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. 

A city girl's take on chaos.

dear friend,

there could never be enough metaphors for our cities — we are sweet children of afternoons where there is more smoke than sky and evenings where there is more wind than air, sweet children of lessons in breathing, in rolling up the windows when the smoke gets too black, bringing them down when an orchestra of night plays across streets and the Sun trusts us with our streetlights so it sinks in relief behind neighborhoods made out of clay

friend, we will always understand when we are eighteen and the pages of our books tell us that some people believe that chaos breeds in order and it’s not a bad thing, that when mismatched skins and non-polar voices brush against each other, there are sounds that we can make poems out of.

so we will always know we can melt into mess, descend into anarchy within our ribcages, wage war against our silence, and that while we break we will give way to rivers of broken faith, we will give way to light and the six’o’clock grace of the breeze, and howl so that the universe will never be the same again, because it shook in places where we went and broke our fingernails, knees, bones, and hearts.

friend, don’t you see that our cities might well be the universe’s snark at the human proclivity to set things in order, to set things straight, to dress up and head there, and get here and have that so when rain accidentally trips over our streets, we are flooded, and when some things strike, we have no cover, and that the paint is always scraping and that the walls of my favourite places aren’t tremor-proof.

friend, we are sweet children of cities that never learnt to place reason above love, that never learnt how not to malfunction in places where it matters most — friend, we are sweet children of chaos, spewing infinity from our mouths in places we break, in places where we couldn’t have reached to kiss if they hadn’t broken.

friend, when we fall face first into our destinies, we collide with language to produce the world how it has never been before --

and this is my collision.

this is my love song.

Dear friend,

Did you know, when you are sending out words into the air everyone else breathes, your shadow is making just as much of a point as you are; when you raise your hand, the sun falls behind you and you are reflected in everything that is looking back at you - whiteboards, people, eyes, that sort of thing. When your charcoal silhouettes under darkened evening skies set smiles free, and relief sinks in, and there are bits of you given over and taken in, I am grateful for you.

You as you are, and you as you will be. And we, when we come together and become voices. This is for when the strength of our words and the contours of our voices come to life, and are just as alive as we are. This is for you leaving an imprint of your soul on somebody else's; this is for you being you.

I caught sunlight in my hands, and sunshine in my eye; I caught winter in my limbs and everything in me trembled when I was first making my way towards you. But there's nothing much to be afraid of. Not now, when I know there are times when you can feel complete in your skin and when you are at the spotlight in some corner of the city, and you are being heard. That is how I know that all our times will come.

I hope you always give home to somebody's words; you are wonderful for giving home to mine.

Love,
A friend. 

A Letter To No One

Dear friend,

November is cool at the finger tips; the wind is as surprised as I am when it leaves the beginning of winter on our tea coloured skins. Rosa Rabinowicz chose six words to scream when the Nazis hung a noose over her neck and disfigured face. "Tell everyone what happened here! Tell everyone what happened here!" So I wonder who is going to write about this after-dark November sky, our befuddling, bewildering cities, and the quietude of the beginning of summer settling within our homes. Today it might just be me. Tell everyone what happened here.

I walked right through the yellow shadow of a streelight, and for a moment I might have been that night light stranger to someone else. The universe's spotlight turns on us, the evening is spilled onto the streets, and we are the eyes and we are the ears and we are the hands assigned to this part of the world. And it makes us think about our hearts and how men and women, even the skins bagged with wrinkles, are home to somebody and somebody thinks of love in them. Maybe it is love that spurs heroes out of men.

I spilled the memory of you all over my city so it glistened a bit more. I looked right into the streaming headlights on an adjacent street so it looked like the entire light of the universe was heading towards us. And I found you spilled over the shadows of streelights, over the evening sky, over the moon-earring of a Karachi sunset and over the star that the barely-moon was chasing. I found you spilled in the shadow of a stalled rickshaw, the eyes of a stranger that met mine momentarily, and the guise of contemplation that the city takes on when it comes to rest.

And while we turn into the caretakers of our own histories, we will be as we have always been. And in letters and in love and in memory and in days, and in words and in our youth, we will be the proof that the world might need that we were here and we were alive.

Love,
A friend.

Spotted on your starlight skin:
One single vein
One stroke of blue

From the window I could clearly see
the branches of the forest trees
I’d go if you went too

God grant you the light of day
God grant me the words to say
The world looks good on you

Tonight will you go to sleep
And become somebody’s far off dream
A shade in heaven’s hues

Will you carry on in bones and skin
And melt into the wayward dins
So I can write you again
In spelled out words, in piano tunes

A Letter To No One.

Dear friend,

Sometimes poets hold their hands to each sides when they are talking about hearts. I find wonder in you. You are not a number. You are not somebody's measure of probability, you are not a bar chart, you are not somebody's statistics. You are flesh and skin and bones and heart and a mess of ribcage and fragility and strength and emotion. You are alive the night when the weight of the world collapses and you roll over and fall into the third dimension of existence, the space in between life and death where dreams are constellations and where we learn to fall asleep. You are not your subject assessment tests, you are made out of the flips in your stomach and the knowledge of how to hold a pen in your hand.

You are the universe's first and last. Your name and your story and your heart and your love and your joy and your pain and your nostalgia is yours and yours alone. You are your broken voice and nobody else is going to sound the same way when they sing your favourite song off tune.

I think it's beautiful how the universe thought us worthy of being created. You are one of the only gazillion things to have ever existed. And I hope when you are writing your best poem or looking at the mirror or seeing a photograph in a moment that you're not going to take, I hope you know that if you are capable of existence, you are capable of anything at all. The possibilities are infinite and so are you.

And in between so many eras, and in between all of every documented human encounter and in between the pages of our history books and in between the creation of a star five hundred years ago and in between the light on the night sky and in between seventeen hour flights from this country to that and in between oblivion and the end of world, and in between being nothing and being this - I am honoured to have known and loved you at all.

Lots of love,
Me.