Life in all its inadequacies

Tonight there's the quiet , the woman in the temples have stopped weeping and the sky is submitting itself to the dawn with resignation underneath it's breath and my head is finally clear enough to think of you in all its clarity. The air is alive and my lungs are filled with all the words I did not say.

Things I have learnt this year:
no human is one hundred percent good or one hundred percent bad

ironically ,emptiness can fill you up

Things I worry about :
I do not trust men enough to live happily in a  heterosexual marriage
I don't trust God like I used to
I don't pray like I used to
When I shut my eyes it takes a lot of self control to want to wake up
I'm not ready for death either
The person I am in love with is an illusion
My childhood has scarred me permanently

Things I understand now :

I will probably never not love you
It's probably never over in my head

Some things just aren't meant to be
And you were never meant to be mine.

Resurrection

Her name speaks of revolution.
Underneath her bones is an abandoned city.
Waking up to injustice

The first time you kiss her like an apology  she tastes like forgiveness
The second time she tastes like blood.

Her name is an anthem in your head
of a country that refused you refuge

Her name sounds like love to you

Your name sounds like revenge,
like gunshots,
Fire
Rage in her mouth , a trigger shaped like a swear word
and a barrel full of broken promises
the bullet shells clinking to the ground
Echoing anything but forgiveness

In the war inside your head
You realise your punishment
Is living with yourself.

In the war inside your heart
There is no victor
Your body is an abandoned graveyard
of all the dreams that died in you
marching like soldiers to their death
Your mind refuses to grant you refuge

In the war inside your bones
Your demons are waiting to swallow you whole
To shred up your soul

Your reckoning has come, he wears black ,
he calls himself judgment day
Spitting stones and shooting missiles your way
You're on your knees praying for an escape, paying for it with regret
But you're confusing escape with death.

How many miles have you walked for men that never held your feet in their lap? - Warsan Shire

Men.
Snakes.
Sexual predators.

Vice in their eyes , lies tainted with cigarette smoke in their mouth , the world lying flat in the palm of their hands, their eyes on your chest, the curve of your hips, watching you out of the corner of their eyes , their tongues curving around the word baby, their lips pretending they're sealed, though they'll splinter your reputation in a second,  their hands everywhere they shouldn't be.

You sit with these boys in class,you take the bus home with these men , you go to work clocking in hours with them ,

but  god forbid they see you as anything but a conquest, 
a mission,
an escapade
a foreign flavour they crave,

they try to get you to fall in love,
Smiling when you fall and break your face against the cold stone pavement of reality
telling you falling in love hurts while they
lick the blood off  your face
But honey, love doesn't taste like stones in your mouth and humiliation

they want the landscape in the background of their homecoming story to be the wind in your hair ,
they want your name on a list of 'achievements' next to your underwear, 

they see you , and god forbid they think of anything apart from your breasts,
god forbid they think of anything resembling consent,

honey, what a shame you weren't born with independence between your legs like them,
what a shame you're soft down there like a pillow to soak in their unwanted advances ,
their sugar, their baby ,

their smiles like poison dragged across your mouth ,
their appetite for the syrup in your tongue unquenchable, you gasp ,
you turn away. But you.

you shock them.

A girl with a mouth full of words like razor sharp blades,
ripping through their veins,
breathing living speaking rejection,
the audacity your speech bleeds,
the shock that you claim your body your own by covering it completely, 
declaring it not theirs to look at
to touch
to speak about
to think about

and now the vile monsters are clawing to get at you , to touch, to get a taste, they fetishise your fucking toes, your feet,  they imagine worse, they jack off to the way you walk , they open their mouth to swallow you whole ,and these primal beasts cannot process your brain , your thinking , your natural innate urge to say no, no , your inborn instinct to kick them in the crotch and set their lungs ablaze with dismissal , and risk waking the sleeping dragon, you take the risk every single time, even though it could take your life.

They still couldn't spell consent after you were done with them.

Slander

You reach the basement. The wall is painted a nauseating bright yellow. You've heard yellow is supposed to be cheerful, you stare at it trying to soak the happy in.
The sun is blinding , the coffee is bitter , breakfast means entering the mess where strangers look at you, prejudice colouring the corners of their eyes , rumours blurring their vision of you.
You look away.

Across the road , next door, everywhere are people who are free of guilt, poison soaked tongues spinning their lies into the grapevine, vilified sentiments taking up all the space in their throats, using slander as arrow poison.

Why do you keep running , he still asks ; it's because it's  harder to hit a moving target.

