middle-ground

my professor and i, we were both nervous about saying
general-iza-bility
can you say it one go, congratulations on pronunciation

there is a t.v. serial that makes me laugh,
i don't have to hear it twice, no innuendo i miss,
a history, a politics i do not have to grasp to learn, to reach, how can you not know this?
sometimes our teacher asks us about people with strange names
we do not raise our hands

we cannot talk about this t.v. serial in class because nobody knows
i imagine my awkward laughter at mahboob ahmed's play of words, i imagine a silent audience,
my laughter.

in fourth grade, we were handed dictionaries for
our mother tongues, we thought they were so special because
we didn't know they existed
we already had a Oxford one at home, its spine worn from use

we spoke middle tongues
safely lodged in the middle of of each language
far away from its unease, far away from its home
there is an urdu i cannot understand, there is an english i cannot speak

we're learning big words, secretly hoarding them like trophies but
presenting them like our own breath
there are new words everyday that slip from my tongue, that i have to look up
furtively, referents of language i have no image for, but i say yeah, yeah
yeah, the middle ground for yes and no, yeah

my heart pounds in happiness, anger and sadness,
grief and joy, the knock on skin, a call for words
and i give you the thing that i can speak
in emulation, in parody, in mimicry

there is a t.v. serial that makes me laugh,
it is old;
jehan aara's tongue is quick, sharp in the urdu
that i cannot speak.

i put air into my fists

and ask her, "how do you tell stories?"

she is not here.

my back is to the carpet, to the floor,

eyes given to ceiling, i ask 

her

cold fingertips press into the

heart of the matter 

this is not starry night, this is not quiet evening,

this is air conditioning in the Fall

spurts of my mother's snores

my back to carpet, my cold toes, fingertips

this is the day accompanying the dream,

but the dream is not beautiful, trimmed at the edges,

the dream is a dream of my own voice

telling more than asking

so i say to her,

"in repentance of our lies

in humility of our smallness

when our words, innocuous poems

fall like daggers on someone's skin,

when our products of aesthetic

are obscuring palms on our own eyes,

our stories refusals of sight,

finding out that the euphoria of

explanation 

meets distant eyes, scorned and wasted,

knowing all of this;

that is how you write stories."

she is not here,

she does not say,

my truth remains

solitary. 

shall i compare thee to a summer's day?
a Pakistani summer; heavy, thick on our bodies,
our panting bodies, vulnerable
against our own Sun the Sun wrought lethal
by poverty, loneliness
(an 80 year old woman withers under the sun, quiet
in death, and they found her much later. it was too hot to
go outside)

shall i compare thee to a summer's day you
intimate to my body, the currency of metaphors, you
how do i say you you, your claw clench ghost grasp
you leave me breathless, breathless, drawing air, scraping against
the atmosphere, that oxygen in the composition somewhere for a minute
doubtful, breathless; a wrench, a wrench, so intimate, you,
the intimacy of
disease

you, pushing world to daze, disease,
you, calling for a name, disease,
what are names against you, you, pervasive like life itself,
so what are names against you: trauma, depression, anxiety
you, who language recedes against
you, shall i compare,
you, the lethal summer, eclipse, tornado,
you,
companion.

Twenty

Dear friend,

I want to write the hallmark letter of having figured everything about myself; of saying that there are many things you learn at twenty, of having extricated myself completely from stupidity and delusion to embark on wise retrospect – when, to be honest, I can’t even figure out the latter part of this sentence. You think you have a grand metaphor of love! And then. You think you know! And then. You think your actions constitute beauty! And then. You think you know the difference between intending for yourself and intending for the world! And then. I do not really arrive at definite knowledge, but much more to think about, because things get re-named, re-arranged, somebody’s laughter splices through one of your strangest ghost-thoughts and comes apart. The ghost may be a costume. 

The thick of life, we can call it. But, and, however, also, I feel the collapse of boundaries in accumulated wisdom. Sometimes I know I can trace the boundaries of my limbs and find comfort in things I am yet to learn. The universe is also home to my mistakes, all of them, days charging over me sequentially like I have a duty yet to the life I have to live. This knowledge of body is new-found though; some days it is crushed, some days it is growing. 

And the life that we have to live. I am trying to align myself to an honesty, an honesty towards what I feel and what I know as opposed what I would like to feel and what I would like to know, so that I can navigate around you, about you substantially, and not like a dream of my own self. 

Seismic shifts; adequacy, achievement, glory are still our dreams. Some days when the coherence of things does not hold, I want to write to you about the things we grew up with; so we grew up with wind filling up our clothes, so we grew up with staying to the side of the street, so we grew up with eyes concentrating on details of pebbles and stones that will not matter, so we grew up with millions of undocumented moments of breathing. Maybe this cannot be constructed into beauty, or consequence, but they also register as crucial moments of life as we have known it. The durability of the in-betweens. 

So if I say to you that we born in both decay and in vitality, and in combinations of both, then that is my offering to you of comfort. An assurance that things and people and we have not been beautiful in constancy, and an assurance that continuity is not broken by decay. Things continue to grow, and so do we. 

May you bloom. 

