///

the world had already put a cloak of haze over itself to remind me that beautiful things never last, like i’m someone who’s meant to cling onto that beauty forever, because only the beauty that has passed can make this present ugly world a little more beautiful.

in front of me sits the white man that smells like weed and shit, his blue irises blown wide by his black pupils like black holes as he lures the girl in front of him into them. he wishes he could jump across the aisle and fuck her right there—even if she resists or screams on this double decker, nobody will hear her (like me). i know men very well, like you, especially.

i walk on broken feet wrapped in leather and more black nylon through the haze. you’re looking at me like you know something, or like you’re wondering on what occasion this bitch with her smokey eyes and grey lips walks the streets of colorful nightingales—feather-light body and yet the heaviness i carry, you wouldn’t know, you’d only feel it but never give it a name. the colorful couple that walks parallel to me—they too wouldn’t know what it’s like to have a soul fragmented into more than halves, and each one pulls you toward a different direction like a cyclical storm. one day you’re down to nothing but a melting brain while you kneel in submission as a man strokes his pride, the next you’re kneeling down to god on ice while counting all your sins on the rosary for someone who doesn’t even exist anymore at this hour, on this day—in this cycle.

///

withdrawal at the ATM again; cash (weed) is the currency to help the helpless—from addiction to the addicted that lay on the streets. perhaps i’d get fucked by a man for money and give all the money to the woman laying in her own piss just to tell her to get her up for once and do something with her life, because that’s what they all say—your pain doesn’t make you unique, all that you’ve endured doesn’t make you deserving of a helping hand, so get up and help yourself—and cut some slack for the passersby who don’t want to help in any way but by dropping a useless coin in your empty starbucks cup. fuck you and your little starbucks cups, that’s all i can think of when i see it, even in your misery—it only reminds me of those obnoxiou white girls that live in the moment, just the way i envy it; boyfriends and pretty little party dresses—and their fucking starbucks cups, doesn’t it taste like blood with all that sugar and capitalism you drink everyday?

///

the bus reeks again of weed and shit, and the man that sits in front of me, cross-eyed, his hungry eyes already undress me as he tells me about how he’ll light this bus on fire and that nobody fucking knows a thing about him. somewhere in that shit-covered mess, something touches close to him. his nails—gone and bloodied, his hair sticks to his head, and he rocks back and forth in front of me, playing with his black lighter as it burns his fingers even more—it feels good doesn’t it? or perhaps you don’t feel it at all. the coolness of the window feels more liberating than oxygen as another man sits beside me. he watches me apply my lipstick, either out of shock or bitter manly irony, as the drug-blown man tells me how much he hates the fucking planet while mr. nobody beside me looks me up and down—all i can see through my mirror is nobody despite the three bodies that sit in the corner of this bus.

i dress and adorn as if i’m heading to streetwalk, when all that ruminates in my head is how many more bills downtown will take from me. one day it’s a dealer, today it’s a pharmacist. no matter how much armor i wear—makeup, perfume, lace, seduction—deep down i’m rotten to the core. even in the thrill of it all, another woman can walk away from a room well-fucked and somehow more glamorous than ever, and then there’s my rotting soul that births an illness from every bit of good that life can offer me. whether good is red roses in holy water or leather belts on bare skin, spiritually demiromantic or hedonistically masochistic—it always turns into poison, no matter how good it feels. i repeat every word of care said to me, yet it slithers on my tongue rather than melting like a sweet sugar cube and eventually a sweet memory.

hurt is the only language i have ever known, pain is the sweetest pleasure i’ve ever felt in this oh-so-complex world. it all exists yet it never exists in me.

///

early 2000s nostalgia makes me nauseous again—the mall that’s so empty yet so full, the one restaurant and drugstore that keeps it alive. i hand over my health card with a picture of a veiled girl to the pharmacist; she does a double-take. another four bills as i pay the price for hedonism—mother curses her hedonist brother who loses his money to gambling while i gamble with every fragment of myself every day, paying the price for games people played who don’t even exist anymore.

i shop for lipsticks again. beaming jim would collect different types of cigarettes with different flavors and leaves—for now all i’ve got is lipsticks. his cigarette-smoke breath was my air, mine to keep. here’s a lipstick in cherry, a stain on the cheek of another man—a gift for him to keep, a part of myself to give away, who will no longer exist outside this cyclical mania.

the fresh-off-the-boat man looks at me like i’m the last meal in this empty mall of fluorescent lights and tiled floors and closed shops. i tear my name—that never belonged to me—and my number that belongs to anybody but me. and these pills—familiar enough, so they must be mine.

i erase every proof of myself existing in downtown—matter of fact, my existence from this day will be gone. the proof fades away in this haze; the scent of him starts to fade from my skin, my curls lose their shape, my makeup smears—yet in the moment it turns into photographs, because somehow in this ugly life there’s still art. even in these drug-filled, zombie-walking streets—you see two kinds of zombies: girls blown out on heroin with broken legs and mini party dresses, or the fentanyl-jacked man whose pants fall below his ass crack, riding public transit to find a home like mr. nobody.

///

the sky is black, but not the comforting pitch-black that lulls you to sleep—the haze is bright enough to remind you that god exists, that hell exists, and you’re living in it. the smell of weed and chinese food from the seat across, with your little styrofoam takeout boxes and your little coach purses as you laugh off the bus—but the one who knows even an ounce about the girl sitting in front of her with her bandaged legs, she watches my face pucker at the bitterness of the weed, and she knows—she knows. yet she will never know. but she saw. that’s all that mattered.

i walk under the wet sky as it cries silently; i do the breathing for it. if i’m not vocal then who am i? the way my heels hit the ground and every head turns, the way this black cloak demands attention yet nobody wants to save themselves for a place so dark. this voice of mine—so loud yet so silent—it’s like everyone can hear me, yet nobody talks back—

///

—i tell the reflection—helpless reflection—through the black mirror, my screen.

who was present? i wouldn’t know. there’s a girl in me who clings to hope like it’s a sliver, and it always bites back—masochist at her core even when she gambles with hope.

this is god teaching you a lesson. girls like you need to be taught a lesson.

do you remember me again in the dead of march?

///

i tell father i won’t be home tonight. i throw every moral and shackle down this balcony. i’m at the top, like a god—not god, never god—but someone who only feels a sense of self when they can control the world the way god does. but remind me again, god—through a strike of lightning in the hotel room, through the torn-open bloody deer on the street—that you exist and you are in control of all the good and bad, never me. i was only meant to be thrown like a welcome mat to greet a new guest of bloodshed into this love-hotel heart of mine.

i feel like hürrem sultan at the top, as if the world is mine for a little while everyone’s asleep or high and i walk under fluorescent lights. i find the most claustrophobic corner so the walls can hug me for tonight, because i’ve stripped off my dress of hedonism—i’m nobody, i’ll blend in with the walls easily today.

this is what it’s like to feel like the world you walk in is maybe yours tonight. the next hour will remind you why it’s not.

///

a full bus after another as the phone keeps ringing. under this haze i remember you again—secretly hoping you’d come back even though life has well-assured me you won’t. that this time, while i’m high, you’ll take me into your arms, kiss me until you taste all the weed-flavoured pain on my tongue—and this time it won’t be an overdose. it will be resurrection.

i don’t know about the life i’m living outside these buses anymore.

i’m alone, going back to a home where i’m alone again. the world begins to blur away, and in this darkness there is a little bit of solace.

///

this time i’m alive as we skip past my stop—you don’t mind, do you? in this darkness i sit on your leather jacket and lean on your shoulder. i don’t know who you are or who i am, neither do i know where we’re going—maybe that’s why i’m here.

///

driver, you forgot to stop at my stop… did you?

///

or was i never here to begin with? so i ask another man, then another, and another, and it turns out i really was here. i departed somewhere far a while ago.

///

my room is cleaned again, but this isn’t my room or my craft. my mind can’t find its way even in sobriety—perhaps it’s too perfect. perfection, in your definition, is order. but disorder—how fucking perfect is the art of disorder.

///

i’m telling the woman in the mirror everything, but she only cries. why are you crying again? don’t you remember the last time you cried, what happened? this is who i am—mrs. nobody.

contrast is what gets you going, but it’s also enough to split you in half—held and loved the night before, alone and armored again.

you’re a walking paradox—living in a cinematic paradoxical life, aren’t you?

///

your life sounds cinematic, where the hero dies at the end and the heroine keeps looking for love in all the wrong places, anything to be held—anything to never find myself existing in days like these again.

///

so another dose i take and i’m seeing stars.

///

i still carry the day on my skin—the smell of rain in my hair, the bruise on my ankle, smeared mascara and chapped, ashy lips. somewhere on my vanity is my black dress—it still smells like him. a bittersweet reminder of the beautiful world that never stays, and that clock that ticks above, never sparing you.

15:21

“i’m curious to know a bit more about your childhood… where did you grow up? what emotions do you feel when you think about it?”

i tell him about the house—home, that i grew up in and the one that keeps growing within me. home lives on my skin in the blackened bruises, like the black fungi that spreads on the walls; home only keeps growing—darker, closer.

this house doesn’t creak, it breathes—it inhales through the walls that are swollen with memory and exhales with the kind of silence that pierces your ears until it becomes a sound of its own. it cries until the paint reveals the rot that lives beneath its concealment.

perhaps i’ve lived in this house before, or maybe i never left it—the humidity of my tears still lingers here, and the wooden floor still creaks from the pounds of my fists—those lonely nights where plywood became a witness of pain and the sponge for it.

in the closet hang lace and vintage leather, just the way i like it; i wear black lace like it’s a second skin—i mourn by adorning myself, the house likes me better this way—with my lips painted blood red and my eyes smoked like ash, the shadows don’t have to reach as far to hold me close to them, there’s comfort in embodying that darkness myself.

i blend in with the black night sky outside this broken window—that’s how i knew it was home, when nobody outside this house would know of the ghosts that i dance with every night—and that i too, am among the dead, carrying a thousand deaths in this light body of mine—

“do you feel safe at home?”

i remember the way the walls breathe—his gentle voice that still echoes in this hallway, so yes, i say. i feel safe at home, only here. even when the man dressed in black suede stands tall in the corner of my bedroom, lulling me to sleep at night by burying me in the memory of his skin. it’s still home, even when it hurts—it’s home, especially when it hurts—especially when hurting is all i’ve ever known here. here is where i bleed—where i adorn and paint—over my wounds, over these walls, i’m anything but hurt when i live with ghosts—they always disappear at dawn. i taste the bittersweetness of farewells every dusk and dawn, it still bleeds on my tongue when i’m not home, because home will always be with me even when i try to leave.

hello. i hear it when i pass the long wall mirror, the air shifts and suddenly the crimson of my pashmina looks like the autumn leaves again—i’m not watching my reflection anymore—i recognize it. i see his softness in the furrow of my brow and my lips now pale and grieving that would once smile for him.

i smile at the mirror, waiting for an answer, every time i do—but nobody answers anymore, i am no longer the light of anybody’s eyes—only a shadow.

the door knocker calls for me again as i dance in the ballroom, even as i reach for the doors to let someone real in, he becomes the air—cold as winter, and when i surrender to him, i turn into ice. he always wins, doesn’t he? he doesn’t let spring flowers bloom or the autumn leaves hug the earth a little closer—he only lets you feel the frigidity of winter—

“who do you spend the most time with at home?”

him—who lives like a beautiful ghost in the bodies of love that my home carries—the epitome of it; his heart-shaped face, lips luscious like damask and his voice as soft as velvet. even now that he’s gone, he still lingers in the love songs that play in the distance from the turntables.

mr. nobody though—i’m convinced he owns this house—he’s lived long here enough that he lives in my blood now—in the smell of rainwater, in the low-hanging clouds. he hums along to the music that lingers from the turntable in the back. he taints the only love that ever felt real—the only love that i want to tell myself was mine but actually belonged to fate—that was the realness of it, that it never stayed, that love will always leave you when you need it the most.

my lord it hurts so much, he became a ghost who felt like home because the worst thing he did was just…. disappear. no cruelty, no breaking—just him fading into the dark sky, as if the world, so quietly—like him, decided that he had been too alive in my heart and corrected itself. it reminds me over and over; death adores me—like my cold lover who loves me so dearly to break my heart every time he holds me—yet still, he would be the one who promises to mend it too. death too, come and mend me as i lie dissected on my bed tonight.

he’s just a ghost, yet every time he passes by—i’m a mourning widow again.

the house has learned him too, it holds its breath now every time i smile at the mirror—it waits the same way that i do, and we’re both broken and tainted. i’ve made peace with it, that perhaps this house will always be my home, nobody will know how beautiful it is to me, in its blacks, greys and melancholic blues.

“how do you feel when someone tries to enter your space?”

invaded—this house was never empty to begin with.

i feel like someone is undressing me slowly, peeling all the layers that i stitched together with my broken heartstrings—anything to hide what lives beneath my skin. there’s enough makeup to conceal every crack from when i broke and enough cigarette smoke residue over my clothes for no one to smell the perfume i wore when i thought i lived again, i only loved, and it felt like reincarnation.

even though what he gives me is supposed to be love, it feels like my heart is breaking all over again. every wound that someone real tries to kiss better—bleeds more.

the picture shattered on the floor, blood over his face, he’s tainted now because nothing will ever come close to perfection, and perhaps perfection is only what i can control, even if control looks like walking back home on broken legs or laughing with the walls at night.

i couldn’t control the fate god wrote for us, but everything i can now is only a bittersweet reminder that i can be so close to the earth yet still not have you, because the most perfect thing you ever did was leave. how i yearn for when the earth will hug us, and that would be the closest i could be to you, where fate doesn’t exist.

he holds my hand like he’s proving that he’s not just a number on the clock. his voice is the warmest in this cold house—warmer than the fireplace by the window at night, because he’s real—too real. even the fire cannot possess such a heat, and still the fireplace only stays lit because somebody always comes back at night to reignite it, and home is home again.

i nod, because i want to be the woman who will stay, but the past starts to seep through the walls as the house shifts behind my eyes—and somewhere soft, inevitable—hello. my fingers twitch in his grasp as something softer cloaks my shoulders.

this house was never empty—will never be. you can tear down the floral wallpaper—repaint the walls in eggshell white—but the darkness will still bloom beneath it until it bleeds and bruises.

the house is full of everything that stayed.
full of memories that will always veil me in black,
full of love that only ever knew how to disappear,
full of black fungi and black dahlias reeking of grief.

if anyone ever dares to enter, they will see it, they will feel it—when their blood goes cold.

or worse—they won’t.

the house will keep breathing even when i don’t.

even when you don’t.

“same time next week?”

same time, same place—same home.