Constantly looking over your shoulder , sleeping uneasy as as a hundred tongues wag to the tune of a thousand lies , lies that crawl their way up your back when you lie down,  sneak into your mind when you're unguarded, you wake up to find your posture so defensive , fingers scrunched in a fist,  ready to lash  out.

Lies that haunt you in the eyes of strangers , your mouth is halfway in a smile when you meet them before you slice your lips against  them, your smile wiped off your face with blood.

Lies building up a reputation when you're assisting the boy next door who lost his friend to suicide, rumours about your best friend in spending the night with an unmarried man, she starts, she's hurt, your curl yourself around her the next time she sleeps, like you could protect her when you were eaten up by the million mouths yourself .

Sneaking in through the slit under your door , playing with the strands of your hair , finally reaching the tympanic membrane , red fills your vision, you've burst finally , carrying  your mouth , your guilt free heart, your tired ears, you take them home,  you collapse .

You empty your best friend's room of sharp objects before you leave .

lost cause

Hello there, old friend, I've been flinging my heart at the mouths of strangers who couldn't swallow brokenness, I've been falling in love with the lonely highway, counting the kilometres that will take me home, shutting the prayers in my chest asking for one.way.ticket.please.

tuck away these dreams spun of starlight under your eyelids , dawn isn't calling you, not today.

You
You who
Who thinks too much
Who cares too much
Who loves too much too relentlessly
Who cries too much

You who have buried darkness in your heart over and over but its ghost never fails to haunt you
You giving birth to the idea of giving up,

hold
on
one
breath
longer
You ,still giving your heart to the edge of the sky and praying it won't be flung into oblivion ,
You ,still making love to yesterday's mistakes, still afraid to let.go. , afraid to cause pain so much that your skin is broken,reworn inside out and you're still stringing yourself up by morning  trying to be there for people who don't know what being there is like
You , so dependable
Rapidly becoming so expendable.

I swallow the words like broken glass and walk away ; remember when you were raw with me and we had the ocean at our feet and a roof, a heart , a town , a person to call home ?
Have you stopped waiting for them who can't wait to leave you behind,
Have you stopped mistaking pain for poetry and this madness for love?
Has the instinct of self preservation saved you from the cruelty of unrequited affection , not yet , no.
Your heart is too big for the world to hold ,
and all the people couldn't fill you so you filled it with stones ,
and find the courage to step into the ocean and finally
Let
Go

Razor blade mouth

She was four feet , a vision in pink , eight years old , her birthday was three days ago , her father used to tell her she could be anything she wanted to be.

They had a quaint garden in the heart of city , the first act of rebellion Baba taught her. Her teacher, Mrs Azmi said that she was too loud for a little girl , her tongue was far too sharp , her words too many but  Baba laughed it away, as always.

She was ten when the city splintered its spine on the bloodthirsty breath of a tyrant and the collateral damage of politics , her house quivered,her miniature garden collapsed, her father was buried under the rubble of time and blood . Her legs were torn from her body , her father ripped from her soul.

Eternities later , her name is called , her physical form is taken to a makeshift refuge,  a white man with stony eyes glances at her , unfamiliar , foreign, he asks her questions she cannot understand, she stares at him. PTSD,  he mouths to the nurse.
"The scarf," a lady says, " you can take it off now."

A reign of oppression has ended, is what they say of the city in smoke in the papers the next day . The bombs liberated you. Liberated you from the oppression of your religion, the oppression of your male family members, the cloth you were forced to wear around your head , we saved you.
What ?
Rage wells in her tongue , razor blade mouth they used to call her, Mrs Azmi and the kids at school , baba as he ruffled her hair but her mouth is shut forever, Mrs Azmi is probably dead, baba is locked in the afterlife , his body too torn up to recognise.

If she could speak she'd say Baba told me I could be anything I ever wanted. Baba saved me from everything , everything except the explosion that tore him to shreds. If baba were he'd say , stand up for yourself , binti.
But I lost my legs to the bomb.
Speak up for yourself.
But post traumatic stress disorder skinned the words from the roof of her mouth, churned them into gasps that dissolved at the base of her throat. 

We've saved you the horrible woman insists,  this is what you really wanted. An escape from your father and the system trying to strangle your voice with the hijab around your neck and your head, your head that is too brainwashed and still believes religion and god will save your broken  heart even though it didn't save your dad.

