psychologists suggest that all humans perceive depth based on visual exposure concurrent with physical movement:
perhaps that is why I see Pluto plugging the sink when I stand to wash the dishes, swimming in the grease-and-onions water of the last lunch I ate but do not remember.
there is not much i remember these days, I say, over the clinking of ice, the crush in the blender, the sound of tapioca balls being switched between containers; there is not much I remember, and there is not much I want to.
[your eyes like rainy blue circus tents]
[lashes tightroped as though you could swing the sun of your irises along their length]
[and camaraderie built to perish.]
I have learnt to trace the pulse of a lonely rhythm and the rhythm of someone lost and someone wandering and the rhythm of broken china broken windows broken jetlagged snaglets of glass. there are oceans in my bathtub, wells in each glass of lemonade that I clink to someone or somebody’s good health over luncheons//funerals//baby showers for someone and somebodies I do not know. there is not much I remember, but people ask how you are doing and I say, over green tea, over oolong and over the sound of my head wailing ‘admit that person in you is dead, is gone, is an inert shell saying have a good day a good life a good morn’,
I am fine. I have been better. I am fine, and lately I have been dreaming.
I will wait for you in the thick of August and in the thin of it, I will wait for you, glass-eyed and steeped in Kashmiri tea, I will wait for you to escape the thicket you are in, locked in a network of angular hands and spasming lungs and a mind that refuses to see past its own menial miseries.
I see you in cups of bubble tea, eyes rimmed with sea salt and tongue laced with bitter satire and hand poised against the glass as if deciding whether or not diving would be a good thing.
[but I cannot hear you over the crush in the blender.]
when we came home early from school, it was a Thursday, I thought it looked like rain, my aunt’s car was a can of beans being rolled across Karachi streets, the sabzi wala’s vegetable cart was on fire, tipped over, and he was trying to pick the remnants of all he had off the streets: cabbage leaves crushed underwheel, and tomatoes with their insides spilling out like the intestines of a not-old-but-not-young country dragging its broken self across the streets, endometrium slit and eyes deadened from trying to pick up the remnants of all it had.
I remember tyres on the street, all ablaze, the smell of burnt rubber in our brains heralding our way home. I remember heads ducked low, the fear that spun through my body when I realized that the driver could not duck his head for fear of us, when I realised that there were more concrete pellets on the pavements than in the newest flimsy apartment complex that some sahib built on stolen land.
A roof caved in some house this morning, the newscaster yelled on the television today, and here, please have some images meant to break your pathetic hearts, because the government sure doesn’t give a fuck about anything anyway. And before we head to the commercial break-- involving shiny clothes and dancing to how fabulous XYZ’s chai tastes, because you should care--a reminder to please keep your cupboards well-stocked, because it looks like rain. and it is setting the streets on fire.
there is a strange sort of silence in a room at midnight, the rush of cold air conditioning, the tick tock of clock matching pulse, and the stiffness of joints unraveling in bed. it is not quiet--yet it is, when you think about it-- and I find myself wishing for some semblance of nonexistence to encroach my tired mind, scoop the ragged winter jackets from my open skull-- that drift across still water rushing from ear to ear, and keeping me awake.
I have often longed to slide into the narrow space between my bed and the floor, to rest my cheek against the cool marble like I did when I was a child. I long for it so much-- as though wishing a semblance of nonexistence upon myself will tire me out less frequently, as though people serve more purpose in silence, provided that they are not awake.
monotony burrows into the marrow of your bones and you bite down on it, tugging and pulling at the cartilage like kitestring. wednesday evening: the kitchen faucet running, and your eyes ready for departure-- to head off into a land made of snow; and malt dew raining from the stars.
we lemniscate. the kitchen unspools around us in orbitals of plastic, copper, rubber shoes, stringlike and sticky: it lemniscates until the sun salivates through the roof, until our skins are ravaged as one in the oppressive heat that comes from staring into one's own head out of the corner of your eyes.
i was taught that summer is drawn blinds and cool sensations behind drawn lids; summer is pulling threads out of quilts and knotting them around your wrist until skin chokes on nylon, canyons raised in the spaces your fingers trace as if to commit the single instance to memory. because summer was in the joy of things falling apart, summer was burrowing into the back of your own head, summer was wanting to raise your eyes to the sun, to rip off the blinds, to gasp for breath until you were left wanting
for a quiet exhalation.
monotony is goose feather and a kitchen monarch; monotony is a hangman weighing down my every limb and widening into a rictus every time i dream to it--quietly, eyes ready for departure, to head off into a land made of snow; and malt dew raining from the stars.