16:00

now my little fingers, coated so red from the blood of my little lamb, i gave them my irises, and they give me back her bloody body.

i do this every night now.

i go into the fields of kashmiir and find myself the frailest lamb—young and fertile, and i slit her throat open, until one day i’d dip my fingers into her flesh and all the sudden, my fingers aren’t red anymore; they’re coated in only iris nectar and broken stars; it drips from my fingers, of constellations that my eyes can’t read but somehow my skin recognizes them as they burn through my skin and carve their names into my very own existence,

i finally realize, bloodshed is of my routine now—murder is routine—routine is murder; nobody would know except for the little lambs what it’s like to be killed at the hands by the one you love.

my mind, far too wounded from the predators of this world, it takes a break from the pain and bandages itself up in cotton—two layers around its eyes and ears, it dissociates them from my body—and my body? oh—an old piano sitting under the crystal chandelier in the opera hall, my schizophrenic men come to play their illusory songs that nobody can hear, or see.

but my body—once belonging to an artist and will always be an artist’s and my deaf mind can’t hear the songs being played on the broken piano that’s wailing, but it feels it—the passion and the fire that fuels the musician—so it calls it art, i call the demise of my very own body a work of art.

the men dig up a grave for the little girl and throw her frail body six feet under ground, they plant their psycheldelics over the green grass sitting on top of her and they dance around her grave in circles and circles—she lies below, not dead but with the soil filling up her lungs and the serpentines decorating her neck. scorpions sucking her blood and the beetles dancing over her skin; it’s beautiful though, isn’t it?—at least they kill her a little differently this time, a little softly, a little more raw, until she’s tender to the flesh.

at least they love her more than the ones who pick her and throw her away.

the very so, suffocating earth hugs her tight and squeezes the life out of her but she’s grateful—mother earth will hold her body, and never any human again. she blends in with the earth, her essence mixes with the soil—the air smells like murder

a girl with once a name now becomes the suffocating winds of the north; once a nobody and still a nobody, thankful she is though—she devotes herself to killing.

it’s midnight again, she prays before she puts her red lipstick and mascara on. she lets lace hug her body and drapes herself in satin, artificial but close enough to silk—just like the juxtaposition that she is herself, a heart so alive and blood-filled that beats with ecstasy as hope strums her heartstrings, and then the butterflies in her stomach that dance in circles like her head that spins in circles—round and round, like her lover would spin her around but at the end of it all, she’d nothing but an accessory, dizzy and lovesick on the cold floor all alone.

she’s the delicate silk of a savage man’s black tie
the rush of red-hot blood that swims through a man’s pride
and always, the lipstick mark on a man’s cheek is to be wiped by obliteration.

mrs. nobody is fooling everyone, and the biggest fool being herself.

she plays jazz on the radio again, sways her body and sings along as she occasionally curses under her breath after every chorus over every mistake she makes in adorning herself; as if every stain of red lipstick is a reminder of the blood she spills and every black smear of mascara is the ash she turns into after another lover gets high off of her.

the room is a witness that watches her get ready, the walls gossip; the one beside her wall sighs knowing she’ll come back home tonight to share her tears with it and the one she leans on as she gets ready, it laughs at her again—how many times a day does this wall see mrs. nobody get ready for nobody, just hoping that her reflection in the mirror would be in somebody’s eyes instead, remembered for once. the walls merge into a space smaller, steadier, and close enough to cradle her when her shattered heart breaks yet again.

the candle on her nightstand melts slowly as the scent of amber and tobacco fills the room. it’s the scent of a lover who carries the outside world with him—anything outside her head smells like liberation, like refuge for the refugee who only knows of the world that’s built them a home out of their own heartbreak.

mrs. nobody accumulates the scent of those she had met but can never keep, the scent of someone else’s jacket and the warmth of being somebody’s.

she stands in front of the mirror and rehearses warmth in her voice. she pops a heart-shaped sweet on her tongue, letting its sweetness mix with her saliva that’s tainted with the taste of bitter corruption that she brings back home every night. she’ll practice saying her name, hearing the way the letters roll off her tongue from a place much sweeter than she had known—she keeps going until it sounds like it belongs to someone worth staying for, someone worth being remembered.

but even then, do the wrappers gather faster than the memories.

she always makes sure to look at her paintings before she leaves her room; the ones framed with antique cold frames and iridescent varnish, somewhere in that beauty does she hope to be framed in one day—but instead she looks for a new flaw in them every night, as if she’s teaching herself to taste the ugliness that comes with beautiful things framed in shiny promises. she knows it from the way the frames shatter every night, big words and beautiful promises reduced down to shards. she sees the shards as her pen, rewriting every promise over her skin and every praise just to tell herself it was real—that she was real.

before she leaves she cracks open the window and lets the cold air fill the room, she wants to convince herself that her teeth chatter from the weather outside and never the storm that’ll pull her again. the feathers in her coat go cold, as she allied with the birds; give me your warmth for the cold nights and i’ll bring back the sun that nobody stayed to gaze, for i am the moon and the small world—my stars!

that’s what the nighttime has always been, an empty black sky full of broken stars that need their moon to shine—but even the moon needs the sun. but mrs. nobody—she comes back empty-handed, broken alliances and a broken heart. she sleeps through the sunrise and comes alive at the nighttime.

she labels herself with the lie of seduction when all she really is accommodating, malleable like molten glass that breaks once she’s solid from the cold that comes after the glow. mrs. nobody becomes the somebody that someone needs—within seconds.

someone looks at her like they need a different woman, so she becomes one. some share their sorrows through tears, while some spill their cowardice misery over her tender flesh—tender words on her tender tongue, turning them bitter. they empty their souls at dusk before they stand tall over her at dawn, and she turns into a shadow—again.

by the middle of the night she stops reacting, she’s no longer human or anybody—she’s the bottle of wine that spills on the linen sheets, stains the tongue of another lover until they’re sober and their tongue goes dry—scraping along her wounds and mingling with her still-moist tender tongue, letting her taste the bitter hangover until it’s time to say goodbye, the taste of a goodbye—she knows far too well.

hello is the taste of being wanted until goodbye reminds her yet again that it will always be temporary.

her voice becomes hoarse, her legs are broken, and her heart is ice again.

the red lipstick is gone now, down some stranger’s drain
her coat is cold, but warm enough for her ice-cold body
outside the window is a moving world again, as she stands still.

she returns to her room again, lights her candle up again, and the walls don’t ask her what happened. they cradle her and her bed that smells like death, buries the night under a loving earth, but never its children of adam.

the sun stays, nobody else does, and nobody ever did—but at least here lies her hard body until the night shapes her into something tender again. she doesn’t bother confronting herself, she doesn’t want to learn the language of heartbreak in another dialect—so she stays silent.

dawn she faces and tall she stands under the pale sunshine, nobody knows who she is—all she knows is like the very world around her, she’s mrs. nobody.

SWEET LAND OF LIBERTY

america is the prom queen who sways proudly with her red lipstick and clumped mascara. her hair is blonde with rolled curls, and her tanned skin smells like vanilla and tastes like cancer. she’s beauty, she’s grace, she’s seduction—only from far away.

miss america always had the pageant smile, skinny waist and a perky chest—her teeth too white like pearls and her lips glazed in shimmery lip gloss and crystals; everyone claps for her while something feral already grows under her skin.

she wins prom queen every year, crowned with diamonds—capitalism’s favourite lie and the slave’s blood. of blood diamond trades and her crown that fuels guns, miss america is annihilation and bloodshed dressed in heavenly dreams.

miss america worships her crown, the 50 stars that shine bright—in glimmering unison and silent partisan animosity within the gaps. united are the stars by the men who worship america, kissing the flag and wrapping it around them to sleep, for the ones who pay with their singularity, becoming a multiplicity among the fifty broken stars.

her suffering is rather just as romantic as she is; snorting cocaine and crying underneath the skyscrapers is a luxury—cocaine turns into crystals, suddenly you see the businessman in his black suede gambling for it—her favourite supermodel becomes a niche, an icon because who knew suffering looks so glamorous for the rich. money makes the world go round, she learned that young. put on your heart-shaped sunglasses and see how small the world becomes—nobody knows that better than america does.

she lines up her diamonds like her cocaine, white lines on the dashboard of her lover’s mustang—diamonds carved by the slaves for the slave, to all your desires and your liberation, diamonds are a girl’s best friend.

america is the dream everybody wants to live in. just like the commercial that plays on the television, things go better with coke! everything seems better with a shot of america; she tastes like coca-cola, the taste of capitalism—sugary liberation, addictive dreams and glamorous decay, america you taste like glory!

LIFE IN PLASTIC

little miss america stands in front of her mirror, in the corner sits her dolls, long-forgotten—ken and barbie, the perfect citizens—oh and their two children, the perfect nuclear family, the real american family. barbie is thin, she smiles and adapts; she lives in plastic, she’s fantastic! she never ages or breaks; america loves her for she doesn’t ask for care, only for applause and the flashing lights.

she grew up with plastic, a plastic childhood of manufactured joy; controlled happiness given in small doses at a time, nothing she played with aged or bled and nor did she ever learn survival, she only lived and never endured agony outside her american dreams—miss america, you wouldn’t know the sound of gunshots in your school yet, would you?

her head spins from the teacups in disneyland, she waits for her prince charming somewhere in the land of love and glory—a girl who grew up with a plastic childhood looks for her plastic man, barbie and ken of america for the show—bonnie and clyde for the bills.

give a standing ovation to america, sing your national anthem written on paper bills while you stand tall over green clovers that smell like death!

THE CITY THAT NEVER SLEEPS

america cheerleads in college, all the boys are wrapped around her finger.

she broke up with her boyfriend and drinks her sorrows away; america’s the life of the party—she’s plastic, but she melts under the heat of las vegas—the city of no sleep. vegas is america that doesn’t pretend, only intoxicates at the sound of its name. the sun has set, and there’s no more day, no more tears and no more souls.

what happens here stays here.

in her little red party dress and high heels on, she’s out with her girlfriends—she drinks shot after shot. becomes the slot the men gamble with in the casino. she synchronizes her loneliness with the beats under neon lights.

everyone dances in america, everyone forgets in america. it’s loud enough that nobody has to listen to themselves or outside the nightclub palm-tree paradise; alcohol is medicine, money is glory, crystals are luxury, and the women are cocktails.

sugar, he calls her, anything else i can get for you?

she asks for his sweetness, of cherry cola and an artificial sugary high—drunk, drunk ride; you only live once—live young, die fast.

she wraps her arms around his neck and doesn’t know his name, but she calls him baby for tonight. she tells him that his skin tastes like the fourth of july—he feels like sweet freedom in the salty sweat-drenched noise and his heart is as loud as the fireworks—he’s destruction repacked as ecstasy, she takes him into his bedroom so she keeps singing longer—she makes L-O-V-E with her eyes closed and displays the letters like the hollywood sign on the hills of her heart, america’s sweetheart.

disney is the american dream for children, and vegas is the dream for adults; both are fake cities and plastic dreams that nobody wants to wake up from—wine and dine, drink and drive. overdose and die.

AMERICA’S SWEETHEART

america is patriotic, she’s fluent in intoxication and her anthem—money. her eyes, smile, and body are the currency; there she lies with burning hot desire—red, white and cold blue—stripped of intimacy.

the america she lives in doesn’t sell sex—it sells the entry ticket to the show. she displays herself as a symbol, the blonde bombshell, like the marilyn that the men worship. play a little dumb, miss america, soften your voice and sway your hips with pride—the world was always yours.

she calls it glory in the daytime and the screens, while at night she plays another vinyl by elvis, with a bottle of jack in her right hand. she’s learned how to cradle her pain with cherry-cola pills.

perhaps you’re oblivious to your luck, like your very own four-leafed clover; your body gets a name, your performance gets paid with bills; even when you lie among the rich, high and on cloud-9, you’re still america—not a girl with nothing to her name or her body, just a slave for the rich—of the rich.

nobody ever tells the world—not as glamorous as you—that fentanyl doesn’t need skyscrapers. unlike cocaine crystals, fentanyl wears rags—the america that exists without glamour. the zombies roaming the streets, the bodies asleep on the subway; a man plays his violin until the strings break, and still his starbucks cup only holds pennies—he watches passersby sip their americanos, but he gags; the very thought reminds him that every cup of coffee from downtown tastes like blood and everything he will never have.

GOD BLESS AMERICA

even when the world sing your national anthem, it’s all performance. for some reason, the people of colour and the immigrants sing louder than your own people, they embody your ten commandments far more than your own blood ever would—the outsiders love you harder, they defend you louder because they’re desperate, and when you break their hearts, they blame themselves—that’s the kind of heartbreak you are, america.

land of the free, of democracy.

how romantic is it—postcard americana? they’re in love with the summery ranch, white fences, cornfields, pickup trucks, diners, highways, bridges, and the sugared freedom fantasy—it’s addictive when one gets the taste of it—the privilege, as the politicians say.

miss america, when will you tell them about what they don’t see: the overdose at the end of this sweet indulgence? how sugar poisons you—your so-called liberty is rotting your own teeth.

ironically a woman of copper stands in your heart, holding a torch—a promise, one that she won’t ever keep, yet still she mothers the exhaustion of the newcomers—only if they serve, and if they never come close to your pedestal, or even if they do—they eventually fall; she watches them drown, she watches their dreams rot and yet she never steps down, this is liberty—she sees it all, but she stays and stands tall, engraved in give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

THE SHOW MUST GO ON

miss america watches herself as a movie in the cinema; of selling her own myths back to herself, worshipping the hero in flannel and denim—it’s beautiful suffering with a beautiful soundtrack, beautiful people and their beautiful problems.

america, you’re a rom-com movie—in your romance and your irony, the ones you break the hearts of still love you, and the ones who have yet to live in your sweet love—they want you to break their hearts, it’s the sweetest kind of heartbreak for them, isn’t it?

have a coca-cola america, eat a little more to fill the hole that you refuse to name—a paradox packaged in an american dream.

before i go and never come back again, miss america, fuck you and your american dreams.

Subscribe now

la casa de las rosas ⋅ [house of roses]

jim beam, jim beams

jim stands tall, he always does—the world applauds him in the daylight for his gold-star morals, clean hands and sainted smile, but my skin remembers what the sun never saw. only my burnt skin screams when i witness his hands holding a trophy and the roses he leaves on my doorstep after blooming bruises over my skin—i choose my poison, and it’s a bouquet of red roses, he knew their scent from the notes in your perfume—jim knows, he always knows what you don’t know.

men like him always stand tall, shoulders broad with the weight of stolen innocence in their prideful flesh—the blood of a virgin that keeps their manhood as arrogant as their dominance, the weight of his hand is enough to remind you how much bigger he is—he becomes the omnipotent in the room and suddenly you’re a slave in submission, so you submit—to his hands that keep you in his control and his sorry-dressed mercy that keeps you afloat for a while as you’re a slave kneeling in submission, you mistake him for god and so you believe he is sincere and deserving of your repentance.

the world kisses jim’s feet in the daylight, prostrate to him and shakes his hand with the same fingers that dig into virgin flesh in the winter. he teaches your skin his name before your mouth learns how to say it—he becomes the electricity, the current that burns through you in the broad daylight. your nerves memorize his rhythm, and so do your feet—they follow all the paths he carved for you. he was the best teacher and still is.

he lives under my eyelids, one blink and he’s back again; he walks in my home, lives in the corner of my room when the world goes to sleep, behind closed doors he writes his name in every chamber of my heart so i never forget him—neither will my blood, tainted from his venom, it flows through me like a prayer—ferocious and blazing with rage yet still all you feel is his name under my skin; jim teaches your heart to beat with his name, his language and his heat.

sainto ⋅ [saint]

jim doesn’t ruin you loudly, he ruins you quietly—he hides in between girlhood, the timeline that gets painted in the name of naïveté. he becomes the name on the prescription of your antipsychotics, he’s the flutters in your heart on the ECG, he’s in the aftertaste of a bitter overdose. he’s somehow always with you like a ghost—a delusion, a nobody.

he doesn’t just touch you, he turns you into a porn magazine and cuts you into shreds—scatters them around enough until you forget your name and the next minute, who you are, how old you are and what you’re good for.

jim wears a black suit and wakes you up at midnight to remind your grown self of where she is now, and it’s still somewhere in the broken cassette which keeps replaying a loop; every love after him arrives injured, every future has his fingerprints on its throat.

it looks like you again and again and again.

a foreign language that feels like a refuge for my war-torn heart never stays, even if i stitch us together, fate rips us apart, and when i try to stitch my own heart back together with acceptance, i hear your name again—i hear myself begging for mercy on the floor again, holding your leg and fading—it always ends like this.

nobody else can see you.

the letters of his name spell out V-I-O-L-E-N-C-E, the hiss of his belt spells out P-O-W-E-R and his voice that pierces your ears and makes your soul shake? G-L-O-R-Y. he feels like god in that moment, not because he is—but because of how helpless you become—the same way we call for god in calamity that he himself allows, i’m pleading for your mercy even if you’re the one with the knife to my throat.

they say there’s always wisdom in pain, i could only ever distinguish your glory from god’s when i realized your pain only brought pain and stemmed from pain itself—what do i do with praises for my strength when i’m skinned to my core? you’re still the one with everything in this world while i wait for my bounty in the next.

you hold her in your arms and tell her you’ll protect her from the wolves as you slowly burn through her, you’re protecting her from yourself as you consume her whole—you teach her to obey, and she does, until one day she doesn’t—you really do start to look like a hallucination.

yo soy tu princesa.

la muerte en vida ⋅ [death in life]

the years go by, but his name still lives deep in your bones. a lover offers you a kiss, but you feel like a heavier hand would feel more like home—the sharp sting following his hit and the strength of his body against your helpless one. how do i tell you? don’t you know jim taught this language to me? a hit feels safer than a kiss because it isn’t foreign, jim taught me how to take his lips on my cheeks and his hands on my throat the next day.

he wipes my tears, but it isn’t him anymore; you told me that god was always watching and that even if my tongue swears with the truth, maybe god just makes some girls like this… how could you be so sure? watching isn’t the same as intervention, and knowledge isn’t voluntary—when the slate becomes blank, you’ll take in any language that won’t leave you empty among a full world. he writes of red, violet, green and yellow—jagged, round, blotched and bloody words on my skin.

a man is smoking a cigarette across the street, i feel hot rage burning through my skin again. i watch myself land on the concrete and crushed under his feet—i can taste his bitter saliva, i feel his kiss—it’s just a cigarette, but it’s you—it’s you, i smell you in this smoke. you fill my lungs up with ash and my mind with euthanasia and euphoria, smoking kills—but jim kills you slower, softer; you are dead before your heart stops beating, you’re in your grave before the earth gets to welcome you.

dios ⋅ [god]

why the rage in your eyes? your irises are dark yet soft, turn brown—blazing and the pearlescent whites of your eyes stay red-hot; fists clenched, chin up and brows furrowed—you’re still holding all that heavy metal in your hands?

why shouldn’t my blood rage red-hot?

jim uses the girls’ bodies as a training ground for him and his men, all on the top shelf. femininity becomes an erotic relic for sale, of dolls and toys for the master until you grow out of innocence—or oblivion.

jim still stands tall, not because he’s big but because nobody ever forced him to kneel the way he makes his girls kneel.

jim thrives because god hasn’t reminded him yet that he, too, is a slave like the rest of us—the only difference is he serves his manhood and we serve our vulnerability to him, we serve anything that feels real, even when it bleeds—especially when it makes you bleed.

yo soy la princesa. comprende mis white lines.

i think you should listen to the song as you read, you’ll get the true cinematic experience then </3

the soft chords of oud play, my heartstrings remember this melody—of the song where the hero dies at the end, after he saves the heroine.

