the side of our slippers placed on the floor.

There was a black sky above my head. It contained all the words I had never uttered. Now I wonder why, but the reasons are a far off dream not worth venturing into. I forgot to slow down on my way, yet I still reached the point where the death in me collided with the life in me. Now they walk hand in hand – sometimes without a quarrel and sometimes with animosity.

So when we started living for the second time, do you know what it was like? It was like staring at the eyes of a beheaded sphinx. Our bodies were hijacked away from our souls, and the carriage definitely exceeded the speed limit on the highway to purgatory.

The second time is never the better time. The second time is the blurry time. The second time, we learned how to crash without tasting the glory of flying. The second time, there were sleepless nights. The second time was storms and drowning at sea. The second time, we were defenseless.

No one was listening. So we played our melodies on the record machine high up on the moon.

Each night since then, there is a song playing in the blue silence of the dark. It’s the sound of our lost hearts roaming in the purgatory.

Chew it up – chew it all up;

Says one shadow to the other –

The shadows cast on my cerebral cortex

From the gyri and sulci of my brain.

One shadow slides down a sulcus

While a splinter of light

Sits majestically atop each gyrus.

The combination of light and shadow

On these curves and enfoldings

Has formed a painting,

Which is reflected behind my eye lids.

Won’t they see?

Won’t they hold a candle up to my eyes

And shoo the demons away

So the image becomes clearer?

For how devouringly they feast

On my gyri and sulci.

If it weren’t but for God’s voice,

A voice I played on my broken record machine –

They could never notice the lines on my hands;

Isn’t that the way of His angels? I heard one say.

So if His voice was eaten up by the cries of my devil.

My devil who I had buried in inked pages

And notes of symphonies of the night –

All my lost things would come back to me.

But they have gone,

And His voice licks the image of my gyri

And sulci reflected so behind my eye lids.

Won’t you sing with me father, before

You take up to pirating in the sea of mother’s blood?

Even when the razors slipped across my skin,

And the water rose in my ears – you chose to gulp

Your glasses of grey misdirected agonies.

I asked mother to pull back the chord of oestrogen,

So I could climb back.

Look me in the eyes she did, and poofed

Into the mist I was born into.

A loud dream; so very loud to wake up from.

I’ll be done with the food of my chaos,

Won’t you see the image even then?

Their lies will be the poison in your children

And their money will be the flowers

On your grave.

So I choose the life of a wildflower…

A wallflower.

The sky melts at my doorstep each time

I see you – you with the grave mud sticking

Out from your ears and nostrils.

Can I have my ten pounds of sadness now? You asked.

But I choose the truth and for ten seconds spent

Burying you in these flailing loving arms,

From my gyri and sulci, the image still on them,

Ten pounds I cut out from them

And place atop your hands in return.

They fit, like the truth found a home.

Walking out the door with ten pounds of a truth instead of sadness,

You will never look back.

They will never let us remember,

So we shall never stop to forget.

He went on – whom I never saw again.

But those ten pounds of my truth,

In his hand lines they grew roots.

With each hand line sprouting, the truth

Sprouted too, blooming in black and charcoal mystery.

As each hand multiplied to a billion

Over the years – the children of truth increased…

All with the flicker of ten pounds.

Now the image – you never bothered looking at –

The same image is what’s reflected

In each of those hand lines, for

My eye lids reflect the eyes of end of Time now,

Not the image, the image with shadow and light

Resting atop the gyri and sulci.

Forget me? The water took me

Long before their waves of control did.

Build a house, the lady in red will

Never be invited down here in this house.

Her parlor tricks and ashen lies were

The knife I used to cut those ten pounds

Of truth from my cortex –

All this devotion is my stars;

Every heartbeat I chase, the air they suffocate in.

He let me go, the father I buried in my attic

And the mother chewed me up, the one whose hatred

I choked on, just to live some more.

Did you not see?

Did they ever see?

Their eye lids reflect insidious.

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The sleep chimes made me hum along

To their silent prey notes.

When the night star landed on the sky outside,

I did not know where I was.

To another dimension, perhaps –

The dead live there;

Vermons make spiral curlicues

On the walls surrounding my roots.

Atop my fingertips, my veins

Run backwards to gravity’s pull

In that dimension where the dead live.

I feel thirsty, my mouth cried; a

Vase of dry ash and mirror powder.

So the pitcher water looked up at me –

There is something insipid about my reflection

On the water surface in that oblivious space and time.

It pushes me off my path,

Despite how subtly – this slimy crack in my brain.

A drop of water trickles down my hollow esophagus

Like dry milk over a dead baby’s spine.

I know I cannot gulp this down.

Shall the drops spew out of my eyes like black daggers.

I see a car pull up the drive way –

You with your suitcase, a book in hand

Curl at my doorstep but my raven

Locked me in and chewed on the keys.

If only our wrists came with bolts and keys too.

Would you have the access to mine? The squaling

Of my raven – ample evidence against a grey sin –

Gives me the answer. For what shall befall the ignorant

If the wise decided to make duplicate keys?

Would you come to me then, a tired eye of the storm

To weigh me down under clouds of love, a book in hand?

The chandelier on the ceiling before me reminds me

Of the many dreams we had together – concentric

Like the glassy flowers of the chandelier.

What a disgust it looks like; envisioning veins

Hanging from each glass flower, my sinful head

Turned towards the ground as it hangs, utterly empty.

So when they stuffed sin down my gut and tainted

The cover of innocent we are all born with,

A thing so meager couldn’t be moved against them.

Which calendar did they follow? Why did they decide

To slash open my bones and implant their seed in?

Now years swim at the edge of my nerve cells.

The one I love could be further than this – further

Than the hounds of hell below my feet.

Yet I grow listless of it; a mind cannot but wander

When the heaven above it cracks and melts.

She will succumb like a lamb stuck in a lion’s teeth;

Came the cry of my creators and my captives.

Perhaps that is the thorn I wish to sting my eye upon – a

Bleeding end for a bleeding start.

Shall they weep, my bones, under the ground below their feet

Will mix their salty taste on the ash of dandelions atop my grave.