Tehreem Ali's Blog, page 6

The Eternal Curses

These masked faces, how they linger in a blind faith and empty streets of passion. They ask what love is, their tears falling on their charcoal hearts. You try to find the will to forget, but these hands have only ever held on to the rope of the past, for it is the only thing that never leaves your side. They told me pain is meant to fade away. Little did I know it was the sole companion I was to have; the greatest teacher of all. The dimly light shadows of our promises chase me around everywhere I go. You asked me for strength. I cut my life lines and laid them bare at your feet. You asked for hope. I spread my dreams and aspirations around you – yet you stomped on all of it, your black halo finally visible. Do not fool yourself with the serenity of the night. That darkness will sting you to the marrow of your deteriorating bones; breathe it in, the raw palpitations of that heartache will be a stepping stone to perseverance, in that silence you shall find answers to doubts you have painted in the grey halls of your consciousness. We see drops of lust falling from the tree of Chance and mistake it for Love. Your soul is frozen still, the coldness seeping into your veins, the chilly desperation in your eyes. Yet what is it which you long for, you ask yourself each day. The echo of your demons resting within is the only sound you hear in return. Look how the sun and the moon talk of your fate everyday; they know it is a blank page. You have been given the ink to write with, but instead you write down your despair and lethargic pain onto those pages with your poisoned blood and believe it to be your story. But I am more than my scars, you are more than your flaws, and they are all the prisons we are locked in; mistaking it to be the reason for keeping us a failure. When you are broken and defeated, that voice you always refused to hear before will be your only guide and support to rise up from. Yet you drown yourself in your defeat, thinking your charcoal heart is too burned and black now to ever shine again. Little do you understand that the light of forgiveness and compassion is too strong to cut through those dark layers and revive whatever is burned and black.

But who shall find your heart when you buried it in an iron sea no one knows where? So now, you waste and wither away into ashes of what you could have been. I will always be able to see you past the camouflage you hide under; that sort of vision comes when your eyes have been cleansed with the tears of experience and pain.

When all has been said and done and remembered back to when, they label you as the one accursed to be lost, and me as the tired traveler accursed to never forget and let go. When someone will ask our names, we will be called the cure which blended and faded in one curse – a curse dark and wild enough to be immortal in its feral effect. Someday, a numb soul shall drink this cure like wine and in their blood shall flow its energy as well as the stinging, addicting darkness which is the pulse of that curse.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Beneath These Lush Facades

Precarious was the halo of that moment, one you refused to contemplate, when they drowned our innocence in a black pool of Sin. They burned paintings of our love and hope that hung in the otherwise empty hallways of tired minds. Drink from the devil’s soul and herein lies the eternal secret to lose yourself. Meanings become vacant; smiles drop down and melt like last night’s candle that they left burning in our hearts. Where to start from and where is the end we rise up to – why ask a listless sentinel when you cannot even breathe down your own mistakes? They made an ocean out of this screeching pain, into which our shadows sail away in a broken ship. Ride along the demon that sits inside your weak conscious, thumping loudly on the ground you call clarity, etching away designs of all that you lost; it will never die down. Only the darkness shall consume the rawness lurking inside. The incoherent beam of life slips by your callous skin and you sit there wondering where we went wrong, where we lost control, where we stopped trying. So the beads of Time fall from your hands and wither away into a faded chance, an untraceable ghost of reasons we used to reside in. The resilient notes dry on their still lips as their hearts deflate from the weight of love. Now you see them and call them the forsaken.

Losing might be an option for the lovelost. It satiates the hunger of the weak minded, ones who find solace in the numbness of cowardice. Born anew in a womb of shallow misery chords, we sit by the shores of something lost, something borrowed, waiting for a change to come stumbling our way.

But the change lies within us.