وحشتيني (waḥ-sh-tī—nī)
i miss you.

as the trumpets swell and the violins tremble, let the world give a standing ovation for the hero who saves the heroine from dying, before he takes a bullet to his chest—burying himself into the dark sky of the night and never letting his light live in those night again; everyone will stand in honour, not because he lives, but because he won’t anymore.

how will the world cheer for you, kneel to you—put their hand on their heart as a means of respect when this is the same world that will tear your chest, break your heart and press the grief hard enough on your sternum that no sigh to leave your mouth will be of relief—only burden?

all i hear are the echoes of your voice, the echoes of trumpets, as if the world still expects me to stand in silent ovation for you, because dying once was never enough, in the silence i play every song that sounds like you but in film, i refuse to let silence take you away from me because you are anything but silence, you sound like every song of heartbreak, every syllable of longing and every lyric of yearning.

وحشتيني .. وحشتيني
i miss you .. i miss you

my hands are cold from the sting of an early winter, eyes red-rimmed and skin flushed as i’m sitting in the front row, watching you die so gracefully in front of my eyes; you do it so beautifully that you make death look like life, i want to follow you behind.

he’s glorious, he stands tall with the world’s heaviness on his shoulder—like the dutiful brass of the trumpet, heavy with expectation, but there’s the contradiction of the softness in his voice, from his velvet-cloaked heart. then come his eyes, they feel like home—the ones that hold you before his arms would, especially in his sweet hesitation—of strings and keys, they shake quietly, and i repeat that melody still, playing a song the night forgot to tell me to stop.

i wish i had picked all the flowers from my garden before you left, give your soft heart a place just as gentle to rest before the earth swallowed it—if only you could have smelled the fragrance of my love for you, aromatic enough that your heart would have something sweeter to cling to before the world stuffed your wounds with salt and dread.

سؤالك عني ما يمنع، ولو قلبك علي زعلان
your silence won’t stop me from wishing you’d ask about me again

the silence says more than the words, the language of melancholy is such that i’m fluent in it through strings, brass and a foreign language that feels like home, the same language that sits on my beloved’s tongue like honey—for the last time, i hear the last words of his words before they wash away.

the trumpets announce a doomsday, part of the orchestra before the hero dies—of brass and breath, unflinching like him; they announce him in ceremony, loud as quiet as he is. the strings of the violin shiver in response, delicate yet loud enough like his eyes—they refuse the posture of brass, thin and feminine in honesty, do you hear me crying out your name?

somewhere between brass and string does the piano press softly—key by key, like his gentle touch over my wounds; we didn’t demand attention, we only insisted on being felt.

please ask me how i am again, i’ll tell you i’m okay because i know that you know i’m not—i still smell the lavender in your cologne, it smells intention and home, soothing enough to put me to sleep again—if only you knew, even the softest of feathers don’t bring such a sleep that even slate would bring on a cold night because your warmth and lullaby would accompany, look me in my eyes and that’ll be an answer loud enough—drive back home and pour your sorrows over these violets i grew for you, we’ve always spoken the same language, despite our mother tongues being oceans away.

وحشتيني .. وحشتيني
i miss you .. i miss you

in the echoes of music, every word feels like a wound—every line, it’s the language my tongue doesn’t speak, but my soul recognizes your shadows in those words, for how much i miss you—how i can spell your name from every letter that equates as a synonym for longing.

i still remember the night you left me, on a cold december—the world was asleep, it was only us for a while. your eyes lurk under a veil of melancholy and your voice too quiet to reach my ears but my soul heard it—and it repeats it all back to me like a melody, in one word—وحشتيني, slow at the start and heavy at the centre, softer at the end again; it’s as if the word embodies you, with soft exhaling exhaustion as it dies off at the end.

the emphasis on ح (ḥ), it’s the spine of the word itself—rooted in longing, it’s an exhale of pain rather than speech—but the ش (sh) follows, almost like a hush, my longing told to be quiet with one word that’s big enough to remind me you’re no longer with me. it’s a word so soft becomes just as harsh at its core with a break, air forced through clenched teeth as restraint fails, grief is told to lower her voice as she remembers the way he’d say it, not too loud and not too quiet—just soft enough to hush my nightmares.

at its end, the word is drained of its strength and softens in your chest, ي (ī) that drags as the word drops lower, just the way the hero’s warm breath lingers for a while before his strength is finished and his heart surrenders and he’s too tired to keep standing. he was strong right at his core, in the middle of a story, but at the end, he goes quiet—the end of the day was always quiet, whether it was his voice or the sound of his heartbeat, never this cold silence of nothingness.

even وحشتيني knows how the story ends, sharp in the middle and soft at its finish.

أحبك يا أجمل الإحساس، وحشني حبك المجنون
i love you—you’re the softest feeling i’ve ever known.
i miss your crazy love, the way your voice calmed every storm in me.

the hero always takes care of the heroine first before himself—even when he betrays the clock, negotiates with the longest of nights and rewrites the cold route with his warm blood, it’s enough to mend his heart and make him stand taller—to be the hero without announcing it, with his last act of honour—he becomes a saviour, sacrifices with a smile before he dies.

he isn’t مجنون like a madman, he’s the smoke that comes after you blow a dancing flame—he’s the craziness—the fever that comes after he shares a piece of his heart with you for the night, you realize that the word مجنون is written in his eyes—but so is your reflection.

there’s the tired softness in his face that crushes my ribs; it’s the bittersweetness of an ache i couldn’t name. he’s the hero that finally saved me, and he’s the hero that the world takes away from you before you get to thank him.

وحشتيني .. وحشتيني
i miss you .. i miss you

how could you save me but not save yourself? i wonder if i’m asking that question to you or the clock—the cruel clock that takes you out of my eyes and far away from my heart. the memory of you makes my eyes sting, and my hot tears fall, burning my skin and grazing over my lips.

i go back to all those nights again, to the bullet that pierces into your chest before you disappear, it isn’t loud, it doesn’t make an announcement—it engulfs you silently until you disappear the next day—you’re still here, but the clock reminds me you’re slowly leaving me and one day, the scent of your cologne no longer exists in the streets, the shadow of your tall figure doesn’t hide me away from the world anymore, the lights are pale without the warmth of your brown hair and soft skin.

all that remains in my garden of roses are thorns—the scent of once damask now reeks of rubble—everyone stays, except you, everyone but never you.

the hero always dies at the end after he thought he saved the heroine.

the trumpets praise him.
the violins mourn him.
the piano remembers.
and i hear them, all at once.

my beloved, i miss you—i’ve missed you for too long, i still do.

i miss you.
i miss you.
i miss you.

وحشتيني

read the sister piece:

i. beer

beer is the first taste of alcohol people reach for—cheap, harmless and foolproof. it gives a short thrill but enough for one to believe they get a taste of the night life, it makes your cheeks red-hot for a while enough to feel good, until it lasts. it’s the easiest to hold and easiest to tolerate; summer nights and city lights, all your friends cheer and finally you feel a little older, a little more free.

it’s bittersweet in a way you don’t understand, but you force it down your throat to feel older and braver than what you really are. the fizz and the faint taste, you overgrow it eventually. you don’t get drunk on beer, you get familiar with it—it’s the door that opens to what else you can drink, not what drinking does or turns you into.

ii. jeppson’s malört

you decide to shuffle through the shelf and you find malört, you don’t even know what it is, all you know is that it’s something you wouldn’t enjoy—it doesn’t look pleasant nor sound pleasant, but it’s there—apart of your family of alcohol on the shelves; its bitter scent already hits your senses yet still you want to dive deeper, not out of delicacy, but out of bitter curiosity that you know won’t be good for you.

it invades your orifices, of rotten grapefruits and turpentine—you choke on it; you had wished you had never went near it or have held such a naïve curiosity towards it. you shouldn’t have jumped from beer straight to bäsk liqueur, you were never made to tolerate the nausea it brings.

now whenever you open the closet, this bottle reminds you as one of the first bitter and vile tastes that exists in these bottles, it was one of your firsts and coincidentally the closest too—pungent is its taste like medicine, but most medicine was never meant to be on your tongue in the first place—not that young, not that close. medicine should’ve been a refuge, but you find it as danger and in bottles of alcohol instead.

iii. spirytus rektyfikowany

polish-made and the strongest bottle of liquor on your shelf, you should’ve built your tolerance up from the sweeter and lighter drinks—but you pick your poison and it looks like a bottle of euphoria at first.

it burns through your stomach, most people mix this with another one from the shelf, but you drink straight from the bottle—you throw up but you keep coming back for the sharp thrill and taste of burning victory. it sends you into shock as it settles in your body, you think you can handle it because you thought this is what warmth feels like, in the bottle of liquor that nobody ever drinks straight out of the bottle, they told you to never go near it but you thought you could trust it because you think you’re thick-skinned and resistant to bitter vile drinks—but you burn your flesh instead, dry your mouth out and strain your heart.

you can’t tell if you’re hungover or if you just came back after seeing god but once you’re sober enough, you never go back to anything like that again—you spill it down the drain and smash the bottle into pieces yet still your mouth remembers the burn long after the bottle is gone, your tongue is still charred and your skin still shivers.

iv. vodka

you promised you wouldn’t go back, especially not to liquor, but you know what they say about addiction—cold turkey never works. so you reach for something a little less harsh on your throat, the flavourless taste is enough to lure you in—you thought you had drank the worst of it. but vodka, it feels like water after rektyfikowany.

you enjoy its coolth for a while over your burning hot sores, but slowly it gives you a headache, your throat burns again but you don’t want to put the bottle down, you think that you can handle it again—the more you drink, the stronger your tolerance but then you realize you weren’t made for vodka and the so-called purity of vodka was never made for your burnt liver and bitter bile.

you boasted, vodka never ages but you did—it keeps calling for you when you pass by that shelf, but now you don’t want it—you know it, vodka was never made for you even though now you can tolerate it like it’s water, because your heart has burnt to its core.

v. brandy

you don’t drink liquor anymore, so you try something sweeter and less harsh, liqueur; brandy, for old souls and older men. it’s slow and amber coloured, its warmth pulls your cold yet burnt heart in. you take a sip because it feels safe, it’s warm without burning your throat—because you mistake age for gentleness.

it was never about gentility, it’s the heaviness that makes your head spin after you relish the notes of fruit and earthy warmth—it blurs the lines that you were never ready to cross, but you do and suddenly the warmth feels like a touch too close to your spine, it doesn’t call for you, it doesn’t bring a thrill but it brings delirium—that’s when you realize, it’s not about tolerance or addiction—you get attached, never drunk on brandy.

you still inhaled its scent and took sips of it everyday despite all the other bottles i your shelf, just to taste such warmth again but time passes, and suddenly a new drink makes the brandy give you nausea, you only now realize how bad it was for you, because you never should have clung in the first place—so young, so forbidden.

vi. bourbon

bourbon was the bottle you kept at the back of the shelf, untouched, not because you didn’t want it—but because part of you knew you’d wanted too much. you were scared to touch it at first, you hadn’t gone near whiskey because it was too warm, too rich and safe. it doesn’t rush you, it smells like safety and golden like dusk, like someone who would place the glass in your hand only if you asked twice, it doesn’t burn you—it settles, comforts and warmth lingers—you wear its warmth on your face, not intentionally, it’s a kind of warmth that flows in your blood now, people can smell the intoxication on your breath and see the euphoria in your eyes.

it’s the only drink you don’t trust yourself around, not because you fear its taste but once you take a sip, you would never want anything else again—and it’s true, look at you still trying to find the warmth of bourbon in all these bottles, even the scent of its residue in its empty bottles.

even if you poisoned yourself with this delicacy, you’d say you would die with a smile on your face because death would at least taste like oak, vanilla and spice—it destroys you more beautifully the older it gets.

vii. champagne

champagne tastes like water now, it’s all bubbles and promise, sparkles with no stay—it fizzes fast, hits fast and disappears faster. you drink it to not be alone for a while, cheers to the attention and the way it makes you laugh until the numbers on the clock break, but when you’re alone—you know it, it never fills you.

it tastes like celebration and leaves behind confetti in your bedroom—pretty, pointless, then gone.

you accompany yourself with glass after glass but it begins to taste too sweet, fills your body up too much, yet your heart is still empty. you don’t think you’ll ever go back to this one, you never wanted to be the life of the party, let alone even a part of it.

you’re still looking for bourbon, aren’t you? but champagne is too sweet, too fake.

viii. gin

you said you wouldn’t go back to liquor but here you are, trying to taste anything close to bourbon—with anything, even the ones you swore you’d never take a sip of, you just want to black out and land into those same arms again. you’re held, but you’re still alone and empty.

gin is sharp, herbal and unapologetic. it's the taste of the decisions you make lone at 2 a.m. just to feel something, only to black out and forget it all by dawn. it warms you up for a while only to leave your mouth dry, mind loud and an illusion of rest on a bed made of paper bills, but your heart is broke and your body is still tired despite its restlessness.

it doesn’t ever last, it never even pretended too—it burns you clean and leaves no trace except for the echoes of nights you never want to visit, you knew it’d leave you empty but you drank as much as you could to replace an emptiness that gin was never meant to fill.

never liquor again, never trust liquor.

ix. mezcal

liquor again, but this time you think it’s different—you know the family it comes from, the way it lured you in at another one of those 2 a.m. binges; it charmed you with its depth, mystery and bittersweetness.

it’s smoky, complicated and older than you in ways you can taste, it’s close enough to the taste of cigarettes you’d smoke with a shot of vodka but mezcal is sweet with spice, warmth with smokiness; you know there’s something ashy underneath in its heart, but you relish anyway.

you let it burn you slowly and intentionally, you don’t sip mezcal—you surrender to it when you feel the ghost of bourbon, but the smoke always clears. when it does, you realize you were drunk on the story and replica of warmth, never mezcal itself.

x. red wine

red wine does something to you, it feels too close to you—its the slowest of burns and the deepest in warmth, the same colour as your blood that pours out onto the tiles or your little white dress. it ages, deepens and stains—not out of harm, but out of richness and imprinting its memory.

like your blood, it still blooms in red in all the places you don’t want to be reminded of where you once cease to exist, you are the bottle that breathes when opened and the kind of flavour that settles into the tongue—the one that demands to be handled with intention and grace. you don’t hit fast, you unfold in layers; of bitterness and deep sultry sweetness, you are both the body and the depth.

all of these bottles are only a reminder—that you are the deep red wine whose aftertaste lingers longer than any alcohol on these shelves, no matter how much ecstasy or euphoria flows through your blood—the colour is red that stains, red fingerprints that you find on every bottle, but you—you are empty.

the sky was navy blue again, i hate the colour blue, it reminds me of every sorrowful thing that had existed in my life; the ocean that never purifies my skin, the blue sky that ridicules my black grief and you—my man with his navy blue heart who gave my heart a home for the little time on the clock and left it to mourn your existence for… forever?

the trees were black, engulfed by the dark of the night; the weather’s getting cold again, my lips are too dry to be kissed, skin too dry to be touched.

the streetlights glow again, of pale white; i still remember the way your brown hair gleamed ablaze under the lights, your voice softening the harsh fluorescence—and the high that kept me warm with you on these same streets.

away from the stops are the amber lights on the roads, the world is cold and cruel but warm enough under these lights—like the soft glow of your eyes, and the red that shines in the corner of the bus, the same shade that shone over your face, of your worried brows and sad eyes, the darkness of shadows that carve your beard in contrast to your fair skin, like the dark trees that make the navy blue sky darker; i don’t know what kind of world you were, but you were the land i wanted to rest my head on, the oceans i wanted to ablute myself in, the air i wanted to breathe in and the fire i wanted to burn in.

the city streets are empty, emptier is my heart.

my eyes are full of sleep, lethargy runs through my veins and life diverts away from me. they tell me i’m too observant, it’s not observation, it’s seeking—seeking the answers that are too foreign to fit in anybody’s language, the answers that god is depriving me of; i’m taking in the dead world through my eyes and burying all of its dead people underneath the brown soil of my eyes; the graveyard of my soul, rests in my eyes yet still over the land of the dead, i hope for life, you to come back and make this land flourish, even when their soil is blood-filled—you are the life i want to grow in my dead heart, you’re my tourniquet even when i want to die, i want you with me—just like that same night.