No, she tries to say , baba never shushed me , the scarf around my neck didn't rip my femur bones  in half and nearly kill me , you did that ,this war against my people did that, this war took my tongue and my will to live and baba told me I could be anything but I can't be anything because I can't walk and I can't be anything because I can't speak, god gave me everything in the world but you took that away from me ,  all she wanted was to shut her eyes and dream the white woman away , all she wanted was an escape, a bullet to the brain , like a ticket to the grave , the white woman wouldn't go away ,she wouldn't understand her scarf wasn't oppressing her as much the stench of blood on the white woman's hands, as much as the shrapnel pooled at her feet, the hole where her home and heart used to be.

1, 2 inhale .

Time is burying disappointment in my veins like the bitter bloodred of betrayal , did you know the oxygen you needed to live can leak into your arteries , block them and cause a part of you to die ?

It's called an embolism.

I think about the hundreds of text messages flying through the airwaves, racing through space and time to reach friends and fathers and lovers, messages that didn't reach in time , messages that were read after the senders were shot dead , last words entombed in fragility, messages that were still never replied to.

" I'll call you," she swears and I try to not think about all the birthdays she's never called me, all the times I've meant nothing, waiting for the phone to ring like a sickness to end.

Take me to the city of dust and bones , a childhood spent in heaven. The flight is achingly familiar , remember when they gave Patchi on national day ?
Remember how you said you'd always be there ?
Remember when our words slipped between borders and countries , time and land separating us like never before, and you said you couldn't do it and you were sorry .

In forensic science we learn about how most murders are lust murders and how close rapists are to their victims , how the  food that sustains you can lodge in your larynx till it suffocates you to death.

I can't recall the last time you texted I love you too back and I can't help but wonder if I was too drunk loving the poison of your memories to realise they were killing me , sucking the life out of me , the worst kind of betrayal .

Dementia

Reading countless posts which talk about how the generations most remarkable feature is that they've lost the willingness to live and aside from art and the culture of melancholy that enraptures  our vacuous minds,all I can think is , if death was a gift, what makes you think you deserve it ?

Sick hearts chasing delusions , we're the twenty first century of a world meant for destruction at its own hands by people who forgot humanity before they learned how to crawl.

You've prayed so much to be free you can feel the tons of unanswered calls pressing up against your eyeballs like a weight the sides of your skull don't want to hold any longer and you're thinking of freeing yourself in the shower , freeing yourself as you walk home , you're thinking of the rope he wound around his neck and how his parents begged you not to do it to yours and you're wondering , am I really all that different ?
You're wondering if his family can remember his face because you're beginning to forget your family's names and you've been so far so long , you're trying to convince yourself you wouldn't matter and they can forget. You've made homes of roads that moved on, who is the weakest ?

Anger is no longer distinctive , I can feel it every day,corrupting my senses , burning through my veins , reducing me to viciousness , stripped down to bare animalistic desires , you think you're different but so does everybody else, but you're all monsters , you've all learnt to break hearts, just different kinds.

Strike two

She has eyes strikingly hazel and dusky skin that reminded him of sunsets and the flush of blood pulsing underneath her  neck, so very alive and warm. Some days it feels like the earth is swallowing her and even the ocean can't understand the emptiness in her, some days stone preaches to her heart about softness .

He imagines his mouth on her skin and she pictures freedom from him and his persuasive eyes .

She's  counted her blessings on the stars and the sky rent asunder to show her the stars weren't enough .

Except for him , the burning desire that pulsed through her arteries ,her heart skips a beat , lust calling her name and claiming her soul in a rush of impassioned mistakes.

Apologies couldn't keep anyone sane but she would find that the hard way. Suffering is a form of life she had never pictured until she had to live it. Patience bent into her bloodstream , the caverns of her veins echoing with decided resignation.

Only God loves you enough to forget the devil that walks around with your heart and name.

RIP to another soul lost to the obscurity of the afterlife

Death catches you unexpected , like a fog you walk in to to find yourself blinded and confused.
I walk into the kind of silence only death can invoke, murmurs pressing up against each other , sighs escaping tired lips , everyone treading the dreaded path nobody chooses to walk on, prayers pulsing through veins that are now acutely aware of how very much alive they are.
I woke up this morning to that fog. To be reminded of how grateful I should be for life and everything that is worth living for.