Filed under: Life Tagged: doubt, life, pessimisim

The Warrior

And when the dead and decayed sentinels of his dark thoughts went to sleep at dusk, he stepped out of the dungeon of his mind; the continuous tip tap sound of his bloodied dreams falling on the floor of his consciousness. He had not eaten or drunk anything since days. Somehow, the raw emptiness inside kept him going. The keys to the cell were tied around the bulky waist of an ogre called Doubt who sat on the corner, fast asleep. He hated that sound – the sound of his snoring; Doubt was not just another hungry monster lurking in the cell, no. That would have been too liberal a torture for him. Instead, it fed on his weakness, it devoured itself with the dark intentions residing in him, it drank a piece of his battered and bruised soul each day. But he knew. He knew he had to fight the ogre named Doubt and get the keys and free himself; only he could. He crushed the walls of his cell – they were made out of the concrete of Fear. The drum beat of his heart – now a grey shadow – was the only consolation for him to keep going, to not give up. For the demons around him would kill to put that drumbeat to a deafening silence and he could not let that happen, he would not let that happen. When he came face to face with the ogre called Doubt, flashbacks from his lucid past started to play before his blood shot eyes. As he focused on each of them, he realized he had been his own worst enemy, that all those times he had fallen under the crippled yet destructive hands of Misery, it had been nothing but a numbing presence of self loathing which prevented him from getting up. He had always been a wild phoenix within who had been burned but never really risen from his ashes – up until now. So he decided to sift out whatever remains of his soul were left in this fire raging within and that is when he laid the ogre called Doubt to non existence; by accepting the hand of belief and riding on the horse of courage as it came running towards him.

At the end, all it took was a piece of colored imagination here to open every locked door; and a ray of hope to light the screeching darkness as he made his way out of this dungeon, to find his way out. At the other end, a grey bird sat lightly on a cloud. He had run through a wide valley of Fear, defeated Doubt, passed through fires of his consciousness; he refused to back down now at the hands of nothingness. The bird flew towards him and perched itself on his shoulder. The cloud sat drifting in the cold air before him, motionless – like a flying carpet ready to take him wherever he wanted to go. He had hopes. He had brighter dreams now. He had the essence of a million warriors within him now for he had not only endured but won a battle of the toughest kind – the battle inside his mind. But the bird whispered to him in a sound that resonated all he had ever desired to accomplish, all the drops of love he had refused to let slip down his throat, and it whispered to him that freedom is just a state of mind.

Filed under: Uncategorized

A Maiden Named Hope

There came a forked road in the road. The mist all around made it difficult to read the otherwise faded signs. But she knew her way well without the assistance of blank notes and ghastly echoes of her past which was walking behind her, tapping her on the shoulder, begging her to stop and turn and drown in the darkness she had promised herself to leave behind. Her head is a large, growling cauldron of magical and beautiful and quirky thoughts; her heart is the place the opaque halo of the moonlight dances in; yellow beads of nostalgic perspiration hangs down her delicate temples; the things roaming around and being pushed by the passers-by are the ones she clings to at night. What a thing it must be to exist in such a golden skin, they thought of her. Yet, she was the sole keeper of the secret embodying the rawness that lay hidden under that golden skin – a rawness so wild yet gloriously sweet in its own essence. She never needed words to make her thoughts fly by and take ground in the hearts and minds of others. Rather, she lay down her guard for the broken and the pure and made it her home to spread her kindness in their empty souls; holding on to the thorns as others got the daisies at the other end of the stick. When one beauty fades away, it becomes a soul of the free. She knows she will fade away soon as well; everything does. The memory of her transient existence is what will make her eternal and so you shall see her in all your dreary hallucinations, all your empty shores of self doubt, all your cries of misery, all your grey defeats. And the skies above will whisper to you and tell you her name was Hope.