the quiet hum of the engines, the fans that turn on and the one dead tv screen and the one bitch who turned the lights on behind me, suddenly i’m under the spotlight—look at this ghost grieving another ghost, the world is trying to steal me from my dreams again even as i try to sleep with my eyes open—i don’t want anyone to steal me from the closest i can get to you, even if it’s gazing at the dark sky looking for your eyes until my neck hurts or consuming arabic poetry until your name forms through these roots and your accent sits between these syllables.

despite the darkness and silence, i still don’t sleep, i never have and i won’t—i have nothing to dream of anymore, i’ve watched my dreams through the reel of two people that hold each other on the bus ride, the woman who cries in her lover’s arms—the father who takes his little girl to the park and the woman who stands tall and accomplished, while here i am, leaning my head against the window frame, every bump is like a shock to my brain—i’m trying to electrocute myself, shock myself out of delusion and in to a seizure of reality until i come back to my blank slate which reads i want to die. i was born for it.

i feel only loveable for this dying earth, to be hugged by moist soil and kissed by the angel of death; nothing seems more romantic than death when love has already hung herself from the chandelier of my heart.

it’s like we’re driving through a vacuum, into a black hole—i don’t know what comes next; will i live while dying or will i die as i live? i smell your cologne again in the empty bus and suddenly i want to wake up in that other world again on another bus like this, knocked out cold and my last stop would be my first breath after a taste of death—my first breath would be the air that smells like your cologne and warm skin, your soft voice would be the first wave to reach my ears and your heart that would be the kindling fire and your eyes—oh your eyes, my anchor—my only anchor.

there’s the soft glow of white lights from below on the grey floor, those same lights you’d always shut—you lived in the dark, my nightingale who sang his song at night and i’d fly like a firefly, brightest when the night fell—but who am i to even live for in the nighttime now? i don’t fly nor do i gleam, i blend in with the darkness all over again, and somewhere are your shadows here too.

i’m still breathing in that cologne, like heroin—it sends a rush, with the kind of frigidity that makes my eyes water but the rush tricks me well enough that you’re out here somewhere in this nighttime.

the radio waves play in my ears, i don’t listen to love songs anymore—it’s dark wave, blurred syntax, and reverb now with the charcoal sky and the smell of cigarette smoke is the world i live in where you don’t cease to exist anymore. the light raindrops on the window and the white lines on the road, i lay between them and inhale the ecstasy.

i’m praying again like before that i stay stuck in traffic longer just to stay with you a little longer, as the cars rush into streaks on these roads—god is smearing the world in front of my eyes, but i still never blend in with it, no warmth to wrap my heart in.

can you wrap me in your arms again so the world never sees what i have become now? hide me and tuck me close enough to your heart, perhaps open its door for me and let me warm my cold hands—let me bury myself in the browns of your eyes and rest under the shadows of your lashes—i wish i saw death coming, you died when i thought i was alive and i died when i realized i was never even alive.

the billboard still shines, there’s a sign that says jesus saves—i look up at the sky for god, but he won’t respond to me tonight.

it’s 6:48 again / it’s 6:44 again / it’s always 6:48 / the city never exhales

i’m a lovesick fool aren’t i? i look for your eyes in the browns of mine that never rest, in the warmth of bittersweet coffee that i can’t have and in the dark crisp autumn leaves that dance around me while i cry again.

the night haunts as the darkness remembers who it shielded once, who it carried under its shadows and it reminds you—reminds you of its favours towards you, and now you realize how helpless you are, you can never give the darkness its comfort back that it gave you.

it’s always 6:48.

how do you hold the heart of a baby girl who says she wants to kill herself because she feels that nobody loves her?

she talks to me through the mirror, telling me how merciful god is to small souls like her—that eternal paradise awaits her because she’s been a good girl.

mama says i’ll go to heaven if i’m a good girl.

what makes me sick to my stomach isn’t the fact that i know she can’t kill herself,—it’s the fact that she’s my reflection, that we speak the same language, the same grief right from when we were little girls like flower buds—the seed was the same, a man that breaks and a mother that conceals, nobody that heals.

she’s a reflection of me, the fawn who pleases just so she doesn’t die alone—mother can’t speak the language of your grief, father won’t pick up the phone. yet still, all that matters to us is that we would be good girls, never burdens; god loves his good girls.

mother is on the phone justifying her upbringing of her girls and how her firstborn was the easiest, the one who always nodded in obedience, cried in silent rooms and never further burdened her as she already knew mother carried too much agony—she knew from the sharpness in her voice and exhaustion in her eyes that shows up when she attempts to save me from the wolves, but with every drag and every sting of skin, she only makes my skin softer with a heart that hardens with every bitter word that leaves her mouth.

calm before the storm—it’s the realest mercy yet cruelty god could make me feel, the bandages god puts around your heart before he hands it to the wrong people to hurt it again—but this time he tells you too, like everyone else, that you can survive at the end again—i only believe it while mother cries on my shoulder and her baby girl cry on my chest tonight, i laugh to swallow back my tears, if i don’t laugh i’ll cry, i always do.

it reminds me of every night where i stand at the bridge of death yet all that comes out is laughter—from the paleness in a lover’s face as he watches me fly towards death but not a smile across his face, or the redness in mother’s eyes as she watches me slash my skin open in front of her eyes and not a single ounce of sanity left in her anymore, she doesn’t bother keeping the word why on her tongue anymore—it’s foreign to her, her own motherhood is foreign to her—not because she’s cruel, but she’s an empty cup, with sweetness crystallized at the bottom no longer able to be poured.

they say that man is the spine of the house, he either makes the women in it thrive or watches them silently die—yet still, all he believes is that his wallet is enough to fill hearts, fatherhood for him was all about building a house outside hearts that never had the blood of home running through them; empty houses for empty souls, an empty father and husband for his empty women.

father quietly curses his bloodline, of no sons and only broken daughters like wilted flowers in a garden—he couldn’t believe that he had never flourished a garden, all he ever grew was his pain in my mother’s womb, with the same taste of bitterness that he feeds her heart with.

despite being the only woman in this marriage, she’s still the other woman—an accessory, like a handbag rather than a second half—an extension, and his daughters are the physicality of his pride, that like him, are so fucking broken on the inside.

mother sits with a teacup and stirs her grief into it again, her rage burns through her hands—she never spits her rage and frustration at the one who kindles it, she buries the ashes into my urn-of-a-heart.

my heart has only reduced down to glass that’s cracked from every corner yet still i serve, smile and soften as my own agony turns bitter in the deepest pit of my stomach—but no, i’m her easiest daughter—a sister that mothers more than a mother, someone who cradles the little ones to sleep because softness is a fawn in our home, for our tongues.

i am bandaging wounds that speak the same language as i do, of carrying those that never learned how to hold me back—i’m your fawn, your easiest—a flower, pressed under a book, nobody notices the silence, the smell of me dying is beautiful because it’s perseverance.

mother watches me break then looks at the clock striking midnight and laughs, softly defeated yet bitter at the core—bittersweet; i wasted all your time, didn’t i? just a little more, don’t collapse yet.

when will you ever ask me if i’m okay? or am i just a facade to you?

i keep stones in the corner of my room for a dry ablution—for when my mind regresses so much into itself that water feels like fire, and the doors lock past midnight. i strike the bits of earth i have, as an attempt to purify myself—not from physical impurity, but from the grime of performance, i take my mask off as the chalkiness of stone smothers my face; god,i’m here again after carrying everyone’s worries, my heart is about to break again.

only god knows how much my heart is hurting when i lie on the cold floor, last third of the night, as i surrender all of my womanhood—let this urn of a heart hit the floor until all the ashes scatter and all i am is a little girl.

i beat my fists on the ground, soak the prayer rug with my tears and pray in a language that only god and i know—it’s soft obscene, nothing like the rigid and obedient prayer mother taught me; i moan in pain to god, shedding the cloak of shame until my head feels like it’s being split by lightning.

all i know is god listens, even when i’m nobody’s daughter and nobody’s woman.

i ask god to let me feel a man’s arms around me just one more time—his touch and his voice, just once more. there’s this ache of finding home outside the house of my own blood. nobody ever told me that a house isn’t a home as all its inhabitants chase death in different languages—divorce papers, segregation, shut doors, blades, drugs, men, suits and soap, the little one thinks.

suddenly a man that’s a little older, dominant but kind and gentle starts to look like home—more than what a lover should be; he feels like the man that my girlhood needs to cling onto, liberation for my womanhood and the voice that soothes my early-woken motherhood back to sleep—he presses a gentle palm over every part of me that grew up too fast, every ache in me that longed for someone to hold me. he’s medicine for a wound that was never to be mine in the first place.

i never wanted to come back home house. still, tonight i’m alone again, with god. first, i cry in prostration, then i cry when i touch my skin, i self-medicate with the only drugs i could find in solitude—no matter how good it feels or hurts, i bind the glass together for another day to cradle ashes.

for now, all i do is close my eyes and put myself to sleep, imagining that someone holds me—even if it’s just a dream.

The very infamous sixty-nine—it’s said to be mutual, equal and balanced—but what happens when 69 decides to 69 you back—when it turns around to show you a mirror of everything that you’ve been avoiding about yourself? Whether it’s in the reflection of his eyes through inversion as you submit and surrender, or afterwards in the mirror alone, with your cramping legs and swollen lips as you realize, even in that geometrical symmetry, you were the one holding all the weight while pretending it’s equal.

The symmetry of 69 haunts me every time. Does it terrify me because it resembles a broken loop of infinity rotated, or that it’s a mirror of my very own psyche—split into two, the coexistence of the desire to give while also having the desire to receive?

◐ | 阴 yin

It’s dark and lonely, I say I’m lonely even though a man is sitting on the other end of the phone as he helps himself with the help of my imbecility, one would do anything to not feel alone, in theory or touch. i only labelled him a boyfriend but it felt more like we were business partners, we both give and receive yet we’re both in debt, that’s the pain of putting your heart up for rent—the tenant leaves at end, stains of humiliation on your walls and the bitter taste of solace in the water; it spills out of me in the darkest of nights, yet still i’m the one to blame for poisoning your heart—you are where it begins.

He tells me how he imagines us in bed next time, heads and mouths at the most intimate parts of each other—it’s supposedly a transaction where both give and receive at the same time, apparently we become equals; do we?

He knows I’m fluent in obedience; before I know it, his sweet pleas fold me inwards, into myself and into him more than he folds into me—my neck bends with submission, and my spine aches like a curved book’s. It feels like I’m consuming myself more than him; I’m being swallowed by his symmetry.

In the contrary, my body gives me away before my words can; the saliva that trickles down—it’s sweet enough for a man whose pride is in his manhood and his tempo follows my submission, it’s cyclical and rhythmic—rises and falls, there’s something that feels easier about giving than resisting even though the comfort haunts me in the mirror later.

◐ | 阳 yang

In another universe, my lover holds me and looks at me with sleepy eyes, until this time i tell him i want to try something in bed—he asks me if i’m sure, he never buys my pain coated sweetened in erotica, as if he can hear the hesitation underneath but he knows i’m fluent in stubbornness too—thus he obeys.

Before he knows it, my neck submits to gravity only because my body wants to fall into him—my spine arches like my stubborn rib, his touch is too soft for my rigidity and his voice, too delicate. My pulse stumbles, not from the fear but from the knowing in his touch of the language every nerve speaks under my skin. It feels like he’s giving me more than what I give him; he swallows me in symmetry, and the shivers that he sends down my spine—it’s too much current for a woman who always followed the rigid structure of silent submission, suddenly the songs I sing follow the rhythm of his offering.

Here, the self is folded into another self, two mouths as broken halves of a circle pray to feel whole enough as mutual pleasure unifies two in its entanglement.

阴阳 when the yin-yang meet

Yin-yang, represented by the taijitu symbol (☯), which represents the two complementary forces whose interactions shape the universe; the yin (black) and yang (white) halves.

阴 (yin) is associated with darkness, femininity and inwardness—close enough to submission. Darkness is emptiness without light, and the lack of heat is frigidity—yin is empty, it receives but also pulls like a magnet.

阳 (yang) is associated with light, masculinity and outwardness—light without darkness is blinding, and the lack of coolth is fire—yang isn’t empty, it’s occupying, solid, heavy. It gives, it pushes, it dominates despite the symmetry.

But darkness is a stain, it engulfs the light and softness—it folds resistance inwards, it’s a tug-of-war of forces, none really rest. Haven’t I heard about it before? Dominance and submission / give or take / command or obey.

The halves contain a dot of the opposing, the seedling that’s the beginning of the other; they’re never absolute, never black or white. There’s no grey area either, it’s the seedling, sliver of light that I must carry with me, despite how much I submit to the darkness and to the ones who claim to be light, you too carry the seedling of the dark in you.

Lacan says the ego is formed when a baby sees a unified and polished reflection of themselves in the mirror; it’s enough to convince them to be whole, while the real self inside is still unfinished and fragmented. The self only looks whole because of the two halves being held together, the real you that you can’t see and your inverted reflection.

69 too, it looks balanced enough—both digits are symmetrical, but are they really identical? They curve towards different directions, inward and outward. It’s not about how they complete each other through symmetry; instead, it’s about how harmony is shaped by inversion, just like the ego’s reflection, too, which is merely an illusion in the mirror, but harmonious enough to convince us that it paints as completion.

You think symmetry is perfection, but two halves only come together as a whole because opposition creates tension, energy; energy is life, isn’t it?

It’s the same way the moon thinks it’s complete with its luminance that reflects along the waves, but it’s only a mirror of the sun. It’s the very same way you think you’re seeing your complete self through an external lens—you are only seeing yourself through inversion, you only understand your pleasure through another’s, that’s what 69 is.

𖤓 cyclical exchange

Darkness still carries a sliver of light and the light carries the darkness of the shadows—there is no life without the co-existence of the two, and there is no me without the co-existence of wanting or giving, it drives me insane.

69 is celestial—it mirrors the interaction between the waxing and waning of the cosmic and human realm; the way one part of the moon’s luminance grows fuller while the other retreats.

The cancer’s glyph is two opposing spirals like a rotation of 69 (♋︎), lunar nature lives in that duality and also governs it. Cancer’s energy is said to be tidal and cyclical, thus expressing the loop of co-existence even in the celestial universe, trying to maintain its equilibrium.

Cancer is the cosmic embodiment of the yin-yang through water; it’s ruled by the same moon that rules the sea—the inward pull of the waves and the outward push, it’s two tides meeting and parting; two energies feeding and feeding off each other.

三 the third factor

69 can’t be divided into two evenly either, it was never meant to be a game of two notions, it’s only divisible by one or three—the holy trinity of 69 i’d call this; the self, the other and the force that pulls the self from both ends, whether it is to submit or surrender—the ambiguity is the third factor.

There’s liberation in control, to be the reason why another self submits. It’s like the seedling of hopeless light in the darkness of the yang, it feels like control and submission are synonymous in my life; I can’t tell which one feels good, or if any do at all—can they ever co-exist even in the 69?

Then there’s the pleasure in offering yourself without having to give anything back—but it feels like helplessness, does it mean I let go of control, or am I controlling my submission itself?

69 is the paradox that ought to balance both desires, but even then, the third factor makes my position ambiguous again. He and I—we aren’t two halves, we are inversions, not twin flames, and perhaps that’s the thrill of it. That I’ll never, never fully submit or fully control, it feels like reversed psychology. I offer to help him, and he offers his help to me, yet at the end, we both know we’re asking each other to be helpless, to be in control yet lose it all.

That’s where I find myself, existing within the tension—the crescendo.

六十九 penultimacy

69 feels like the crescendo, doesn’t it? Before you subside into the stillness and silence of 70—it’s the last breath you take before 70, the last wave you soar. It’s the number of climaxes itself. Despite its symmetry, it’s sharp; I can feel it pierce the border of cyclical time.

It’s the final act of vulnerability and unity between two, where we finally attempt to balance ourselves out rather than play the typical sub-dom game. It’s an attempt to balance out power where we both serve, and we both indulge.

We play a game of pacing and synchronization, but sometimes gravity wins, or my hunger for autonomy, it’s anything except balance.

As we reach 70, out of this broken loop of infinity, we blend into one, supposedly unified like infinity, except we don’t reflect one another—the harmony is no longer a visual.

Like the moon a night before it becomes completely whole—when it’s over, spoon my inner yin—being the yang that protects me from outwards, curving in towards me—towards the coolth of my heart, bring in your heat while I contort your rigid spine. Even in this, I can’t tell who dominates; the yin’s submission to yang’s dominance or their magnetism that co-exists.