you've only got yourself and your insanity

But you make it messy when it's going good. You make it all so messy and your face blurs every memory in me until I'm standing next to you and I used to mean something to you.
What satisfaction do you get living your pathetic life glued to people in virtual worlds who don't give a damn ? What fun is it being a fan of a game, I never understood and what pleasure did you get in selling out and god you are so beautiful I wish you wouldn't.  I wish you wouldn't sell out because you are worth so much more.  I wish you wouldn't sell your soul to the devil and I wish your face wouldn't break my heart everytime I looked at it. You've insistently consumed me and I'm tired of your flames girl and I've been burnt so thoroughly that I'm all but a handful of ashes in your hands and can you please let go of me.
You're a beautiful lie.
It's a trap and everything you've been banking on is going to slip and give way beneath your feet and you'll fall and break like the delicate skin and bones you are but god you act so tough you've almost deluded yourself into believing the lies you project.
You're worth more than this.
You're worth more than this.
You deserve more than this and I know you said sorry but my heart still breaks.
Why did you change like the tides
Why did I open the doors to damnation for you ?
I still remember when you said the old you was dead. And she is. And it aches like this  because I miss her everyday .
You've no right to say you still care and wreck me like this.
It's so difficult  to take care of someone so fickle.
It hurts to look at your face and I can't explain that and it hurts to think about you in ways I shouldn't and it hurts to have thought you changed only to realise that you became much worse.
Vacuousness isn't appealing on you.

Fine lines

I can remember not knowing what a headache feels like , asking my friend once if the throbbing in my head was one , triumphant I'd finally gotten a headache and I could understand.

I could never understand your nuances , 3 fucking revolutions over and your name is the drug that keeps my brain wanting more at 1 30 am. I've forgotten how to unlove  you because I got so busy getting so good at it and now everything you do crushes me and i can't undo the damage I've self inflicted ,can you not be so inconsistent,  you're eating my heart raw and inside out , all I am is a memory, and I'm tired of being forgotten by you.

Now you know how heartbreak tastes in your mouth , you breathe in the acid of absentia , you might as well set fire to your lungs, you wouldn't know the difference honey, you wouldn't know.

Why you should leave when they say "I'm busy "

You are constructed of your parents dreams and passion , an extraterrestrial intermingling of fate and coincidence , your existence is a gift to everyone's life you've touched and you aren't perfect or flawless.
But you don't need to be.
Walk away from people who dismiss your imperfections as flaws instead of acknowledging them as unique manifestations of an individual existence .

Walk away from people who make you feel like you're missing a limb or a spark or something that makes you interesting enough to hold their curiosity, you are not created as entertainment for the masses , your existence was never intended to please any mere earthling , you are an amalgamation of everything you believe in and everything that you do , you are too damn precious for someone to not be able to make time for you.
Walk away from someone that isn't in awe of your absolute magic.
Walk away from people who aren't committed to unconditional love.
Walk away from people who are too "busy " to acknowledge the miracle that you are.

Santa Monica

Find her in the wrecked ship she passes off for a heart , find her when she's sleeping alone in the house she cannot call a home , find her in alleys behind parked cars, in between the cigarettes you hate , find the dreams she drowned in the bottom of a jack Daniels on the way to yet another party full of faces  she doesn't recognise , men she doesn't know brushing up against her , their perfume too strong against her marijuana soaked memories of you , find her when she's sober, look her in the eyes and see if to still recognise the girl you called your friend. Find her behind eyeliner that is too harsh against the ebony of her skin , behind the walls she has built with broken bones , find her behind the facades she has constructed , find her on her way to drown her sins in the sea,take her home. 

Find her stumbling drunk , clutching the sink like a drowning man would reeds , holding her hand to her throat , puking put the poison last night chose to force feed her, find her when her demons are ripping her limbs apart , find her blades and protect her wrists from her fanatic attempts , save her from the chaos of her mind at 2 am when you're clinging to pills to escape the pain of seeing her shipwrecked lungs zoom in on you and call it home ,save her from the blind instincts to turn to people who would eat her raw and bleed her dry , save her from the burning in your heart when you look back and find she's found a safe house and it doesn't include you.

I wish we all could make it

On Thursdays we wear sadness like  a suffocating cloak that threatens to put out the light of our very existence . I've crossed oceans to be able to stand here and the ground is giving way to my feet and no face looks familiar except that of death .
I've left promises I've broken to myself under my feet as I'm walking away from them,breathing in the smoke of burnt perseverance , I've lost the road on the way home , and it's raining uncertainty and clouded with a chance of corrosive heartbreak , didn't I tell you not to break down my walls,  they were to keep my demons from devouring the earth after tasting my soul and declaring it dead. Didn't I tell you the girl with the copper skin will tear away your resistance,  didn't I tell you sin would consume you, didn't I tell you to forget her and the poison she made you eat and called it love. Don't save me sugar , there's no saving the dead.

Promises don't have expiry dates.