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Shell of a Man

Every night, as the world went to sleep with its misery tucked safely under a pillow, he lay awake. Wearing a cloak of his shadow, he lurked out into the deathly silence of the moon outside. He walked in the streets where the secrets linger. The moon up above did not remind him of fairies or dreams or hope or any of those delusions. For when he looked up at the moon, he remembered a heart that once beat inside him, its rhythm comprised of love notes and joy; he remembered the face of a cure that had come to him and laid his bleeding mind to rest and peace. His hands were callous from the amount of work he did each day in the valley of doom. His eyes – as still yet calm as an iron sea that melts your heart. He had everything; he lost everything, for that is often the way of the world. They told him love would fix him, that all he needed was to believe and never give up. But he had done all that. Being drunk on these mere ideas had gotten him nowhere. He had put burned razors across his golden skin, drowned in the bitter taste of time and vodka, sat near fires of desperation and burned his thoughts in their flame. Yet none of it had done him any good whatsoever. Yes, he had a beautiful mind and an unlimited passion inside him that screamed louder than any cries of pain ever have. He knew the limits to sanity and had crossed them to be the genius that he was. Pain and heartache was the sword he fought his fears with. Sitting in a black room with his demons and having a talk with them was his favourite past-time. But this was not the sort of piece he wanted. So each time he asked himself why he was so lost, the only answer he gave himself was that he had lost the key to his heart; and now its door remains locked for any sort of love or hate to enter. That is why the world has labelled him a shell of a man.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Embers on Our Fingertips

We lie in our broken hearts and call them a prison. And the ones we gave the keys to more than often throw it in a river very far beyond our reach. I walked on a path overflowing with needles. They told me the wind had set them there. But I knew better, for I know that the sleepless nights I lay awake in – drenched in my nightmares – you used to get up and lay those thorns on the way you knew I would be walking upon in the morning. But that is okay; we only ever let love break us to the point that it cuts and bleeds us dry. Then it places a growling cup of heartache under our eyes where the darkness from the soul drips, the tapping sound much like the sound of rain falling on glass. But do you hear it? How can you? For the noise of your actions is so loud – it echoes in my wary mind; it bangs on the door I never thought I would open for anyone; it screams in the silence of my torture; it emanates a glow that blinds me; it jars my ability to see beyond – beyond the hurt you lay waste on my empty shores, beyond my scars you promised to cover but only ended up deepening. Yes, there is good and joy in little things running around you. But that is what makes them special: they run away. They are not here to stay; neither am I nor are you or anyone else.

There is a certain beauty in this illusion of a world we all live in. It wraps us around in myriad colours, steals our spirit then throws us thristy on the desert of desperation. We call for help. Oh look, here lies the ignorant beast who laid down his life for an illusion – comes the cry from the skies above.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Perks of Love and Other Drugs

So time stopped. It was like that perfect moment that you thought only existed in books and movies. But there is always a grain of truth in everything – even the stuff movies and books and songs and all our crazy vague dreams are comprised of. So they sat on a dream cloud and decided they would take a trip in this land…some call it love, some call it a theif; some call it pain while the wise just view it as an illusion. They learned with each other and about each other; hurt with each other and laughed for each other. That is how they made memories together. We are nothing but a pack of memories, eventually. She was a lost crown, waiting to be woren by the right mind. He was the epitome of a grey mind, one that was a little lost and a little doubtful. But he carried this crown and put jewels of compassion in it. She was a river of darkness flowing with no sign of stopping. He was a bridge that only stood for the weak. She was a painting hanging in the hallway of others’ lives for so long, her colors were starting to dry and fade away. He was a fresh brushstroke filled with raw colors and energy, revitalizing her. She was an open wound. He came like a cure to her. She was a summer breeze blowing soft kisses on the hearts of those suffering silently. He was the hand that ached for a rope to hang on to that wouldn’t instantly break away. She was a mirror of the mistakes she made and learned from. He was a lost wanderer, drifting close to the shores of nothingness. She was misunderstood. He was indecisive. She never faltered for love. He always feared love. She was committed. He was unsure. She was the broken silence that you hear before a storm arrives. He was the aftermath of an earthquake. She was the drop who couldn’t swim. He was the sailor who did not care who swam or drowned in his ocean. She was the emptiness that engulfed her to the depths of her marrow. He was the guiding lightning strike of new opportunities. She was a caged prisoner in her own despair. He was an aimless beggar in the streets of belonging. She was a shallow pit filled with a sadness that never reached the top. He was a sealed, locked door. She was a halo of the bright and the hopeful. He was her misery chord. She was looking at that gaze which shone brighter on her scars than the stars ever did, but he was already looking for the way up ahead he was going to walk away on; into a forever that could last for a blinding eternity, who knew. But that was the closest to a heaven she had ever been. And she wondered if real heaven would feel this way. If it did, she wished she never got the chance to go there. Once empty, forever emtpy, she sits staring at a broken mirror called life and wonders when the pieces will lift themselves up again. If they don’t, which piece shall she pick up and own and lead? For she realized, in the end, that everyone walks away to that path they look up on, even if their smile on your scars seems brighter than the shining stars up above ever have. Because that light? It is not real. It is nothing but a beautiful, mesmerizing illusion. And now he just plans and feels and moves on, crushing the dream cloud they had floated on.

