Spaces in Air

You do not know how this moving and unmoving
On airplanes and buses and pieces of old luggage
Makes me feel like a piece of warm clay
That dries and cracks when it’s touched by
A different airport chair and then
Softly melts into a form-square, or nicely curved or a mean little triangle.
When it touches me, I am jealous
Because you are not here
To be jealous for me.
When someone, old men, or young
Reach for their seatbelt beside me
I imagine you watching us from a distance
And burning, burning, burning
Like a piece of red, left-over coal, .
Moist and Molten.
Both, at the same time.
The same air, that finds its way inside our bodies
And touches our heart, and lungs and blood and womb
Yours and mine
You inhale it and melt in anger
I sip it and it comes out
In wet patches of your anger around my eyes and my legs.
The same air, my love.
The same.

Alone

To sit and think
about my
aloneness
is to be
alone.

When I am empty
like a bowl
dry of water,
I am alone in my stomach
where faint sounds of something
drip into my blood.

The dryness,
Oh, the dryness
that empties itself into my lungs
and the systemic beating of breath
stumbles into my groin.

Ache.
Ache.
Ache.
Like the dull tapping of a wooden spatula
on smooth, cold marble.
Sticks and stones,
and the whisper of Autumn.

When I am alone,
The world is a deep, black hole
and spirals of smoke swoop into the void.
Where scribbled wasps with netted wings
chew air.
And blow out smoke rings like coins of dull brass.

There is silence.
And there is deafening noise.
As if I am on a subway train.

When I am alone,
Sad stories circle like a cloud of swallows
in front of a falling sun in a red sky.
Stories that the old maiden in the forest tells
as she waits for age under a tree.

When I was young,
My mother.
My mother,
was there.
Her stomach.
Soft.
And my head,
on her belly
for the comfort of her womb.
For the sounds from her inside walls
that would match the beating of my feverish heart.
And I was in love.
And peace.
There are many kinds of silence.

But. Not. Here.
I. Am . Alone.

And I think,
I am alone.

Kuch to Kaho

Raat abhi baqi hai.
Abhi to din ke aane mein bahut dair hai.
Andhera, jo kisi kaali chaadar ki tarah, thartharaate jism pe
aahista se betha hai,
Abhi kuch aur dair bethay gaa.
Falak mein abhi aag nahi lagi
aur subh ke sufaid dhuan mein abhi waqt hai.


Iss akeli raat ke raaz mein
Kuch kaho.
Abhi to raat baqi hai meray dost,
Abhi to saara andhera kaatna hai.
Kuch to kaho...
Ke yeh raat tale,
Kuch to kaho...
Ke sitaron ke darmiyan, koi nai aag jale.

Outside the huge glass window on the fourteenth floor, I sat and stared at the skyline.

A silky, blue sky with orange creases burning through it, almost bursting at the seams with the weight of the dipping sun as it sank deeper into its folds.

And through it all, the dark needle of a skyscraper pierces the fabric of the sunset, with a still, unmoving, unwavering arrogance that fills every space in the air around it with its own measures of its greatness.

Some birds fly around it, but most just scatter away. It attracts, but the bravest.

A monument to man.

Dark, silent, sedate, and tantalizingly conspicuous.



Tiny lights glimmer below it on curls of roads and narrow streets that look as if someone pencilled them in. Like fireflies going on and off, signs of movement thump softly like the sounds of a beating heart...with a noise so soft, that one feels as if the flutter of an eyelash would cause one to miss the beat.


And sometimes, one does miss the beat. But this time, the heart is one's own, that has suddenely filled with a strange pressure. Not nostalgia. Just...just, awe.
Awe. I wish I believed in something enough to bow to it.


Proud. I am proud of Man. I am fearlessly, arrogantly proud of him.

The Man "I" Love

K: Are you seeing someone else?
S: No.
K: Tell me, are you seeing someone else?
S: No.(pause) And besides, why would it matter if I did. That shouldn't mean anything to either one of us.
K: It shouldn't? Why shouldn't it mean something to me?
S: Because.
K: Are you seeing someone else.
S: Fine. I am.
K: No, honestly.
S: Yes! Yes. Yesyesyesyes. I am. yes. I'm sorry. I am.
K: Are you really?
S: Yes
K: What's his name?
S: That doesn't matter. You wouldn't know him.
K: Are you telling me the truth?
S: (laughs) yes. You don't believe me. And that's why I wasn't telling you.
K: Who is he?
S: Just someone. 5 years. And he doesn't deserve me. I'm sorry.
K: 5 years? Why don't you tell me?
S: I don't know. He doesn't deserve me and I love him.
K: Why didn't you tell me?
S: I don't know! I just...I don't know.
K: God. We lay naked together. Why didn't you tell me?
S: I don't know, I don't know! I don't have to justify anything to anyone.
K: Oh no you don't. I have had my heart trampled on before without an inch of remorse.
S: I...look, I'm sorry. I just...I love him. He doesn't deserve me and I love him. I'm sorry that I didn't tell you. But I wasn't lying, technically. I just didn't tell you.