Love,

Me. 

mirrors

dear friend,

i'm learning
that mirrors are compelling
things -
and then i stand and
i stand
in complete reflection
in complete summation
the flux made whole
the silent, languageless composition
of body

i'm also learning
the shame of
disintegration
of constantly negotiating
being and becoming
of sometimes pretense
of sometimes lie
of sometimes overstepping airs
of sometimes
over-spilling
of sometimes
being and becoming at the wrong places and
wrong times

i'm also learning
places that rescue shame
places that make pathways out of guilt
places of Understand
places of Overcome

i'm also learning
escape
i'm also learning
staying

perpetual
impermanence

but
then the mirrors turn on us
then we turn on ourselves
to see the genius
of the flux made whole
the silent, languageless composition
of body
the relegates of language
of seeing things Exact
and
silenced forever by words

this will not go down in history

this is for your about-to,

you can't wear your almost like validity.

tragedy is
big.
(not almost)
change is
big.
(not wavering)
victory is
glory.
(not gloriously
futile)
 
but i see you unfinished, your impact is a grand total of me, but i see you unconcrete, your lunge into corners, and i see you dual and in distance, the things we are, the things we want to be. we are discovering things that will not go down in history, we are discovering how to shoot eyesight into places we thought wouldn't be so home, we are discovering how to tunnel into others for nothing but to stand like tourist in front of museum doors. we are making things of inconsequence, like landmarks out of people, like questions on sundays, like things about each other.

i see you in almost, in transition, in a learning that greys and burns and blooms in alternation, in change, in autumn and spring, i see you while you are your own range, the paradigm, the shift, and the still.

may you stay.

i am not sinking

dear friend,

sometimes this awareness of being alive comes and rests in the air of my throat, and I can almost swallow, but I am not sinking. 

we are as halo as we can be in the language we are made out of, and in the language made out of us. we are queens of light-outs, we are kingdoms of midday hair, we are freedoms in our flickering lights when the voltage breathes in and out of  bulbs

 we are seeded balance, a skin-made strength, a spinning space in grand schemes, a subtraction from all else, darts of fate now learning what shoulders can do, how bones can bend, like pages, close and open like folds, like pages made out of body

 and when we throw our heads back, and give, and just give, then we are so unheard and so heard and all the spaces bridge and we are such a part of 

everything

my heart is finding its breath again; whirlwind words from point a to point b, from this bone to this bone; ya rab, ya rab, ya rab

(the answers build, the laughter slips)

 our gazes forever trained to sky, our verses forever made out of the luck of a bird tunnelling into the air between tree branches

 and the climax: always one breath that brings soul to your lips; almost, almost, and all the parts of the universe fit,

and so do we,

and so do we. 

the palms of winter are pressing now

the wind has lost its fiery vow

the flames are smoke

the water ice

and you have left this deep crevice

i keep finding between my bones

the summer doors are closing now

and memory is folding how

the day welds in 

and becomes a thin

wedge of life 

and now we wake into a newer dream

and flow into this seamless stream

(that will not mend) 

of discovery that all our odds and ends

will be taken by the storms 

A Letter To No One.

 Dear friend,

I drowned my 7 AM bones and daydreams in a soft lullaby about forgetting. And that is when I miss you and love you. When the world stalls on Sundays and morning light sifts through into our rooms, and it stalls the sleepy darkness giving way to day, and I am hidden by blanket, bed and bones, and the universe rakes through our hair, and I am awake to see it, I want to cry that we can swallow everything whole, cement into fate while defying city dreams still flit in our eye-lids behind the back of our minds, like how the night before we were driving home and a stream of headlights bore into my eyes to give company to stray thoughts and dreams backpacking across our skins. 

Dear friend, did you know that sometimes humans forget the memory of their pains, so they don their aches over and over again, and if you ask yourself, would you readily give over everything that makes your prayers your prayers? So I build from the pits of our stomachs, and from days that leave nights in our eyes like someone’s streaming mascara; we can be sad summations of our skins, but I swear to God, when you break, you will flow. The most beautiful songs were written for someone, because of someone, so there’s something to be said about how things will live in other ways than now. 

And I don’t know how to say that the world intervenes, and that things will make us cry, and that some dreams don’t come true, and that happiness is fleeting; I only know how to know that, I only know how to recognize in other words and other hearts the same knowledge and we don’t say, but everyday we dive heat-first into things that are blurring at the edges, and the things that are simply leaving. And I don’t know how to fix that, and the biggest thing I’ve ever learnt is that I can’t fix that, not on the pragmatic side of the scale, nor on the positive side of the scale. I only know that we will be, and we will be, and we will be. And I will love you for it, I promise you. 

Love,

Me. 

A Letter To No One.

Dear friend,

I think I will always choose you over the impossibility of you, I think I will keep choosing you over the weights in my skin, and I think I will keep choosing you again and again. Some days we are lined up against the shore, and everything is still for a moment, and the sun has clawed a few strokes across a sad, black sky and the ocean rushes forward and my eyes collide with the horizon and I am suspended in the universe’s ways for a moment in time, and then I can feel almost feel the earth shifting, the courage of time to plunge into night-time darkness, the Sun always the impossible suitor that coaxes the earth out of the black again and again. And so I will learn from the Sun and the earth, and so I will always pluck out my metaphors from the space between the sky and so I will keep finding you in everything.

I’ve been learning to save the sunshine in my pictures, and goodness in my pocket, so there is never dearth of things that keep me alive. Sometimes my head is bent over a book and I am sitting into a niche cut into the wall of a building with a friend, and calls to prayers and distant cries echo in grey columns, and a summer wind is consuming me entirely, and suddenly I am in love with everything again. Suddenly I almost reach out to trace the sunwashed streets of my city, suddenly tree leaves are leaning sideways to say onwards, onwards and suddenly in a burst of sunshine, my eyes see the world half-dipped in sun, and I want to brush away the furrow in the eyebrows of a street stranger and lend a woman a prayer and it is okay to be what I am, whatever I am. 

I think I love you broken, I think I love you whole.

Love,

Me.