It was never a game for two, the mirror is a lie, and so is the concept of pure balance and black-white interplay—this is what happens when 69 decides to 69 you back, you acquire the third factor into duality,

want to dive down further into the rabbit hole of sex positions? Read the original piece that inspired this one! Though I warn, it’s graphic—if you can handle it, then happy reading : )

i’m standing midst the forbidden borders, in the interlude of empires. my voice too, sits in the tension before the big bang—where worlds collide and inadvertently turn into intimacy, the kind that takes more than it can give.

i step into this world as a foreigner, with a voice that disrupts the pre-existing disorder, in the middle ground of partition.

i want to cross the threshold, bypass this territory—to settle somewhere outside the harem of my body where my shattered heart lies, fragments scattered like concubines in silk begging—performing, for the attention of the sultan that rules my psyche. i’m trying to seduce the history that was never mine to be handed in the first place.

ironic enough though how the words حريم (harem) and حرام (haram) derive from the same arabic root, something forbidden yet safely tucked under a cloak of so-called chastity—sin is often hidden, for it attains value—a currency.

i. arousal | worship through art

the harem is a political theatre, where voices are either glamourized or silenced with a spoonful of supremacy—and women who entertain, are prized—for your name and your status, sits a sultan—apple of his eye, and you’re chosen for once.

hürrem sultan, once from the enemies of the ottoman empire, europe would be sultan suleiman’s beloved—the first imperial wife of the sultan, she rewrote imperial law through the armour she wore—charm; fashioned through her beauty, seduction, wit and power—she becomes femme fatale of the harem—a political performer, dealing with the currency of voice.

it was said that she was gifted with a voice like silk, one that she’d use to charm her sultan—she worshipped through the prayer of her voice, from her spirituality to her femininity; the sin and prayer, encapsulated in the same voice.

my voice is the currency of structured worship, singing feels like liberation when all the world does is shove musical sheets down your throat and expect you to swallow your own ambition before their majesty.

this voice is a creation of god, so i honour his covenant—exhaling what he places in my ribs, every breath is a prayer when i honour a covenant that tears my soul apart; to continue breathing, even though i wish not to.

mezzo-soprano—it’s the liminal vocal range between soprano and contralto, like myself it settles between two empires, it’s the taste of the bridge in between the sweetness and bitterness of red wine, dark yet delicate—not an angel nor a devil, rather something ambiguous, of a full chest resonance, coming from the harem of my heart is my voice.

life becomes such that you begin to find home in a voice liminal like yours, that breaks your heart and mends it at the same time—like you can feel your sorrow in the voice of a mezzo-soprano, فيروز.

when i can’t touch him with my hands, i find him in the octaves, between the white lines and in all these old love songs, somewhere in my chest are his echoes vibrating and spilling into my songs.

do as you please world, shove scripture down my throat and i’ll bleed out on paper—through prose and poetry, silent writing becomes musical for my hushed self—until night falls, a sultan chooses me and the ghosts of the harem prostrate to me.

it’s the kind of worship where you want to undress—of all the paper clothing i wear and the mask i wear, until all you see are wine-stained lips, forbidden to carry in my breath while i talk to god and forbidden to kiss another man with, in both—i am not there.

strip me to the core, until all i am is a voice, a throat—an embodiment of prayer.

ii. plateau | worship through the body

can you taste the wine on my tongue?

feel its fragrance fill the air; of sour cherries, bitter black currants, sweet tobacco, spicy cinnamon and the earthiness of black tea and oakwood. the air smells like red wine as the mezzo-soprano sings, with seduction and sorrow.

i’m still in the liminal space between empires, where one’s music creates worshippers and the other’s harems creates performers; i fall somewhere in between, with a desire to perform and worship—the contradiction to be seen as a worshipper in both the eyes of god’s and a man’s.

like hürrem, i’m trying to reclaim power as i navigate through a hierachy i don’t belong to—but just enough surrender and it feels like everything is bending into my will.

i want to cross the line far from where i am—either carve a home into his chest and rest, thriving off his blood—or jump off this cliff and surrender to the ocean that turns into wine the minute my body touches it, at least in both i know the ending is death, one where i’m dying into god through either ecstasy or surrender.

every sigh is worship, every moan is a call to god—despite being chosen, there’s still an emptiness, surrender of my body to another man is beyond vulnerability—my throat trembles and chest vibrates, every sound is involuntary like a prayer trying to slip out of my throat, it’s the sound of submitting to something greater than myself, in this very moment—it’s desire.

i sin with the same breath that i pray with, unity becomes worship.

وترك حساس حاجه تزن عالوتر
(that string is sensitive, quit playing on the same string)

تأثرت كتير. عليهن .. عيدا كمان وعيدا كمان
(you’ve really moved me—play it again and again)

you’ve touched the most tender part of my core, play it again—the same strings of my heart over and over until my voice fractures into two, let it be until the harem in my chest collapses and i scream into full resonance, like the roar of a sultana’s victory behind the closed doors.

your hot breath in the crook of my neck, you prostrate and i call for god—it’s the kind of worship where sin turns into stars, even as i drown in the oceans of desire, my body still remembers him through the photon of his omnipotence that resides in my spirit.

hedonism is a bandage to hide the wounds that keep reopening, seduction saves and beauty is performance but prayer and surrender—they live in my voice, in every language that i speak, that a dictionary wouldn’t accompany for.

my breath won’t steady—it stumbles, catches, betrays me.

let it rise like a crescendo—!

iii. climax | worship through unravelling

and let my voice split into two—screaming into your mouth.

until a cry that forces itself out, like a confession—without the rigidity of control—let it shake the walls of the harem in my chest.

from the primality of my core—let my spirit be heard for once, as a manifestation of desperation; like the revolt, i feel my heart rip into two and the empires colliding—the harem expands with performance and the self gets smaller; until there is no self, and all there is is god—at the end of annihilation.

my voice transcends my body, sitting above like a lily in water—this is the ambivalence of power, sopra (above) only exists outside my own realm—while my body is the vessel containing the mezzo (half), the ambiguity of worship and desire.

femininity becomes a sword, the sound of its slash through flesh is piercing—of prostration, of surrender.

like the arabs revolt against the ottomans—i’ll revolt—scream, only to be handed back into the enemy’s hands, while my psyche thrives and allies with the darkness again—performance is my currency again, and my pockets are emptying while my heart is bleeding; just like suleiman and his hürrem, the altitude of oneness eventually breaks, until you’re left again with an empty page

still, i dream of transcendence—to soar high up in the sky, like the soprano. the highest vocal range of them all, the same one that femininity and innocence share a home with—inhabiting a little girl and a woman, the one that can access a flute or whistle register, its transcendence pierces the sky; while i’m in the seventh sky—through this scream, i plead to god to let me stay.

the soprano breaks the air, as does the altitude—dives back down; my songs are shaped by two women who will never meet at the same altitude—one whose voice breaks the air and the other’s whose breaks the heart for the body that’s a vessel for prayer. from mezzo-soprano فيروز—earth, and the soprano at transcendence in the sky—majeda el roumi.

the ottoman empire becomes the structural cord—rigid and imposing while the voices of mashriq become the melodic lines, breaking free; here i am in the middle, between the crest tension and resolution.

voice becomes stronger than political power and colonialism, as artistic supremacy outdoes ottoman political legacy—does anyone win in the end anyway?

iv. resolution | worship through surrunder

it all begins to subside, i’m the hushed mezzo-soprano of shakey exhales in the harem again as i reminisce soaring high, at the top of the world but underneath such ecstasy am i only hollow liminal space.

my body is a harem and i am a foreigner to it—i watch it bend inwards and she cries, like she prostrates through the curves in her voice, the mezzo-soprano trembles as she cries—this is the loudest yet most silent kind of worship, intimate devotion through prayer offered through sound and breath alone.

i return to god again, with nothing but broken breaths and cries of a lost servant mistaking herself yet again for man’s slave.

her sobs are nothing but of truth, without any structure—yet this is the language she’s fluent in, she talks to god in every language that exists in her holy quaternity; worships through the many vessels and personas that exist in one body, four prayers in one night, with a voice that speaks every language contradictory to god.

وأعودُ.. أعودُ لطـاولـتي / لا شيءَ معي.. إلا كلمات
(and i return… return to my table / having nothing with me.... but words)

topakapı is the palace i adore, but never fit into—the voices of mashriq feel like home for my own songs but my home is outside of my throat somewhere, of corrupted land and a silent graveyard of memories, despite the clash of language and politics, in the end i’m still lost, in the middle of it all.

my liminal space is existential, neither ethnic or political—i am the third empire that settles between darkness and light / prayer and sin / surrender and control, whether it is out of the same fear of hürrem’s to be replaced or weaponized with my own voice, i talk to god in every language i know; hoping he hears me, how even in sin—it’s him i’m calling.

my body is a harem, a symbol of rooms that i watch from the outside.

*for my uncultured people

فيروز = fairouz

ماجدة الرومي = majida el-roumi

chicken breast / mutton chops
i’m laying myself here on this table
table for two? just you and i

here it is, every fillet, flesh and bone
come take my pain—taste it through the delicacy
though not graceful is preparation, the art is extravagant

you forgot to finish dinner
my dear, keep devouring

i have so much more to tell you—to feed you
so many more courses, richer than the one before
how much more of my name there is on the menu

half-woman and half-butcher’s special

chicken breasts / pale and raw
tender and soft, melting into your mouth
my blood sits at the bottom of the drain

isn’t it beautiful? the sound of the knife scraping across the cutting board
the scent of bloodied wood / its splinters resting underneath your callouses

put your two fingers so softly under my chin
practice the precision of butchery with me

knife in your hands / butcher’s slices, fillets uneven
run your blade across the grain / where the muscle memory is thickest

perfection / precision / erotica / extravagance

oops! the knife slips
again / again / again / again

what have you done?

i am the bone / flesh / the meal—and the mess
both the cutting board and the lifeless life on it

all the spice seeps into my cuts,
it burns—the irony of this world

the red-hot rage in your hands
the sting of your kiss and sharp teeth
the velvety softness dancing on your tongue

it was you again wasn’t it?

you left your autograph on my skin again
could’ve cleaned it up, couldn’t you?

my pain is growing claws that cut like blades
almost the same way when the world forgets i am human

sometimes i laugh and look at myself in the mirror
re-enacting bloody slaughter—what have you done my deer?

he would ask the next morning who did this
but i’d lie to him / just take my pain in your hands
his grip is rough / bones of adamantium

mutton chops / thick-skinned, tasting of blood and hard work

poke those knives into my tongue—
my cheeks and my open sores
let me bleed under the pressure
for a fool like me—
it’s feels safer to bleed than admit helplessness

everyone grows scars in their eyes too
they cry blood when nobody is looking
how much more longer do claws stay under the skin?
they always poke through skin, until one cries of blood

when softness can’t find home, the refugee turns into violence

bones dense, i grip on for life / can you hold onto me—rough?
against the grain, the thickest memories under my skin

bite into my raw flesh—do you taste manslaughter yet?

i already taste your savoury warmth on my tongue
aged, seasoned and a stubborn delicacy
red-hot / spice burning my tongue
your claws tear my skin apart

bite into me deeper, let your teeth sink in
indulge in the taste of rosemary and thyme
the strange comfort of tallow despite the sharp bones
even then, under this thick skin—my blood tastes sharper

forgotten on the grill for far too long / wasn’t i?
are the lemons sour enough? do your eyes sting yet?

devour me with your bare hands,
let the comfort of control coat your hands
lick every finger clean / every single one

let the grease coat your skin
the roughness of your jaw / stubborn but delicious
mutton-chopped beard / neat but messy enough
carved with enough intention as if the world didn’t carve the darkness itself

does it belong in the kitchen when i’m crying on my bloody knees?
or in between my chest, carve a heart between my chest with your teeth

but your eyes—they never warned me of that danger did they?
how sharp they are despite the sweetness in warm brown

the same sharpness in how the world carves meat for the dinner table

don’t i look beautiful like this, dear? / deer?
deer / wolf / dear / / deer / wolf / dear

so for my flesh, tear it / then kiss me gently
you heal instantly, and i heal eventually

your arms are my necklace / crack my neck
send me into whiplash / bring me back

break my bones now / my heart is already broken

chicken breasts / mutton chops

i’m joking about chicken breasts because admitting that my chest hurts is pathetic
denying a hug / wearing a sheep’s clothing with wolf skin

i’m full of too much rage to be soft / i’m full of too much softness to be rage

table for four? just you and i / i / i

x1 - initial drift

i’m sitting here with my laptop again, scarlet-coloured blood coating my hands and smeared onto the metallic grey of the touchpad and the white screen spinning with word—my blood glows, fiery like a pheonix’s plumage made of fire is that colour of scarlet; blazing with the undertone of orange. it’s a red too violent to stare at / i look at my hands again / are they really red? / or did my mind spill again? / in the shades of fiery rage and glowing-hot urgency; i read the words off my blood-smeared screen, is her name; the way she births life into colour especially red and the chaos it carries in its hues, like my blood—i feel like i am reading a mirror of my soul as the red devours the black of my eyes and i descend into madness.

x2 - re-entry

my ribcage is made of aluminum foil, electrically conductive—every time my heart beats, saying your name with every thud, i feel a jolt that shocks me from my skin to bones, a wake-up call back into cruel world again. my ribs are coated in the gold that melts from my pheonix-plumage-of-a-heart.

i want to flick the switch, take a trip somewhere far from the quotidian linearity. i cut the extension cord into half and wrap it around my neck as i hang off of the nail on the wall that once held a painting i have long forgotten—i want to become art tonight, an artificially manufactured dreamer but at least i’d dream. muscle memory doesn’t remember its rhythm anymore except for the pain of a cyclical wake-up call, but to that too, i am deaf.

i’m full of electricity and current in my veins, the memories flow with unbounded energy—hot and sharp, the lights flicker and i’ve become the time machine. i hammer more nails into my skin and hang portraits of my fragmented soul so at least they’d recognize me, i’m still their artist child even if if my soul is shattered and behind the art, is red-hot wounds that burn through—they always burn.

x1 - human

термодинамика, i’m embodying the second law of thermodynamics; ice cubes in my hands as the heat from my body radiates and turns them into water. the heated rage from the blood in my hands feeds the frigidity of each ice cube sitting on my scarlet-red wounds, at last when they melt—we reach equilibrium; the cold doesn’t dare to turn its head back to my red-hot restlessness, disorder furthr increases and ice is now water.

i embody all its laws, the heat that consumes the coldness of ice doesn’t melt into the void—the water, once ice cubes, soak my sleeves and burn from all the heat they absorbed, internal energy has increased and now it’s burning me alive again despite its once-so-cooling properties.

mother i’m a burnt child, you know i play with fire.

x8 - celestial displacement

the shockwave has me spinning, i am seeing stars—the galaxy of death circulates me, the milky way is somewhere outside of a screen and only now do i realize i am living outside of it despite my hard body laying limp in a lonely room.

i carry a stellar death in my veins and the world suddenly looks so small in front of the celestial bodies that perform pilgrimage around this dying universe as the stars slowly die.

the orb of earth, bountiful of greens, blues and human on the inhabiting the future residents of the hellfire—but red and bloody-ironed mars, is where i see myself; bleeding yet cold on the outside and molten fire at my core, the only difference between i and earth is that earth is warmer on its outside and bounties life.

here i am outside of my own body, my soul is burning and trapped outside of god’s world, from the small room to the galaxy itself. yet my heart is still human despite being made of current, even outside the nebula i am looking for the orbs of his eyes—any shade that resembles his, until another jolt hits again.

i fall out of the stars into the ocean, a little closer to my reality.

x3 - submersion

i can’t breathe in this ocean of grief, the red alga of odonthalia dentata dances, its teeth are digging into my skin; i was once and always to be consumed, by any creation of god that was born to mock me, knock me out anywhere from the rhythm.

the eight arms of the octopus and all the reminders they carry, they wrap around my body as they suck the bitter-sweet blood out of me; the eight evil arms around my skin, the eight evil thoughts from my veins rushing to my heart, precursor to the garden of seven deadly sins in my mind and their eight planets—their eight lovers.

x1 - human again

we swim back to the surface after the ocean-dwellers feed on my flesh and its dispersed chaos. the sand is hot and skin is bronzed, a summer long-lost in my timeline—the little kids build sandcastles, the little boy is the king—he’s always the king and then there was his queen.

they eat starfruit bright as the yellow sunset, the sour-sweet juice trickles down their chin—the queen comes up to me and offers me a piece, despite it being cold, it burns when it touches my tongue; every beautiful thing i touch—sweet or cold, burns.

they then take me home in their white sedan, suddenly the nausea of nostalgia hits but i swallow back the bitterness. they offer me a mini carton of banana milk—apparently the koreans came up with this because bananas were a luxury at the time, and foolish enough were consumers to believe they could taste that luxury through artificial sugar and fruitless flavour; similar enough is how i believe this time-machine of artificiality will let me taste the sweetness of nostalgia—but nostalgia only tastes like battery acid and burns my insides, i’ve manufactured it again.