Filed under: Amateur, Life, Love Tagged: heartbreak

Headless Love

You look into its eyes every day and still say you have never seen it. Its voice echoes in your mind each night as you lie in the silence and heat of your sweaty mistakes. The sheet it hides under is what protects you from the cold within. And yet you think ��� every time the cold winds blow ��� that that is what pierces your callous skin. In the morning light, its rays shine upon you each time you close your eyes and open them, their warmth seeping into the emptiness inside you. When you walk, it walks beside you; when you drown in your sorrows, it pulls you back up; when you are surrounded by lies and cannot breathe, it becomes your air; when you are unable to reach out for help, it becomes another hand to you and makes you reach out; when you run in a field of blinded passion, it shows you right from wrong. In each heartbeat you waste away now, it is what makes new ones behind you so that when you run out of fuel to drive your desire and feed your hunger, it will be your strength through it all. In those moments that fly away from your hands and fall down into Eternity, you see its reflection cast on your grey shores yet you do nothing and let it get washed away from the merciless waves of misconception. The details are all lying scattered around you, but the blindfold of hate covers your eyes so tight that you do not see them. All of your wrongs will come haunt you one day. But even then, it will shield you from the swords of your demons, how pale they scream beside that gate ��� hungry for that heart you hide and the soul you try to sell. I gave up my bruises to heal your pain, but no matter how bright it gets, the darkest of corners remain walled up against all that light, their defenses forever unyielding. In your hour of dead fear, its voice tries to guide you into the light, away from the ghosts chasing you. But your screams, so loud, drown away that voice and you feel left alone on your own. No one is ever alone; their demons reside within them all the time. And so does its sentinels.

Every time I sit at the corner of my life, the past screams inside these veins and flows into tomorrow. The odds are never going to be in your favor; you have to make them. Death out of willingness creates the seeds of liveliness. Everything else just fades away. Names and places are only noises in this illusionary world. An empty request to your stars above, of where you shall be laid to rest; you drain out your fate from the good fortune and call it chance. So even though there is another you within, it is a headless love but a passion as whole as the universe outside of you ��� if only you know where to look.

 

 

 

 

 

Filed under: Amateur, Life, Love Tagged: amateur, human nature, life, love, optimism, random, self realization

Black Wings of A Grey Bird

How far can you go when you cannot go any further, asked logic.

Where does your pain find means to be strong for, asked reason.

Shall it be it now or in the fading moment of the future that may not even exist, asked doubt.

Can I be more than they give me purpose for, asked hope.

How long till I become a memory, asked the mind.

May I pull more on my broken strings and show them that love and pain is the same, asked the heart.

Is it the shadow of a sound long forgotten that I hear now, asked fear.

Am I too thick a burden to carry, asked love.

Will it be too late if I go back now and do not return, asked desire.

Did they run on my grave or dance to a loud anthem there, asked hate.

Should I burn brighter and destroy their last remaining forts, asked anger.

How can this ache pass into a loud nothingness, asked misery.

