Tehreem Ali's Blog, page 2

Ash Dandelion

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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 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.

3AM Thoughts (36)

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Wasted on a pair of young limbs, the air inside the other me – that wears the face of life – was choking when the other me – that wears the face of death – sprung forth to life: a sphinx always waiting, calculating the right moment to pounce at my life lines. I heard your voice from somewhere so far – the voice of me wearing the mask of life – so far, it felt like you were the foam and I was the dead sea floating backwards. You were the land while I the water and so I drowned you in me. Every now and then, you swim back to the surface; long lost friends and lovers I drowned to my shores long ago littered on this land like lifeless sea sponges. Sometimes I feel you there deep down, a crackle of hollow sound in comparison to the howling raven I feed your heart strings to. But don’t you know that hollow as it might, I do speak? That I live nonetheless?  The crackle of my bones grows louder too sometimes. So when the day comes, these cracked up bones will be the tool I use to cut the voice of the raven in you and put it to sleep once and for all. So you would break your back just to kill the raven? Henceforth if both of us can’t exist, neither shall one.

3AM Thoughts (35)

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I wore that insipid rejection like a dark blue cloak above my swollen shoulders that night, much like snow clings to the neck of tree barks in the dead of winter. The light of life was spinning at the back of my skull; and I knew I was drifting softly in the hugs of this ravenous blackness that sleeps in me since I was born.

How can a child be so dead hearted, they used to ask me. Now I simply let the bags under my eyes and the clawing of the raven in my head do the answering. Life fades, color by color, into the blackness of this place. A place my creator left uninhabited beneath my charcoal bones at the dawn of creation.

So that night, I went to sleep in the arms of the worm – a worm of delirium. Even though the delirious pangs have subsided, a woman sits atop my cortex. She wears an armor she made herself; of my past lovers gone wrong, of the knives hid under pillows, of the scars I took for granted and washed away in my river of deceit. She talks to me, but what she says is too loud for me to hear. So I just follow the look in her eyes. That is what leads me to the road of self damnation.

My Raven, Immortal

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What skin is this skin made of,

A mirrored emblem of tethers and cracks,

Stitched in by the demons of Hell itself?

What water can glide across its surface?

Nothing so delicate anyway, I suppose.

 

For the one that feels it the most,

The flame dies down –

And their bodies dance in the embers

Until moment comes to set sail

Their soul towards a land of heavenly beasts.

 

What cells is this mind made of,

Backdrop of death hymnals lining

Its grooves and crevices? A pit of sin

And mockery, the shadows eat each other up

When his love is asleep and the raven awakes.

 

For the one who thinks too much,

Curtains close on the bedside too soon

Until a heavy cloud of dust befalls them.

And the sheets beneath, all tainted grey

Gulp the liveliness from inside their spine.

 

A visage appears to slit my raven’s throat

But its eyes linger – linger on the weak spots

So that every savior up there in my mind turns

To the dust that taints my sheet all grey.

It shall not die; it cannot die.

The Orphan in Me

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Pallor of the sin I have harbored

Taints fingertips of every friend and lover

That bequeaths a tad kindness upon my heart,

No matter how subtle it may be.

 

For they can’t see the raven

Holding my hands behind my back.

Or the little orphan girl wearing a mask

Of what the dying look like.

 

So they feed me scraps of apprehension

And they blue me into a land of opiates –

All colorful and bone-ash tasty.

It’s food for the orphan in me – can’t you tell?

 

Mothering a wild flower is easier

When the roots are still young;

But once the orphan grows to be a

Strong shadow, it cannot be uprooted.

 

Hence I take the orphan to a park

And decide to puncture her shadowy figurine

Weighing down on my mind’s ledge; but under

The flicker of serendipity, she fades away.

 

Have I lost her, though I to myself in the caverns.

But every now and then, the orphan in me pays me a visit

To paint me a picture of what it is like growing up

In a body not nurtured by the hand of life, but Death.

 

 

 

 

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When a Heart Gasps…

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A bad breathe lingered always

On the corners of all

The lies I ate

And the smiles you spat out.

Were we ever found?

Not even close.