K: Is that why you wouldn't let me enter you?
S: Yes.
K: I...you lay there naked next to me. You let me touch you, and kiss you. I put my tongue inside you. I-
S: Shutup! Stop!Stop. Why are you saying all this?! I don't want to hear it! Stop.
K: Because I feel a little rejected.
S: Just...stop. I'm sorry, I told you I'm sorry!
K: Sorry doesn't mean much, does it baby? You're no saint darlin'.
S: I think you should leave.
K: I will. Just...not yet.
S: I love him.
K: And that's why you wouldn't have sex with me. I kept thinking that...how strange it was...and yet, it makes perfect sense...this is why.
S: I love him. I'm sorry, but I love him.
K: Well, I hope he, this man that you...you LOVE, hope he takes good care of you darlin'.
S: Yeah? I hope so too.
K: Because I would have.
S: I think you should leave. Goodbye.
K:(Gets up. Walks out.)



S:(alone) You saved me today. You, the man I love. You saved me.

Aftermath

I'm tired, you know. I'm just...tired.

I've tried everything.
I've sat in dark corners in dinghy rooms and smoked intoxication. I've put wine bottles to my lips and drank without fluttering an eyelash or gasping air. I've found the dinghiest poker clubs and thrown my pearl earrings to the whims of a hand...I've wrapped myself around poles and around men in oak-pannelled wine bars.

I've opened my legs wide and let them see, and touch, and play...


And still, and still I find that you persist.


So either come, or just tell me simply that you are leaving my life.









But...come.

The Eye of a storm is like a baby in a womb

Somewhere, in the peach colored globe of light swimming in the darkness of the room,
hovering over the dense colors of the night,
your words touched the sobs in my blood.
and the air, that was still trembling from the limbs of our passion
became still and calm.
I reached out with a finger, and touched it, the air.
It rippled in your hair
and I allowed myself to stroke it through your curls like a mother.
Somewhere, the passion that had been as hard as a sharply-sour, raw apple
softened.
In your words , that licked at it, it melted and
I tasted the warmth of autumn and cider.
Afraid, that the air would begin to move again
I pressed my cheek into your shoulder
forming a cup with our bodies
to fill with our tremors and our lives,
bound tightly with knuckles and fingers cross-stitched to each other.

Desire isn't Red

Alcohol.Smoke.Cocaine.Drugs.Hookah.
All, fun to indulge in. Sometimes, and sometimes not.

But Desire.
Desire. Pure and black and deep.
I have never encountered something as magnificent and as terrible.

Soul-cleansing. Soul-cleansing is what I need.

For some time anyway.

The God of Small Things

When we were kids, Baba would sit in front of the heater in cold Karachi evenings, and open the newspaper with a square saucer of peanuts on his lap. Before he started reading, Ayesha and I, on the lookout, would scramble onto his lap, one on either knee and ask him to read out loud the comic strips on page 8 of The News. Baba would be waiting for that too. He would translate them in urdu, and change the characters into caricatures of seven-year-old humor that we could understand. Charlie Brown would get a new name, “Peanuts” would be called “Moong phalli”, and Alley Oop would be pronounced with a tarzanlike guffaw that would have us rocking in giggles. We would munch on peanuts, laugh, on occasion, request for repeats, and when he was finally done, we would scatter. Then he would read the “serious-but-boring” black and white lines, which we both thought was a very insensible way to write about important things. Mama would be in the kitchen, I could hear the sounds of cooking, the plate being placed on something, the hiss of steam from the pressure cooker, a knife on the chopping board. Kitchen sounds that hovered around our heads, and hands and feet as Ayesha and I brought out a Ludo playing board and argued about which one of us had a higher claim to the red “goties”.

.

One doesn’t miss the big things.

And how do we even talk about what we miss? Except, in “not’s”.

Not the big things.

One doesn’t miss the big things.

The "I"

"...and it was impossible to love her if you hadn't grown up loving her."

She knew that.
Clearly and simply.
So everytime he offered her a drink, she would shake her head and turn away.
Alone, she would drink herself to oblivion.

Nobody can love her like she loves herself.
So she needs a way out. Of herself. Before she is left standing in the field of yellow grass and dry loss.

Not people. No. But a person, yes.

Pablo Neruda and the Unfaithful

I read Pablo Neruda after twelve months.

I read Neruda’s words on his website and in a swift, time-stopping motion, something rushed back. It felt like someone was blowing air into a thin reed pipe and it was pillowing against my face like soft cotton on a summer day. It felt good, but suffocation is not supposed to feel good. The days when I used to sit for hours in front of a blaring, full-lighted computer screen, my head throbbing with the pressure of noisy color and electricity, and read rows and rows of lines written by Pablo Neruda. 4am in the morning, words skid and slide just below my eyelids- only barely touching my eyes. But I read because I was hungry. It hurt me not to read. Something itched and allowed a fine red, Neruda rash to grow through my blood.

There was a different man then.

I read for myself, but Neruda was him. Actually, scratch that. I am still confused about where I made love to Neruda, and where, through Neruda, I was actually making love to him. I was unfaithful, and I do not know who was wronged.

Cancer

Every morning these days,
When I wake up I see
a clump of words on my pillowcase.
I do not know when they fell out
in the night
but every morning I lose
more and more words.
When I write, they bleed
imy hands, my fingers.
I have blood on my hands.
I kill them myself.
Everytime I wrench them out
like a tweezer pulling at an indignant hair
I am pressing a razor to my wrist,
and they come out, the words
rushing, pouring.
I bleed words.
When they are inside, they are
my blood and I am them.
Outside,
they are corpses
of what was alive.
I kill.
“Them”.
And I no longer know
when the words have bled,
what “them” is.