back at home, somewhere over the blue marble floor and antique couches with the aroma of warm bone-broth soup, the kids lay out photographs from their trip to the zoo, from chubby pandas and suzi the elephant—they reminisce over yesterday and i’m reminiscing over my lost years as if they were yesterday; it stings again.

they paint with their aunt, she’s an artist who was famous in the city for her artwork; yet again does the queen try to invite me, she offers me a paintbrush and tells me to fill my canvas and tells me to compete with the little artist, i can feel her gaze burning through my body, it burns but i still continue.

the little boy, king—he paints bird’s nest with eyes and a bow, calls it chewbacca while the queen paints flowers like her mother taught her and their little artist paints a girl on fire—it burns when i realize it’s her art i had tried to hang onto my skin, but all i have now is the punctures of all the nails i hammered into my skin.

her painting wasn’t complete but enough to burn me through and through, she goes to the bedroom watches the elders use the glucometer on her diabetic grandmother, she stands with flowers of hallucinogenic flowers hoping that one day she’ll be wear a stethoscope and do the same, she wanted to save lives.

until i look into her eyes and she looks into mine—she screams—the extension cord around my neck, nails and burnt canvas frames hang from my skin, scarlet-red blood dripping on the floor and my wired ribcage poking out.

time is her enemy and so is it mine / she is my enemy and so am i hers

she is me and i am her, before she sees—i let time engulf me.

i dream too much, the past doesn’t want me there anymore.

x0.5 - trajectory distortment

i’m somewhere between a nightmare or is it a dream? will my lust testify or will my ego? my longing is out of order, entropy is the result of miscalculated coordinates.

it’s the same craving in a different universe—a woman’s lips are locked onto mine, i’m living in a dystopia dreamland where my man-loving soul is drinking in the galaxies of another woman, taking in her scent instead of his nightly musk.

the galaxy holds up her shape like a mirror and asks isn’t this what you wanted? but even in the dream i can feel the wrongness of it. i don’t want to be here.

spin me round—and around, i’m on the bed in pink lace, floral lingerie as she kisses me and spits every deadly sin onto my tongue—her nose brushes against the bridge of mine; it’s something out of an aubrey plaza movie, a movie i’d never find myself in the real world.

she has a cat named pussycat and when she meows it feels like a glitching sound effect, the dream reminding me this isn’t real, this isn’t mine, this isn’t where my longing lives. it’s comedic yet tragic, lust takes in the shape of a cat and the lines are being bent.

life gives me the taste of the love and lust i desire through a body i’d never take it in through, i need your name to jolt me awake again—your gravity.

jolt me awake.

x1 - human again

jolt.

the current once in my body—desire, is now scattered around my bed like geranium robertianum, feminine and pink but it’s an invasive weed growing and dominating the little buds of deed i planted before i went to sleep; the fruit is gone before it blooms.

there’s a quiet relief in smelling your cologne on my pillow again, that spilled through my tears from the very day i drunk you in through my eyes.

the orifices of my body spill with stardust, intoxicating like alcohol is their origin and beautiful as the night sky—but too much of the cosmos in my only-human body kills.

ecballium elaterium—i expel it all, sweet as long as it resides inside me, but toxic the minute it touches any entity outside of myself; all of my flowers kill like poison and my bed smells like lust again.

jolt and your name it is.

i’m back in the bus again—we’re driving along the highway while my skin still burns with all those memories, there’s a trucker beside our bus and i look at his hands, suddenly i’m nauseous again remembering yours on the same steering wheel that took me the closest i could climb to the big night sky, away from the world and into your arms.

jolt, your name again.

i am in the bathroom, it smells like death and the piss-stained floor laughs at me as i’m lurched over the toilet, every memory is being eliminated out of my mouth—everyone outside this place is laughing while a måneskin song plays in the background, having fucking pepperoni pizza and lasagna that i can smell from here but all i know right now is that i’m too far—too far from a silly restaurant and even a filth-filled bathroom, i’m suspended somewhere in liquid memory. i am no longer human.

the red screams of life / the black hums of death

disorder is greater than order and i am the epitome of entropy, my thoughts and memories are all scattered in a bathroom—through pills and scarlet-red blood and the copper-blue coloured hemocyanin memories that leave my mouth and eyes, blood of the most brutal—the octopi’s blood spilling out of me reminds me of every evil thought / sin / universe i carry.

x8 - divine displacement

let this black hole of grief swallow me whole—and the supernova of cursed time in my manufactured, electric heart to take place—let the remnants of memory subside at the bottom of the ocean until i drown to meet them again; the taste of sweet fruit and feel of scorching hot sun.

machine gods drink the ocean, but the ocean is big enough to defuse the current in me—i’m nowhere bigger than any universe except reminiscence, what a dagger to the heart it is to accept.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR GENIUS CONTRIBUTIONS!!

father is built of iron—the type that’s stubborn enough that no amount of heat would mold his arms into a place soft enough to cradle me; no soft amount of heat to warm my heart up on a cold winter morning, he only burns—the orange glow of molten metal is enough to lure me in, but how childish of me that i can’t tell the difference between warm glowing honey and ferocious molten metal that looks like the sun in liquid form, but the closer you get to the sun, you will burn.

i’m his daughter, i am the rust that forms when the raindrops fall on iron—when the blow of a gentle prayer as an attempt to give such heavy metallica a soul, becomes corrosion—a product of emotion and time, the variable that also birth love—they decay metallica’s strength, the very red that tarnishes the back of the trophy, is me.

i am the deep shade of red that reads as a testimony for the love that i carry, but it always decays; passion i burn with, but i’m still cold at the end of the day. i am the rust and the metallica descendant that leaves traces of melancholy wherever i go; from the metallic scent of rage that bleeds from my skin and stains the cold marble every night—soaking the tissues red until i have a garden of blood-dripping roses, i hand them over to my demons; take a look at how much i’m hurting despite the strength in my blood.

my perfume too, smells like iron.

father is the blood that runs through my veins. his cologne smells like iron too—sharp and strong. there’s his strength as he stands in his black suede, of dominance and pride; they prostrate to him, like a magnet he has the world is in his hands, but they were never shaped to cradle my once-so-soft soul.

how can you be so perfect? always there, the dinner table is full and my closet is full of designer but my heart’s still broke. i still look for a cheap thrill that feels deeper than your obligation, superficial it is.

iron is made inside stars through nuclear fusion and when the stars get too heavy from the core—they collapse and there comes the supernova, a shockwave. doesn’t that happen when i bleed too much and reality reminds me, i am you—of mars, made of iron—creation through destruction?

i always collapse at the end

a provider was what he always was, a craftsman is what he has become; father crafts his finest weapons and machinery with his strong hands, he builds me something strong enough to protect me, but turns his head away every time the machines turn in on me—it’s not defence, it’s destruction, i’m crying with blood in my tears as the blades cut into my skin—and you are oblivious to your craft.

father is the iron that tells hemoglobin to bind to cacophony like oxygen, just to keep the blood dancing through my body.

who would tell him—i am nothing like still water, i’m ferocious like the falls—malleable at the core, resistant to perfection and the linear normality. father thinks so too, that perfection is all about control—but father, it’s about letting go; letting myself paint the walls red and shattering the mirror, collecting the shards and building the perfect reflection of myself; showcasing every shatter with pride so it makes me seem like the most perfect girl. without the shatter, i am you—with your dark eyes, curved bridge of your nose, paleness of your skin and your anger that ignites every syllable sitting on my tongue, like burning coal; the mirror doesn’t lie.

i’m afraid i won’t ever be like you father, the perfect man who never breaks and stands tall like a knight in his shining armour that never tarnishes. for a man made of the letters P-E-R-F-E-C-T-I-O-N, i am only rust even because i run in the rain until i’m out of breath and soaked, tarnished—i can never do it like you, unmalleable, untouched and perfect man.

you’re obsessed with control, you’re master behind the craft and i’m the muse that changes shape every day—one day i’m at the centret and the next day i am nothing but corrosion, that tarnishes your shiny reputation, which too is a craft. who(se) is the good man at the end of the day?

hemochromatosis—when the body can’t get rid of iron, the heart begins to corrode; too much yet too less of father, too much control and too less of love, the element that gave me live, kills in surplus.

i’m trapped in this tower as i fill it with paintings that are a waste of my time—read the books that won’t put me anywhere on the pedestal, scribble on the walls with my writing but still you won’t be able to understand the language i exist in despite us sharing mother tongues.

i let my desires climb up my hair because you’ve broken the ladder, after all i am of your blood—stubborn but anything besides superficial perfection. from all the men on the telephone, just to hear one i love you to feel like someone’s even if it tarnishes me further—i’ve learned the language of degradation from you father—what misery there is begging another man to call me his little girl just to fill in the void of my father in my chest.

a daughter is supposedly a trophy, your trophy to hold up high in the sky who’s tarnished on the inside, holding rainwater that i shouldn’t have to hold in the first place. until you take it home, then you become turpentine and your painted golden trophy comes out bloody red underneath, sitting on the top shelf but doesn’t get an eye bat at, even when i’m at my highest.

i find myself on the phone again, screaming for help at a man who’s nearly a decade older than me—i ask him what to do with my life, the stranger becomes a ladder. we make jokes about sugar dating so i can afford a therapy session, not because father doesn’t have money, but father’s card can’t read the code of disorder—daughters are trophies, stainless, no father wants rust to his pride—he’d break every mirror so i wouldn’t see my real reflection.

father and daughter / oxidation and reduction / praise and degradation

in every bond, one gives and one takes; i’m ferric³⁺ when i am praised, oxidized iron, dark and clotting to silence the wound—until you degrade me and now i’m ferrous²⁺; negatively-charged by the subatomic electrons orbiting my heart and i’m no longer soluble, emotion doesn’t immerse me—i only dance over the surface of rainwater, turning anything i touch into red like blood, it’s just that i don’t know if it’s mine. i’m too lost in the electricity of positively-charged poison, cacophony and alcohol for a dying liver—i cannot pick my poison just the way you can’t pick yourself; father, provider, craftsman.

innocence that’s dark like the black dahlia, but when she’s charged—she’s red, blood-red and bitter, staining your name—in the same colour of my flushed cheeks, the sting of your slap still lives on my skin—just through another hand and another man, that’ll fill me up with the poison you always tried to keep me away from in the first place; pearlescent and also tastes like metal.

an electric circuit only flows if it’s closed—if the loop breaks, no current flows. i think about how we father-daughter are a circuit; without the current of father and the silence of his enclosure—who even am i? any colour but red, any shade of blood but rage.

mother keeps fresh-cut flowers in each room, but father says flowers die at the end anyway, iron is too close to death—your reflection is everywhere so you break every mirror. every room is a father in our house, and every room has a price tag—polished and stainless.

even the stars die of iron, once they’re full—they can’t produce any more energy, iron is the marker of stellar death before the supernova, you birth perfection only for it to die at the end, explosive, nothing as gentle as the decaying of a flower.

tell me to throw away the bottle of rust-dissolving acid or take the ventilator off and i’ll do it, tell me it’s okay for a little girl to play in the rain with her father and we’ll play together as you carry me back home to ماما and sit at that dinner table with a smile and you’d really be there.

بابا let’s go outside, it’s your day off today—push me on the swings until i fly high and buy me an ice cream, spoon-feed me and tell me i’m a princess and you are the king, that nobody will ever hurt me and that i am really yours—that what i reside in is a castle, not corroded, suicidal metallica machinery.

in another life i wouldn’t find myself on a bus—staying with him a little longer just to see the big night sky because the stars are too close to death for father of iron, suddenly another older man looks like a door open to a galaxy because he’s softer than metal, and never burns.

what if i’m standing in a wedding dress and instead of vows, we read the contract of a business deal where a tall man like you becomes the ladder but he’ll never get to be the lover, like father who’s iron but not بابا ?

father is iron and i am rust, iron fathers create corroded daughters—hollow yet heavy fathers create the hungriest daughters, now feed my heart with more raindrops and breathe the curse of time into me—until i rust.

he is my father, i am his daughter.

*for my uncultured people

ماما = mama = mother

بابا = baba = father

i. bradycardia, the initial and slow pulse after resuscitation.

….am i back again? who? me?

ــــــــــــ٨ـــــــtrustــtheــlordــi’llــbeــbackــin ــ25minutesــــــــــــ٨ـــــــ

the sinoatrial node, the first spark. the origin of rhythm. in god’s code in flesh, i have been resuscitated, and my heart—it just barely starts to beat again thanks to some cruel defibrillator of fate.

i was born to die, but the pulse returned anyway—faint and trembling, god pressed restart but tell him, please tell him i don’t belong here—never with my ribs broken and the home of our heart, crushed underneath calcium and muscle.

i have woken up again but not by choice, i’m alone and caged in four walls and the quiet white noise of the fan—i am pale, my head is spinning—apparently it’s my birthday, another one of living to die; of candles like defibrillators and the cake that’s the altar. my own room feels like a hospital; clinical, cold and holy while my chest burns with the life machines and pills provide for.

today marks a year of trying to kill myself, but a year ago god sent an angel to save me from hell and for a second it was like the garden of eden—but i am only human after all, daughter of eve and he’s the son of adam—not an angel, the angels object. then suddenly we’re locked out of heaven, on what i hate to call my home—it’s earth, the world between heaven and hell; there’s no peace, no death either, only for the ones that mercy is bestowed for.

who would ever tell us? the day i was born, was the day we would die—but still somehow be two humans with two beating hearts—barely beating hearts. one loses his smile, the other loses her laughter; then they lose each other.

it’s the same cruel world that hid the sun and put a cloak over his joy and the same cruel world that sends me into whiplash from the grief of losing him while he was mine, and the agony of losing him because he was never mine.

i still remember waking up from one dream into another—your soft voice, those worried eyes and the wrinkles on your forehead; death was the closest i could be to you—death was too close to peace, you too, too close to peace.

can’t i get high enough and end up in your arms again?

the pulse stays. only the pulse stays.

feet don’t fail me now, take me to the finish line.

ii. stabilization, a normal EKG rhythm that beats with memory.

i’m pretending to live now, supposedly death doesn’t look that beautiful on me as much as i do while suffering beautifully. my heart has found it’s rhythm and it’s going to kill me.

i was born to die—from the nights i don’t sleep hoping that the trumpet will be blown and i’ll be resurrected in a world where i am no longer myself, this is what i dreamt about with my eyes open while laying in the hospital bed.

i walk along these roads hoping fate will mistake me for a ghost and end the waiting; a bus would crash into me and the world can see how much yearning i possess in my blood, let it stain where i died once, let them smell the poetry of the girl who was born to die.

then there’s my favourite place to take a walk, the train tracks behind my house that i planned to rest on in september but god again, sent a false messiah to save me from myself, he too spoke the language you speak—mercy, but what a fool i am to only understand delirium and speak in broken sonnets.

your memories are the songs my heartbeat sings, the electricity of those nights keeps me alive a little longer—rhythmically, your ghost keep my heart beating; i replay every syllable you say, every word you say and it’s enough to keep me stabilized, every little are you ok? and suddenly i feel like i’m being cared for again.

my heart doesn’t want to beat on its own anymore, everything around me looks either like my murderer or a machine that’s keeping me alive. my blood runs cold but just a trip back to friday night—november smells like decay and cigarettes, somewhere i can still smell my blood on the streets and my tears that make the leaves grow on the schizophrenic trees.

i feel so alone on a friday night.

ــــــــــــ٨ـــــــyou’reــsafeــnowــــــــــــــ٨ـــــــbreatheــwithــmeــــــــــ٨ـــــــ

it was friday night wasn’t it? how lonely was my last friday night grieving us, through earth’s cruel reminder—almost yours, but not quite. another man in your seat is telling me to breathe—but how do i breathe—grieving that night. it’s saturday now—i am the furthest i could be from death yet the closest to it, yet still it’s the world’s shocks that keep my heart beating because somewhere in that rhythm is your name.

god lets me breathe, but i don’t know if it’s mercy or punishment at this point. i almost believe in life, but never fully.

i’m not surviving on nodes, it’s you i am surviving through—and bigger is the artist behind such a craft, god—and you are his heart-shaped mercy.

how did she never know that she never even reached the finish line in the first place? her feet never failed her but fate already did, she grew back her wings after cutting them, but then the black swan, cuts them off again.

the little girl in me, she never liked her birthday—as if she knew, that her own existence would depend on anything other than her, godless entities.

i’ve become my own oppenhemier; building the bomb inside my chest, detonating it in rhythm with my name—he splits the atom and it explodes, so do i—when i try to pull the plug or surrender to living, god keeps me in-between, between life and death. i’ve always loved to play with death.

every lover does it, don’t they? we build with the same clay that destroys us—then we call it love, or survival—never a home that stays standing through every season, never.

i build the bomb inside my chest, underneath the calcified rubble of my ribs and in the oceans of blood; i write my name for it, and i wait for partition of living matter.

iii. arrythmia; my heart is crashing. i am losing rhythm.

the code is breaking and the circuit misfires, the neuron forgets its purpose and my heart doesn’t have a song to sync its rhythm with anymore—slowly the world is stealing your memories from mine; the books i need to put in my head—the lights they turn on in the dark when i’m still looking at your eyes in that darkness, i am getting emptier.

the system is glitching—the error says no love found, it keeps rebooting the same broken code, your name, in the color white—white like those fluorescent lights again, wake up.