She can't tell me the ocean doesn't want to swallow me and I don't need to breathe but I've dreamt of destruction , I've made it my fate with my fingertips , I've refused to let this sadness eat me whole and so it has broken me down before devouring me piece by piece

Tell me why she won't look me in the eyes, do they reflect so blindingly everything she's lost 4 years and three heartbreaks  ago? She pushes me out and I'm left with her perfume and the memory of a summer day bright in my mind when her skin was warm and her face glowed with innocence. We've come a long way from home honey and I've lost my tears to the world that has bled me dry and you've lost your faith but we didn't have to lose each other , not like this.

The paper crinkles against my cheek , and I wake up in starts, I exist but to dream of her lately , it seems, a few thousand miles away, my best friend's getting married and I can't hold her hand and it breaks me a little inside, California is light years away and I'm typing congratulations when my heart breaks for the fourth time.

I've heard someone say that in what they've seen of life , it can only be said that it goes on, and some find that comforting but God sometimes I wish it didn't. That I could put a stop to this earth spinning and time winding years and distance between us and never truly letting us be who we once were.  Her promises were empty , my declarations of love magnified  but I'm here waiting , till time eats me alive .

The big black nothing

But have you counted the poisoned arrows that flew from then venom between her jaws , I've given up on the road to normalcy when her heart was lade bare in front of me and all that it beat out was hate , I've counted blades and silently swallowed them to protect myself from the screams tearing out of my lungs.

A violation, of the common code friendships hold, I've scarred myself walking on coals, bending backwards through the fire and trying to stay alive, I've let go of lifeboats and oxygen masks, all I need to survive is the truth, and when it hit me with force of a point four bullet , I bit my tongue. I'd rather live for the truth than love a liar and you were a fantasy built on bullshit , and when you succumbed to the strings of honesty , it did not hurt to watch your act fall apart .

I am intoxicated by my pain and she was drunk on love and we
were
a
mistake

I'm sorry I'm this weak but I've got her name on my brain and her voice in my lungs , I can remember everything she said to this day , and I can remember when she stopped saying anything at all.

One day you'll be hung over from all the poisonous mistakes you inhaled and when you're dangling on the edge puking your guts out , corroded from all the toxins they fed you, bittersweet broken promises and empty nothings , you will find God and let him take away the pain

Is square one to be my destiny forever ?

I shut my eyes against these blatant untruths , I swear when he looks at me I can count the stars strewn across his eyes , every dream he gave up on etched in the lines on his forehead , his disappointment flooding this room with a sadness so thick you could suffocate in it. his eyes are weakened,  staring at the computer screen, he almost forgets to not let me see him limp , he breaks my heart every time he gets on a flight to leave again.

I've walked this empty road with bleeding soles only to end up in hell  ,  the demons are alive and playing with my mind again,the walls threaten to envelop me and the fight has drained out of my fists, does the sea complain about always returning to the same shore? Does the sky weep for all the children it returns to the sea, is there a story that ends in anything but death ?

Will these questions ever really stop spinning around in sickening circles in my head, will I ever see her face again? Don't let slip those  honey sweet words from your charismatic mouth and charm me out of mind again , I'm begging you .

Nobody ever tells you how lonely it gets trying to stay alive , and honey I could cup your face in my hands and lie to you just as easily as they lied to me when they said I'll survive , but I have too much poison spilling out of me from all the toxic people I've made the mistake of loving .

Don't trust the people who claim to love you , promises won't make the pain of their absence any easier when they end up leaving , and they always do

Pain should be stashed where no one can reach it

Hello there , old friend. Smoke screens and coffee steam and two screens separate this voluntary virtual meeting between us . Let us proceed to have yet another empty conversation where our words are pregnant with insinuations and we care more than we know we should and yet we let on nothing in this nonchalant exchange of nonsensical pleasantries. The word we really want to and need to speak are dancing underneath our tongues as our fingertips slide underneath letters . Here's everything I wanted to say to you and I never really will.
I wish we used to be the kind of friends we were five years ago , I wish you'd pick up when I called, I wish you'd text back and not shut me out , I wish what I did to save myself didn't break you till you wanted nothing to do with me.
Have a wonderful birthday , I wish you were spending it with me.

I don't know where I belong , but I know that this is not it.

What if we are all just one breath away from being the true sum of insanity and passion that we really are,  when circumstances take a knife to the masks we wear so often , spilling blood and ego and character in its truest , naked form, lying supine and vulnerable to the mockery time makes of us , the fluctuations between animalistic desire and spiritual submission , the absolutely wildly lonely crossroads between the nafs and the rūh where nothing promises to save you except the tragedies that He taught you the truth by.