'I think something's wrong with me. I make friends, then suddenly I can't bear to be with any of them. Seems like that other me, the cheerful and honest one, went away somewhere.' - Kiki's Delivery Service [1989]
we watch the sun ladle gravy over the trees, and mother tells me how i have changed-- quietly, sadly, as though i were a seasonal in her garden that has grown purple leaves instead of flowers. i tell her i am rimmed grey like the sky, diluting into watery red glory where the sun touches it, and blazing brightly like the crown of dead leaves kissing winter goodbye. she should not worry for me; i am not a seasonal.
the sun has set on her darling from fifteen years ago and perhaps she (will grow)(may grow?) (is growing to understand) that you cannot prune a thorned shrub into bleeding roses, that we are not all evergreens in winter, or orchids--ornamental, to glow dim and glossy in the spleen of slow-coruscating dusk.
I have not been keeping up with you as well as I should be! I liked your last poem and it makes me want to watch Kiki's Delivery Service since I've been on a Ghibli binge as of late and it's lovely and so is your poetry <3
a concept: your hair woven into tatami mats, eyes gleaming like tungsten filament in an argon web-- you glow incandescent, lips stained to look as though the sun blushed when it first saw you, dipped behind your cupid's bow, and stayed there.
a concept: rushes kissing mellow soil in August ['they only choose the good seedlings, mother']: November sun, bone china teacups and resentment steeped and poured into saucers, into palms opened like parasols against April sun. ['your bone china must glimmer like starlight: as pale as Andromeda, as elliptical, as dainty-- do you not want to be like the stars?']
a concept: bone china breaks easily-- so parcel it, bind it in lace, and hide it from peering eyes. it would be perjury to suggest that 3000 degrees is nothing to a sturdy heart: your eyes dusty and mildewed where rumour touches them, the colour of animal bone ash, the subtext of old books under torchlight. [‘you are not a sturdy heart, darling: you are a woman, you are knotted limbs and slender arms and lips pursed into perpetual smiles.’]
concept: ‘you are effectively quite useless’-- you are simmering rage and wild storms riding the winter skyline, you are bone china refusing to chip, you are bound in lace, not spider-silk, arms untangling themselves and leaping past the harvest meadows. the earth steps between the moon and the sun;
an obscuration: swallow it. let the moon shine on your eyelids tonight.
map the curvature of my city's spine and you will find that it is s-shaped and pierced through with irony in a dozen places.
lift it into the light; draw a rough sketch of what you see in the ultrasound: frustration brews in close-cropped circles, in venemous ale, in double-ridged scales on the snake's back.
the sun swells in my city's belly: it is hot, and piping, and burns as though it is lined with the fire of some distant revolution.
o.2 and buries the remains in her garden (see: o.1)
the only flowers you will see here are the kind that flourish despite sharing earth with the hastily-knotted lips and swollen bodies of polythene bags regurgitating their own lungs.
i have learnt to shuffle my feet when i walk--fast, head ducked, elbows tucked as though hoping that i may evolve into something braver from this end of the street to that. the sun bakes our bones, until we are brittle and coarse, and as dispensable as packaged miswak hanging in the corner of the paan-seller's stall upholstered in red and spittle.
i see them when i cross the street--bougainvillea-- peering over the walls in the languor of foreversummer, in the false hope that someone may uproot them, that if they dream hard enough, their limbs may untangle themselves from the dearth from the death of closely-packed soil and miswak wrappers. i see them teeming in the streets, heads ducked and feet shuffling, like i am.
['but you do know--the only flowers you will see here are ornamental; very little shade, always shedding as though they grow snakeskin instead of petals.']
[we water them with moonshine these days; we water them so they will grow beautiful, feet shuffling, heads ducked, fear lynching their roots where they walk,
but we cannot stifle the sunshine of their souls.]
I have long since lost track of the things I wish to say, because there is nothing to be said for a mind that is hollowed out by its own existence.
I take a scalpel to my heart every day to search for something worth feeling, to dissect myself for all the broken records that cause a pileup on the narrow, winding roads of vein and vessel. [all these roads lead nowhere. I know this.]
but there is nothing to ease the blockage. there is only apathy, ringing discordant and vibrating along the length of my marrow. i am a fragment of myself. i am self-hate and laughable pity and mocking smiles. in this self-depecratory wonderland I am Schrodinger's cat; I am the knave of hearts who steals the tarts, who is hanged for being hungry, who is hanged because he is not self-sufficient but is self-contained, who is hanged because there is no feeling in the lies he tells, because he has been reduced to telling lies.
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