Smoke rolling on the next of kin,

I lit a cigarette of change and

Drank cheap wine of the labels

Wrung on society’s ledge.

We didn’t have a heartbeat,

Not one that can be measured in

A capsule of time.

The silence with others cut in my flesh

And left blue and purple stains.

In your pores, it seeped right inside

And sucked your blood globules.

So there I became a ghost lingering free

Of time.

And you became a walking mess of empty veins.

The sweet decay followed, our hand lines

Lost to an illuminated fate.

Fear comes easy when you have lot to lose.

Bones of a dead cat on my door mat,

I picked the bottle

And laid my demons to sleep that night.

You put your heart out on the night stand

And beckoned the harbinger of Death

To lull you to sleep.

Morning came and brought with it

The halo of the sun – not the same anymore.

When a heart gasps, it is silence.

Yours gasped on the nightstand you set in on.

The silence it made, my ears

It reached in the resonance

With which life thrums in the universe;

Louder than life.

And in this silence,

Your heart beats a new beat.

I turn mine into a clock

And hang it on the wall

Of my mind’s ledge.

Another heart gasps today,

But its silence is foreign

To you and I.

 

 

 

3AM Thoughts (34)

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Words collide like a cannonball in this head, a mesh of neural cells and cortex – words said and unsaid from every human mouth in the last 10 years. Sounds play broken anthems on my sticky heartstrings, the ones that need mending – sounds of dusty promises and banshee screams the color of hatred and paranoia. Pictures of a million shiny tips that kissed this petrified skin flash and I’ll tell them this is the price to pay for the voices in this head, this hideously empty head, a mess of neural cells and cortex. You shut the light, lit another match of questions and lay fire to the pile that is me – my limbs, my lungs, my foolishly wasted spine. A child of Death knocks on my door. This time, I think I will not turn it away. This time, I think I will let it in for a cup of tea.

3AM Thoughts (33)

 

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Look down on the pile of purple mistakes you made…how silently they lie on the floor, like bleeding children. I touch them with the blue of my conscience and the hew becomes a shade of warmth – a kind of warmth that defies the malignancy of who you are. At the end of the day, all we manage to be is faded and ripped tendrils of our yesterdays, trying to be bigger and brighter than before. I sometimes wish I were a feather as light as them; and you wish you were as visible a light as them – both of us knowing one is as empty as the other.

Insidious Insides

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My sins are imitative of

My empty consciousness.

I don’t feel the high

To be creative anymore

Or much less of anything else.

My seemingly well wishers

Tell me I’m too careless for someone my age.

But I still sit there listlessly,

Waiting for the bee clouds to

Come and sift through me.

That day, I’ll be like everyone;

I’ll be everything,

Just not today.

My sins are callous.

What exits them holes?

All the drops of anger and lies

I try in vain to eat away.

Devouring himself in the

Cold embrace of Death,

I met a stranger just like me.

Head of explosions, did he have.

A black saint walking in

My streets, this numbness

Suffocated him too.

And now everyone is a puppet once again.

These minuscule complications, you see them?

Others remain oblivious to them.

But a mind so loud cannot, shall not.

 

3AM Thoughts (27)

And who would come knocking on my door when all I am is nothing but a dead bolt, no keys, no place. Empty pockets strewn with ghosts of memories I touch every now and then. I want to leave but I cannot say no. They do not laugh about it anymore. Their smiles have melted and sunken into the ground – the cold and dead ground, just like their insides. Hollow eyes, can you see? How they pierce your skin and you fall…fall away silently into delirious fever? I heard they gave it a name and it is love. Profane demon of the innocent mind; it will eat you raw, spit you out. You are left with nothing but holes and scars and pain that never dies. Whosoever said it was a game said it true. You might win, yes. But they will return one day to reclaim their prize, your heart. Never forget that. There are no do-over’s or miracles in this game. Just a cold bottle of your soul and a fake smile, pass it on. Can you jump the fence? Can you kill the rabbit and climb down its hole? Or will you just stand there as a passing memory, as my passing memory? So I take the razor’s edge and a sip of the brown and off myself. Goodbyes were never really my thing anyway; too mediocre for me.

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