ــــــــــــ٨ـــــــi’m still hereــــــــــــ٨ـــــــno you aren’tـــــــ٨ـــ٨ــــــ?ـ

the birthday candles look like heart monitors—the candlelights flicker the way i remember my heart beating so, die, die, die. the light going in and out the way i opened my eyes that night, somewhere in the waiting room of death but blink, blink, blink—and there he was.

there’s a knife in my hand and a small strawberry shortcake on the table, they’re telling me to make a wish; my wish has been the same for god knows how long, it’s like a mantra—a prayer i recite every day, like i was born to do it; i want to die. this knife i’m holding to cut into this very cake, i want to slit my throat with it. watch the blood ooze out like strawberry jam with the taste of red candied strawberries on my tongue that taste like sweet-sour grief, just so how i am—glazed with sweetness but sour at the core, yet still i’m gifted with the sweet kind of blood, the kind that people feed off, sweetheart.

they clap louder, each bite of cake is getting sweeter—it reminds me the sweetness this little girl was full of before having drugs as her birthday cake instead.

ـــــــ٨ـ٨ــــــhe's hereــــــــnoــــ٨ـــــnoـــ٨ـ٨ـــnoــــ٨ــhe’s hereـــ٨ــــــyesــ٨ـــــ

they sit in a circle around me—it’s a ritual of nature circulating grief; the way my heart still sends blood to circulate throughout my grieving body, the schizophrenic trees that make the madwoman spin around, enough to trick her that she’s dancing under them with her love—and then there’s me—walking in circles, my tears falling and sinking into my skin, only for the memories to pour out of my eyes hotter and hotter.

all i’ve realized is i’m so empty. so unbearable empty. there’s this strange horror, this place that once felt like home feels like it will not crush me, but keep expanding with ambiguity, getting emptier and emptier—i’ll look for you still, but just its size will laugh at me for still looking for you in a world so big. you’re a ghost in this world full of dead people.

is it by mistake or design?

god’s world of so many people yet still nowhere is there home—never a home for the little girl and no home for the woman anymore; i’m back at the starting, no matter how many times i pass the finish line, i always come back to the beginning—not the beginning where my mother’s soft skin was my pillow in an era of birth being celebrated; i have resurrected, yet nobody bothered enough to offer their warmth—that’s what happens, when the cold leaves you to clinging onto the only warm heart of the first minutes of your last day.

the birthdays will keep coming, as if god’s reminding me to ask myself the questions i still have no answer for.

i call your name into static. every heartbeat a misfire. every breath an exception thrown.

ـــــ٨ــ٨ـــــــyesـــــyesــــ٨ـــــyesــــ٨ـــyesــــ٨٨ــyesـــ٨ــyesــ٨ــyesـ٨ــyesـ٨ـ٨ـ

the atom splits. not with love, never with love—it’s never enough.

i could see but once i was blind.

iv. heart attack; reality settles into the rhythm.

ـــ٨ــ٨ـــــnoـــــnoـــ٨ـ٨٨ـــــnoــ٨ــ٨ـــnoـــ٨ـ٨ــn٨oـــ٨ــnoـ٨٨٨ـ٨ــ

can you make it feel like home if i tell you you’re mine?

so i do it, i’m high again like i was last year—god is unreachable and so is his beloved angel of death, so i take the road to you, the closest being to both an angel and death.

you’re still out there in the world, still theirs while i am dying and looking for fragments of you in materialistic ecstasy; keep taking those pills, no remedy exists for an illness that you can’t name—one you don’t want to name. the kind that make you want to die but you want to live for god, the same god you’ve been screaming at your entire life for relief—and powerful enough was his wrath to place you outside the shrine of worship, with your tongue tasting bitter of pills, outdoing the sweetness of mercy / hands coated in blood and stars, eyes heavy with sleep and grey with melancholy / those wrinkles from how much hope you look for in such a hopeless world / all those bruises on your feet from walking to what you think is a finish line, but it’s never a finish line—it’s the beginning for another marathon, the finish line of a story that dies before it blooms.

i called it love, but it was only my pulse trying to find itself again.

this should’ve been the day about me, but what much do i have left—or what did i even begin with? i’ve always been an empty vase, filled with many flowers but they die. they keep giving me flowers, but nobody gives me water with it—i adorn myself and run on the empty, until here i am again; dead. i hold every story within me, especially the one from when the vase was empty, and the flowers bloomed as they drink in the water, but here i am again—in the middle of my desert-of-a-heart.

resuscitate. resuscitate. resuscitate.

v. flatline.

let death come to me—i’ll kiss it hard enough that my red lipstick leaves its stains and that it turns into art. life imitates art; let me imitate the art of dying gracefully, if the dance goes on then come and dance with me as i day gracefully, it takes two to tango.

let the last scent i take in be your cologne, the last light being your moonlit face. let this home be the light at the end of the tunnel, there’s comfort in death when it feels so familiar—the way you do, in that stupid grey sweater, death too fits me snug like so.

the songs sing their swan songs and so do i, my voice cracks into white feathers. a small body but i carry the weight of my love for you in my heart and i let myself sink into mercy—the way a beautiful swan dies in the dirty water, here i am—dying without you, but still with you.

the EKG begins to tremble, it’s a skyline of grief and at last—the sun sets, along the horizon; god’s hand hovers over the switch—he hesitates.

until i hear the first and last words.

goodــnightـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ٨ـــ

her last words, tattoo the words born to die below her heart—the beholder of death, and you—let it be the headstone that says goodbye since they couldn’t say it with their words.

she lived, she loved, she died a little every november. never anyone’s daughter or anyone’s love—she was just in love with the nighttime and its little mercies—that too never stayed.

she was born to die. and she’ll die, just to be born again.

cruel november / cruel world / cruel life

ـــ٨ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــhello?ــ٨ـــ٨ــ٨ـــ٨ــــ

we were born to die.

call on hold…
now playing: beethoven – moonlight sonata, 3rd movement (op. 27 No. 2)  
♬♩♫───♬♩♫───♬♩♫───♬♩♫

it’s 4AM again, i’ve been dreaming about sleep while i’ve been awake all day. yet here i am, about to sleep—looking for anything to keep me awake.

my bottle of xanax is empty, the antidepressants don’t make me feel anything or anyone anymore and those sleeping pills, do i even use them to sleep at this point? is it even sleep that i’m looking for, or is it escape—the fantastical kind of escapism where you put yourself to sleep hoping that mercy disguised as some prince florian would kiss you awake and you’d be living in your happily ever after.

i don’t know where the story begins and what the ending is, but all i do know is my heartstrings are tied to the corners of black-inked letters and i’m hanging off every syllable and swinging onto the next part of the song, lighting every tape on fire. i don’t know what words are flying over my head yet still, i’m laying in-between those white lines of separation—as if i am obliged to become the partition for the world when everyone wants to be a king, even the peasant.

jung, weren’t you damn right about my repression becoming what i create—i suddenly turn into a confession, a broken voice message that keeps playing back to me on the telephone telling me that all i am right now is a shadow. he says the unconscious speaks in symbols, so here i am writing them into drugs and the thrills of the nighttime. you dive inwards, and i dive into the night—you touch god through science, and i touch him through man’s sin.

my choice of drug is dopamine.
my choice of deed is dopamine.
my choice of desire is dopamine.
my choice of death is dopamine.

i’m bleeding again, from god knows which vessel again; my white dress is stained red with my blood again so i stand at the shore, collecting the salt from the ocean’s complaints and rubbing it over my wounds—just to feel, anything or everything—something to make this pain feel a little more real, right when it stings.

there’s no use of the little bandages that i’m sticking over my wounds that bleed like ferocious falls, it’s enough to convince an outsider that i’m healing and dressed in polyethylene but only if someone could find a medicine that would soothe the ghost crying in my mind—the sugar i want on my tongue from all the salt in my blood that burns up my skin.

i’m sober and the clock is spinning again, my phone keeps ringing with callers that have no ID—i too, no ID. i don’t know who i am at this point; am i just a number? a voice? a movie? a pseudonym? only the next man can tell me.

I WANT DOPAMINE. D O P A M I N E.
I WANT DOPAMINE. O P A M I N E.
I WANT DOPAMINE. P A M I N E.
I WANT DOPAMINE. A M I NE.
I WANT DOPAMINE. M I N E.

my lipstick is smudged from the kiss of shared cigarettes, eyeliner smeared from my makeup remover, my tears—those too, synthetic of surfactants and emulsifiers to dissolve my pride, which wears itself like kiss-proof blood-red lipstick. my drug of choice is dopamine, far too much of a rush and my emotions—they’re fiery like lava, but move slow enough to consume every part of my obsidian heart—here i am trying to cry but all i am right now is made of plastic and polymer.

the music is as miserable as it can get, empty left atrium of the ballroom of my heart and there’s a ghost playing the piano like a madman until his piano is stained with blue blood.

my stomach is insatiable of broken butterflies that make my head spin and my silk-slipped heart is wrung dry of the intoxicants it bathes in every night; i am seeing stars, comets—i’m lunatic enough to keep wishing for the white lilies to grow in my womb again, but here i am with my black dahlias that bleed out of my flesh every night.

FUCKING DOPAMINE DON’T YOU GET IT????? WHY???
WHY??? FUCKING DOPAMINE DON’T YOU GET IT????? 
FUCKING DOPAMINE DON’T YOU GET IT????? WHY??
WHY??? FUCKING DOPAMINE DON’T YOU GET IT????? 
FUCKING DOPAMINE DON’T YOU GET IT????? WHY???
WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY

i keep writing because i can no longer take anything in, i don’t want to surrender to pleasure—i want become it, embody it—this world i live in that moves at a speed where everything turns into smudged oil pastel, i am living for the cheap thrills of blending in with time and the rhythm of my heartbeat that’s still going through withdrawals.

every night i entertain the dead and that’s enough to get me off, the thrill of being something bigger than grief, someone louder than silence. to be the instrument of the nighttime, any time—for anyone.

but then one night, like everything, i get sick of it—the way a man’s pride will rise to the strum of a violin, blow of a flute and suddenly, being the performer—being the instrument or the woman with no name is not enough anymore. control feels like an illusion again, it always was—i’ve sold my soul to the nighttime, a companion of mine where the whole world is asleep and it’s a game of gambling with my sanity, and on every bet—i give myself away little by little until all i have left is my empty hands and empty self—so i become it; cash, a paper bill to be sitting in the back of a man’s pocket that he’ll pass on but i’ll never be anyone’s, never where i want to be. just a woman tasting like traces of cocaine, smelling of cigarette smoke and flushed from the burn of vodka.

DOPAMINE PLEASE DOPAMINE!!
DOPAMINE DOPAMINE DOPAMINE!!
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE!!
DOPAMINE DOPAMINE DOPAMINE!!
DOPAMINE PLEASE DOPAMINE!!
DOPAMINE DOPAMINE DOPAMINE!!
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE!!

i’m still sitting here with the telephone in one hand and my bottle of pills in the other—books scattered around my room, my fingers sore from typing, makeup opened like a paint palette; despite the world i have created for myself to live in, i still long for an answer from the other side—a hello, a goodbye, a stay—even though, it’s never even me who stays.

i’m living off of my own holy trinity of sin, sleep and salvation—with all the rush in my blood it does feel like i’m seeing god through this religion, but it’s only a gleam of light that always goes out.

i can’t sleep anymore. please .
i can’t sleep anymore. please just .
i can’t sleep anymore. please just one.
i can’t sleep anymore. please just one more.
i can’t sleep anymore. please just one more. one.
i can’t sleep anymore. please just one more. one more.
i can’t sleep anymore. please just one more. one more. one.
i can’t sleep anymore. please just one more. one more. one.

how empty are you in the emptiness of the night? when you’ve sold all your desire, planted your hopes into gardens that will never bloom and the grief that you’ve poured into a glass of wine but it doesn’t intoxicate you anymore?

who even are you when the world is asleep—when no thrill will put you to sleep, no rollercoaster to take a ride to the other side? who are you when nobody calls you princess or baby for a illusory contract?

who are you when the world falls asleep?

nobody, absolutely nobody—you live in the world that has fallen asleep, wake up—you don’t belong here.

♬♩♫───♬♩♫───♬♩♫───♬♩♫
am ende bist du wieder allein in der stille.
das lied ist zu ende, und dein rausch auch.

how much of myself will i sacrifice to become a singular in your memory?

i’ve cut my chest open and minced my heart and put it in a plastic bag as an offering for you to turn me into your creation, as exactly as you desire—anything to be unforgettable, to sit in the deepest pit of your stomach, to be the sour bile you taste when i begin to fade away from your memory.

I. 渇望 • [katsubō]

hunger, hunger as reverance

hannibal the cannibal, i get him. from the way he embalms absence through his grandiose cuisine and sanguinary creation; he is the priest who’s ritual is of resurrection through consumption, the artist who’s the creator of his eternity—a renaissance god of rot feeding on a corpse and its embodying memory to stay alive—anything to be the one who devours and is devoured.

from the way he transforms hunger into beauty, eating a human out of reverence and aestheticized consumption is his worship. it’s the kind of intimacy where you kill someone someone gruesomely yet so perfectly, and consume them so ever gracefully; to present you as my creation, with saffron and cardamom sonnets in every bite and the sharp metallic taste of well-loved blood devoted to my name—this is what it’s like to create and consume, preserve and remember, swallowing your soul until it burns through my skin.

drain down my heart with a glass of wine, i’ll swim in your intoxicated blood as i drown in blood-red wine of devotion, like the colour of my love—colour of my blood, red is finality, and you’re bleeding out with it. bitter is your bile, dizzying than any rush, i’m seeing stars and they’re spell out your name.

love is a dissection, of peeling back our layers—from skin to bone, can you read your name on my skin? can you taste my blood on your tongue when i kiss you and bite your tongue, my pleas are through how much i consume you—to be seen and to be known down to every layer, every nerve that signals a fire is for you.

II. 腐蝕 • [fushoku]

corrosion, the oxidation of intimacy

it only takes a few minutes of oxygen exposure for blood to decay, platelets activate and iron oxidizes. hemolysis occurs, red blood cells rupture and release hemoglobin; the oxidation turns blood from bright to a darker brown-black. the way i can see my love bleeding out of my skin and clotting, epitomizing rot—my love feels dead when it’s no longer red.

formaldehyde preserves organs in pathology, it crosslinks proteins so tightly that they can’t even decay; it creates an entity of something dead yet recognizable, lifeless but eternal. it’s false eternity, freezing you in the state you died in.

my very love for you is embalmed in formaldehyde—i kill its ability to evolve, for all there is after its evolution is the dagger of death or the cruel birth of a life full of enough poison to kill me so painfully slow—so i keep you and i in-between; i embalm my emotion so it never rots, preserve your memory and your voice in my very own blood, but i never let it breathe loud enough to wake me up from my dreams, it’s only better in this quiet with you, without anyone else, even time that tries to knock on our door and take you away from me. (it already has, i won’t accept it)

there’s an obsession with preserving you because time is my biggest fear, life decays with time—the people i loved are dead, the ones whose beauty i admired are now living with skin sagging from the pull of death, but still i’ll put our love to sleep forever, so you never wake up and nor do i—no matter how fast the clock will run, we’re embalmed in something greater than the cruel world.

hannibal’s will is human formaldehyde, preserving morality—i preserve you, as a way to preserve my insanity, it’s better to be stabbed in my heart over and over than to be a peacefully sleeping, pale creation in a casket.

that is intimacy, love that will always corrode through gradual oxidation—despite the beauty i paint it all in—the ugliness of it will tarnish my pride, time and decay are the rust that smell like metallic truth.

so devour me, swallow me whole until your organs rot with my memory, until every part of you remembers me even when the earth’s soil drinks the last bit of your blood. let the earth taste it in your rotting corpse, how much i love you, and how much i live in your dead body while i slowly die.

III. 堕落 • [daraku]

corruption, a baptism by decay

i want to corrupt you, your being / sanity / morality—my naïve heart dipped in venom served on a platter and i’ll stain your world with my truth, darker than the black sky is my world, let it bruise your skin in the last bits of blood that drain. i don’t want to be loved like the full moon, love me like the blood moon and drink my blood-red tears, carry my devotion like a testimony so they know that it’s bigger than i am. baptize yourself in the waters of my sorrows and never forget me, the last cry and the last look in your eyes, let it haunt you until your veins bleed in my colours.

hannibal’s will is empathetic, and it makes him porous while hannibal pours down his obsession into those pours—hannibal’s civility erodes while will’s morality rusts, where both become gracefully decayed and corrupted.

here i am as your offering, porous and for you to pour your sorrow down—let it fill all the emptiness until the silence rusts and screams in corroded morality, i want to be so gracefully destroyed, while corrupting your hunger and civility.