The skies hear your cries and they summon up the rain drops to drop down and wash your tears away. The sun runs beside the clouds to catch up to your lost battles and make them worthwhile. The ticking of time fades in the background, replaced by songs of the morning birds to put you at ease. The broken city lights wash your streets of all the blood you spilled last night. The drums in your heart begin to change their tune and play a soothing chorus to help you sleep. The warmth fades away from me and rises in your eyes instead, making you see. The deaf and the paralyzed move into a valley to lose their hurt and live anew. I found you broken and cold, miserable at your best, all your hope gone and your reasons blinded by the fog of hate. Come and pull the sheet of regret over my eyes now for doing all I did. The shadow of my mistakes, I do not hide it. I run and drown with it everywhere I go. So if you think all I am is a shadow of mistakes, lay me down on a bed of thorns and watch my soul bleed crimson black.

When all your questions have been asked, you stand there waiting, expecting to get all the answers you want. But how ignorantly you float on a world of lies and corruption. You can trade your soul to the devil. But can you be sure if he will not throw it in the deepest pits you know nothing of, never to be found again?

So when you think you have all the answers, and you see Life standing there, it looks at you once and that grey bird sheds away its black wings and flies away.

Yet I choose to be wide awake.

 

Filed under: Amateur, Life, time Tagged: amateur, death, disappointment, human nature, life, time, waiting

Beyond the Cuts and Bruises

Yesterday, I was a rich traveler in your deepest oceans, drowned in the waves of Love. Today, I am a wreck floating on your dried up grey shores. What we were, what we hoped to become ��� it is nothing but a hazy image painted on the crimson skies of our dawn. Locked away into an ice-cube lies my heart which you so ignorantly try to find. With eyes closed, we lie under the broken stars as they continue falling around us. Giving up was never an option for us; all we can do is continue living in this empty shell of life and passion.

I wear this mask and you think it is me. It only hides what lies beneath. It does not define me. It does not control me. It does not become me. It is made of pain hidden away from years, lies and broken smiles I eat away silently, promises made in the light of darkness, hope that has been in vain for far too long. Beneath this mask, I cut and bleed and bite away the pain and eat away the grey and walk on.

I have climbed mountains and fallen ��� but it was the climb that made me strong and not the prize at the other end. When I lie alone at night, memories seep through my blinds like silent yet heavy shadows dancing their way in. I do not make mistakes, you see. I paint them on my walls and in these veins that are filled with life but otherwise feel empty. I sit in a gloom in my back garden and when you see me there, you think it is the only place I can thrive in. The words I utter pass you by like a whispered breeze you refuse to feel on your dead skin. I sent my soul away so that the pain of the here and now and of far beyond can make me whole again. Happiness doesn���t come easy to me; it is a part I was not born with. There is a hole inside every heart that can only be filled with the power of Love ��� one that does not know the grey of misery and defeat. You see that grey and begin to think that it is the only color God painted the world in. That is how less we see, how we fear and never know anything further than that. You think just because I do not have a home, I am lost. But even the lost are on their way to be found. So I put my heart where my home is and make my own paths to be found from.

Last night, we roamed around in the world where we can be ourselves, free and wild. But when you thought I could not be more than what you see on the outside, I started giving you up. For there is no use holding on to what does not wish to be held on to.

We see a faded sun and think that it is all there is��to look upon. I am a soldier not for anyone else as much as I am for myself. Inside this mind, there is a battle field you know nothing about or ever will; it is hidden behind tall trees that bleed red and shed tears; thick clouds of survival that hover above the ground and make it hard to be seen. The sword I fight with, I molded it with pieces of a broken heart I buried under your iron sea so long ago, it is probably dried up by now. A fire burns forever on this battlefield, its flames lighting up every dark corner of my mind. What you see in me when you look into my eyes in the reflection of that fire, not me.

Filed under: Amateur, Human Nature, Life Tagged: amateur, human nature, life, love, pretense, random, strength