By MJ Dally
Last day I saw me as me
in a world soaked grey from
an accidental spill of such paint
from a painter’s scaffolding
above the skies, and mad rain;
I stared back at me from a distant ,
blurry mirror across
the cold distance of a corridor;
me, a moody bearded man, balding
and fat, in an old black vest and
emerald mundu,
brown eyes sinking into myself
behind a forehead careened forward.
I thought of what I was then
at the very moment; what I wasn’t
one moment before and wouldn’t be
one minute after;
I examined all of me, part by part.
I studied the anatomy
of my expressions; Was I really sad
or was this baseline human state?
But I’ve felt a little changed after
father died leaving nothing behind
but a legacy of painful joy
as swollen as his ankles had gotten
after his kidneys failed; or as sweet
as he had smelled all doused in
ceremonial attar at the mosque’s
burial ground, yet I haven’t
been able to finish my
grand poem on how flawed
but perfect he was in the same person.
He was the one who died, but
my mother the one that became
a ghost, me the desolate scribe,
and my brothers detached breadwinners.
Then I fell in love, and it had felt
dichotomous too; like
the air I needed to breathe
but occasionally I’d become
a cave, and love, a tidal breath
of butterflies , enough to
block all my airways shut.
My love, you are a river
of melting suns in my black world,
but sometimes you burn
my eyes, then you soothe them
with your own howling winds.
Then I figured my neck could be
drooping because my steth
plays a snake at times;
no matter how much love
I touch its scales with; even
after surviving undeserved
wrath and threats under it;
it’s my favourite pain
in many ways, my boldest
repertoire of fractured knowledge;
from three hundred books,
of nine years and counting.
Sometimes I wish my steth
poured post-rock music into my ears,
not the plight of
pleuritic pain or farewell clicks
of the last of a heart’s beats
or a bowel’s movements
before obstruction.
I wondered if my lips were dry
from chanting too many slogans
in a resigned silence; playing
convenient victim to the rift
history birthed as one great nation
rending into two, killing millions
in the process,
like falling into a chasm of death
between two halves of a torn roti.
I think of their journeys
when I loiter around the
railway tracks near my house;
may be I am their easy ghost
haunting the tracks at night,
scared of stoic Gods and
street dogs alike.
May be some child somewhere
in my country is watching YouTube
and learning to hate me.
YouTube is all we know,
good-bye Tagore,
Kamala sleep tight,
Basheer and Arundhati
sadly have no software updates.
All we know is how to fail
each other, leave dead babies
on the sea-shore, chase each
other into bouncy dinghies like
COVID did us into locked rooms.
In our world, submarines
are more important than sealions,
corporations more than corpses,
selfishness more than seniles
and reels more so than reality.
I miss my Afghan and Ukrainian friends
who died in their own wars;
into other people.
My eyes looked like lenses,
beady and shiny like an ant’s
under a microscope; my own
little proboscis upon the world;
my nectar is people, the silver
pricks of their pain,
My irises are tongues running
in guilty thirst,
over an icicle or lover’s skin,
yearning for stories I know
I’ll find only therein.
These people shall give my oddity
both fame and shame.
People are lenticular tilt cards;
a saint from one angle
and perhaps a sex offender,
tyrant, chauvinist, narcissist,
toxicist, racist, casteist, communalist
from another.
But we are all people too,
flickering at unique spots on
a spectrum, from evil grime to
opalescent human love
and back.
When I saw me still standing,
inside the mirror,
like a whale in its vertical sleep
inside the blue blood of the Pacific,
I knew I was being hoisted
into standing upright, by thready
puppet strings between me
and the stars, like I were
them too, maybe special
after all, not psychotic for the second looks
I steal from living things and stones,
elephant grass and the moon
with a perception more piercing
than these things
and a deathly wistfulness to write;
my words will be tentacles of love and mood;
they’ll plant wet and dirty kisses all
over you, chest, navel, thoughts,
everything.
Just hold still at first, if you will,
the disgust will pass,
you will love me too.
I’m a bird with bright feathers;
don’t squeeze me too hard in admiration,
I’ll burst, my life leaving in a red and fleshy chirp.
I am a flower, mince me only
if you wish I be a paste on your forehead,
I’m a vein; bleed me if only
for blood donation, violate my silence
only if you truly wish
to feed my words
some delicious ears.
At 30, I am so many things,
a cauldron of confusions,
an echo-doll of everything around me,
a catafalque of a survivor,
a shrine of a smaller, inconsequential
personal Hiroshima,
a blooming surgeon,
a lock that shifts to my patients’
keys,
a learning writer, a city of glass,
glowing into existence only at night,
an accepting winner of battles
against myself,
and still a child, like my world;
anything still growing must be one.
By MJ Dally
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