IV. 水物 • [mizumono]

the final course, before the moment ends.

i want to be desired so fiercely that i disappear into your hunger—i want to make your flesh reek with my perfume, just so i am not forgotten even if i become the sacrificial lamb, your offering; you are my sacrificer, my artist, my priest—and i am your design, of boundless hunger with a contradictory desire to be consumed, i want to be the creator and the creation—the artist and the design. i am a creation of the mercy you poured into me, but time envies my blood-dripping devotion; so it tries to kill instead, but i preserve, the very little that is left.

cronus swallowed his children, fear disguised as love where posession is preservation, he makes a lifeless entity within him of paralysis, preserving it in formaldehyde.

zeus who consumed his wife metis, the goddess of wisdom—wisdom doesn’t stay contained though does it? even when devoured and dead, running through his veins—athena is born from his head, consumption is transformation; the devoured changes the devourer.

hannibal devours will to preserve him forever and will wants to be devoured to be unforgettable—hannibal never kills him but still swallows his art, as a resort to understand.

whoever consumes, they speak the same language—love, even when it tastes like blood and flesh that rots grotesquely. what remains after rot is remembrance in embalment.

whether i devour or want to be devoured, all i want to be is unforgettable and for you to never decay, as your voice still haunts my head and makes my heart bleed every time, each mouthful is an attempt at eternity; you’re dead yet your alive, in this in-between, at least you’re mine.

V. 最期の誓い • [saigo no chikai]

the final vow.

you so beautifully decay, 物の哀れ
侘寂 in the the worn edges of devotion

水物 served in fleeting sweetness after a meal of devotion
無常 no love or body is permanent, even with formaldehyde,
it tries to trap what the 水物 teaches to release, finality

then comes the 寂 after hunger
the 夢 of your soul fused into mine
on a clock where you still exist somewhere

and the 渇望 for your heart,
but 死神, it’s dead. final.

my final act of love is to mourn you, 弔い
let you 安息 in peaceful cessation

無, perhaps my hunger too will sleep one day.
度愛して、もう一度愛した。あなたが死んでも、私はずっと愛し続ける。

cover it up / your father will see
have some shame / men will be uncomfortable
don’t play with boys anymore / you are growing up
he will see you /  be a good girl
sit like a lady / don’t laugh too loud
your clothes are too tight / men will stare
what will men think? / what will men say? 
what about the men? / what about society?
what will society say?

before god’s book, i was taught a different scripture—shame. we learnt prayer from the people that paint us as the embodiment of sin itself, that’s how a little girl learns that her body was never hers—a burden on a man’s temptation, a wilderness that gives and gives but only to the wrong people—never does she learn about the beauty it gives, the biggest of all, her very sinful body is the womb of a holy life.

the little girl runs in the sun in her little sundress while her brother runs around shirtless, yet there comes her mother telling her to cover her up, and that’s how she begins to prostrate to the religion of shame, under the sun before she even learns how to spell sin. cloth becomes a boundary between a girl and the world, rather as adornment that makes her bloom into her femininity, it’s concealment for femininity—taking the sun away from the sunflower so she doesn’t glow bright enough for the deadly nightshades.

girls like us learn shame as doctrine before religion. i’m muslim and modesty is an integral part of our faith, but absurdity is the religion the people around me follow instead. they follow their desire. modesty written by misogyny is reduced down to solely a piece of cloth and enables shame rooted in patriarchy.

in khaled hosseini’s a thousand splendid suns, we meet mariam from afghanistan—in her world too, do they speak the same language and stitch the same verdict into her childhood—harami, one from her very birth—a sinner, a girl. in our own homes the lesson is quieter but no less absolute; we grow up thinking our body is a danger, not a temple.

mariam and her laila are two modes of the same weapon. at the end, mariam kills her abusive husband rasheed, and in this story too do we learn that violence becomes a last resort for a girl who’s been the blunt old rifle herself. just like how mariam becomes the one to fire the shots at the end, laila repurposes the weapon and becomes the shelter, the protector—both women are the rifle across generations, loaded with survival that passes through blood—mariam didn’t just need an AK-47, she became one. when you cut the pheonix’s wings, they flies higher—with fire, with a violence that the world plants within her muscles.

it’s not uncommon to see pre-pubescent girls in hijab in highly conservative families, young girls who taught to dress modestly not for god, but because they’re ‘growing up’. before they learn the names and omnibenevolence of their god, they learn about their body being an offense to the people of this world.

the first response to shame is tension—repression; the thighs close, the stomach knots, the jaw tightens and the shoulders hunch—the muscles clench… they clench, clench, clench, clench, clench, CLENCH. the body listens too well when it’s commanded with violence, especially so young—that’s how the body learns no as its primary language, even if the mind wants to say yes, muscle memory has learned no.

they always said close your legs and never load your guns; they’re too scared to speak about the why, it’s only the no—never why they tell a little girl close her legs, so she learns shame before her own self, that her body exists to be managed by others, as if she’s provocation and shall be restrained like an animal.

repression turns into self-disgust when a little girl feels like only a hard body—instead of cherishing the beauty she can bloom into, and being honoured for the same femininity that gives life, the world twists her divinity into disgust. the same womb that god’s mercy settles in and the life her chest can nurture—they turn into nothing but sites of shame.

we live in a world where patriarchy and religion blur; control disguised as protection. men protect us from the problems they themselves create, they want to handle a bleeding gazelle after setting the snares themselves.

the very skin that they suckle on when they’re babies and cradled by its warmth—that same warmth turns cold and suddenly it needs to be covered, not just with cloth; with control, for the ones who lack control and from the ones who use it to be a god.

misogyny masculinizes god and puts its ideologies on a pedestal instead, creating a false god complex and scripture that obeys to the ego—but only have i seen my god in the way a woman endures pain and still gives life. unlike a man, god’s first language isn’t wrath, it’s the womb—rahiim (رحم), mercy in arabic.

you’d be surprised enough to know that even god referred to as he in the scripture is a form of transcendence, it was never about patriarchy.

as much as the people preach, they’re trying to play a god they can never be, rewriting scripture into a language that conceals their own sin; even my very own god doesn’t command to cover with a cloak before puberty—yet alone out of compulsion until a woman decides for herself and knows that it’s a devotion to god and not submission to misogyny. it was never to worship the scripture of shame over a god-gifted bod, god never shames in his scripture—god doesn’t speak in shame like men do.

men will turn away when a hymen is torn or your womb can’t give, but when has god ever turned away from me? even when i am morally naked, stripped to the core, empty-handed and stained all over my skin—he listens and he loves, he stays—he doesn’t ask for perfection, he’s not hungry—i want to put my rifle down when i’m in submission, for once i can submit to the one who put mercy in my body but mine only ever learned about its burden.

when different gods command modesty—the people, they fail to realize that the woman comes with wings like a pheonix, she was never meant to be caged, never to be hidden under a dark cloak of shame—but rather wearing her blazing femininity like an honour, for an entity greater than fragile manhood.

but because we live in a world where men will sin over fragile feminine blooming, put a cloak over your innocence and become prey to the predator, for a porn-sick man who would rather not rip apart the cloak concealing their fragile manhood.

obedience itself is treated as holy scripture; your womb doesn’t forget patriarchy; when the body finally gets to bloom in the hands of a loving man, even then—the body doesn’t forget its language—it refuses to open, it remembers to clench and hold back, to never open its mouth and gracefully obey to the system. shame etches itself into your very muscles.

your body remembers it through that dysfunctional pelvic floor, vaginismus and labor tension—the body remembers when it tried to fly but its wings were cut before you even learnt you were a pheonix. vaginismus doesn’t begin in the pelvis, it begins when a girl learns how to flinch. the pelvic floor continues to obey to patriarchy, like it’s its very own holy scripture.

remember? tension is the response to shame’s call.

how long have you been obeying?

the men in the warzones hold their rifles while the women are the barrels of silence, welcome to our world where rifles are glorified and your modesty is politicized. both are heavy, one carries control and the other carries shame—and both are worshipped.

if shame was our first religion, then the AK-47 is our new scripture—loaded not with lead, but with the things they taught us to hide.

girls, load your AK-47 with all the memory and prayer that was stitched into your girlhood before you knew how to spell sin, and fire back at the story that taught us shame load your AK-47 with one final act that saves someone else; make your revolution a radical forgiveness.

fire.

CASE FILE NO. 005 — SUBJECT: FEMALE, IMMORTAL
DATE OF EXAMINATION: ?????????????? 
CONDUCTED BY: SOBERIETY 
CAUSE OF DEATH: EROTIC GLAMOUR

I. TIME OF DEATH: FOUR HOURS SOBER

Subject appears sedated. Emotional pulse faint but erratic.

 (Segment: BRAIN — site of intoxication & memory loss)

i. frontal lobe
reasoning displays cyclical interference from euphoric discharge.

ii. occipital cortex 
perception blurred; hallucination recorded as stimulatory revelation

i’m so high right now but i love this high, it’s catharsis. i spend too much time in armour and it’s skin so thick that the demons can never spill out ferociously onto this paper as much as they can now. my tears are black and turn into poetry when they plant themselves between the white lines.

my mouth tastes bitter with ecstasy, the weather is gloomy too. the world is grieving me for burying myself alive in the graveyard of the nighttime again, a raindrop fell onto my eyelashes as an attempt to baptize me, and it trickled down the smokiness of my eyes to cry for me—for i’m so numb yet the world felt merciful enough to try to resurrect me with the very thing i am made of, melancholy.

II. CAUSE OF DEATH: EROTIC GLAMOUR

Overworked, underloved. Arteries clogged with validation.

(Segment: MOUTH — site of desire, articulation & silence)

i. lingua
mediates between innocence and confession. articulation of death.

ii. incisors
sharp implements of worship; male deities devour femininity under illusion of resurrection.

iii. lingua mortua
the corpse’s mouth does not pray or moan, it repeats; repetition persists beyond the pulse.

iv. mandible
primal hinge of hunger; hunger dictates motion, thus, consumption

v. caliculus gustatorius 
taste buds of the beholder, does not discern flavour, only possession.

vi. larynx
the voice becomes self-deception, vocally performing survival.

vii. palatum durum
hard palate of mouth conceals tender inflammation beneath articulation surface

viii. glandulae salivariae
secretions are ever-producing. repetition reflex; lubricates grief. 

i wanted to be a porn star when i was little and i mean it. to be someone’s centre of their universe even for just a few minutes—hadn’t it always been my dream to die? what seemed better to my naïve brain than to die in glamour and someone’s arms, while my sanity flies away and my purity drips out of me? i wanted the sex, never the cameras—just the feeling of being my humbert’s lolita again, humbert is dead yet lolita lives, and so does the hungry monster in her loins.

they always called me a performer, an object of pleasure from the very birth of my womanhood. it was never about curvaceousness or even the littlest of clothing i could wear, god has his chosen ones—and then comes some of his most bitter creation—men, who too will think they are god, so they choose you too; god resurrects, and men resurrect their pride through their so-called godliness.

and then i spoke like i wasn’t myself anymore—
like my body was narrating its own dissection

i knew, pre-pubescent or a grown woman, freshly-shaved or skin covered in hair—a man, like a lion doesn’t hunt for the most beautiful gazelle—he looks for the one who’s the loneliest, the quietest and softest to dig his teeth into. it was never, ever about beauty. at least not conventional beauty.

beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, but in this world of mine—the beholder is the hungriest, even the fruit that’s rotten—he feasts on it, anything to sweeten his tongue, he is only of poison anyway, regardless of what the fruit tastes like—all he knows is it’s a fruit and it’s his, for the lifespan of another ego he’s birthed and will resurrect it until he takes it all to the grave.

only then did i realize, a performer doesn’t need a pedestal—all she needs is her lion, and suddenly—she thinks she’s a goddess, until she gets too close to the sun which only seemed warm from afar, and like icarus, she falls to her death again and again.

i am a performer, not because i am beautiful—but because i can wear superficiality like silk, it’s a beautiful kind of pride that shines and dances, but slips off when i harden and my skin cracks dry—when the clay that was theirs to mould hardens, and all i am underneath, is just a hoax.

but i do it again, and again. bathe in the hot springs of lust and soften myself into something erotic and moldable—just to feel holdable, even if i’ve died inside a hundred times, nothing feels better than to be someone’s, and someone’s only. even if the currency comes in broken clocks, i am only here and yours until a quarter after three, until i escort myself to the next—and the next, and next.

III. INTERNAL EXAMINATION: BODY FOR RENT

Organs show evidence of repeated exposure to performance.

(Segment: HEART — site of ego, transaction & illusion)

i. left atrium
intake of illusion, illusionary love enters as currency.

ii. right atrium
failure in containment, identity is deoxygenated in function.

iii. left ventricle
fantasy distributed systematically; emotional supply veins remain vacant.

iv. right ventricle
exchange of nutrients; sweetness functional as mean of sustenance and self-injury.

v. pericardium
protective membrane, ego mistaken for structural integrity.

vi. sinoatrial node
false rhythm detected; heartbeat sustained by delusional stimuli.

vii. coronary artery
final transmission; circulation of synthetic warmth from borrowed external sources.

rent me for the night, my dignity is on sale.

i’ve been treating myself as anything but human, instead of being the woman in the love hotel who dresses up in dresses made from paper bills—i’m the love hotel itself; i’m carrying different dreams in different rooms, just anything to not feel empty. i’m a building, a body, with the emptiest of stories.

somewhere in those stories i’m a little doll dressed in pink lace and in submission to a strong man that i’ll call daddy tonight, who cradles my desires—or maybe a red dahlia with her red lipstick and sultry little red party dress—nowhere where i am present, am i present. there’s an idea of me, a silhouette who’s body you can’t hold but still see.

i spoon-feed my men with sugar until my pot is empty. once i go empty, only then do i try to ask for a cube of sugar, a pinch—but it’s all a transaction. it’s a business deal where the winner takes it all; but the winner only takes the pain and shame, and the loser—he takes sweet pleasure and my sleep.

still i call myself a winner, because maybe this is what winning is—to be in control again, to be the song and play it myself too; a violin’s tune that can put a man down to his knees. it’s the type of win where my pride swells and dignity rots, my manic mind has chosen its poison and it comes in the colour red like my blood and the sound of my name being chanted like a prayer.

that is the very illusion of winning, that i’m losing everything but my ego wins and the men lose nothing but their fragile “manhood” wins.

to you, the animal that howls to the moon at night, let me rent your heart for tonight—you can have my body without the payment, live in it while i drink your blood to feel a little warmer again. fifteen minutes to pretend like you love me, and fifty for when you fuck me.

IV. TOXICOLOGY REPORT: INTOXICATED

Blood analysis reveals high traces of mania, dopamine and guilt.

(Segment: BLOOD — site of addiction, flow, and final release)

i. plasma 
primary solvent medium, exhibits high saturation of psychoactive remnants.

ii. leukocytes
defensive count elevated but ineffective; emotional autoimmunity present.

iii. erythrocytes
oxygen-rich, carrying metabolic fatigue; residual toxins bind to hemoglobin.

iv. platelets
coagulative activity irregular; emotional lacerations sealed over unprocessed debris.

v. normovolemic erythrocythemia
blood volume normal without limit.

vi. oxygen 
respiration sustained through compulsion; cycle of revival and decay self-induced.

i’m high again, i don’t know a world outside the high of drugs and sex, not even the words i have written—like my very sense of self, my art feels foreign to me.

they tell me i’m traumatized or carry it all alone and that this is my coping, but it’s killing me—this is bloodshed on top of bloodshed. i’m carrying a thousand dead nights in my body but the ones who kill me can only see the frail outside, especially when i look into the mirror.

i need to scream into a telephone and tell someone that i need help, but how will any droplet of gentility reach my skin when i wear such thick armour and dip my tongue in wine-soaked lies, just to be an intoxicant? i can only reek of euphoria but really, it’s the smell of self-destruction disguised as a so-called dream.

i want to wake up, i don’t love this high, or anything at all. i can’t even recognize my face.

there’s a silence between the highs where i almost remember who i am and it’s the kind of line that could act as a still point before the last crash, but i still want to fly for a little longer.

my body will keep resurrecting itself to keep dying.

Notes: specimen trembles upon recollection.
External examination postponed due to emotional superficiality.
Traces of innocence found beneath scar tissue.

AUTOPSY REPORT — SUMMARY  
CAUSE OF DEATH: Erotic glamour
MANNER OF DEATH: Voluntary  
CONDITION OF BODY: Found alive, unrecognizable  

CONCLUSION: DEATH BY SELF-PRESERVATION DISGUISED AS DESIRE.

Leave a comment