تخبُّط

يوقظني حلم غريب أشبه إلى الكابوس فأتذكر أنني أمضيت ليلة البارحة أتابع النشرات الإخبارية الكاذبة المثيرة للغثيان. أسحب ستائر غرفتي في هدوء شديد حتى لا تتخلل أشعة الشمس في عيني، خوفًا من أن أرى النور وأنا لست على أتم استعداد لمواجهته، جُبن أو هرب، لا أدري. أفتح نافذتي ثم أغلقها، لا أريد أصواتًا من الخارج، يكفيني أصوات داخلية تعذبني حتى في منامي. أشرب القهوة ثم أُدرك أنني قررت أن أعتزل الطعام اليوم، ولكني أرتشفها في جرعة واحدة على أية حال وأقرر أن أستكمل اليوم بدون طعام. فمن يريد طعامًا في هذه البلدة التي تخلو من الألوان؟ أقرأ الرواية التي تركتها وحيدة بالأمس بدون أن أستكمل ما فعله البطل بعد سلسلة الأفكار التي أوشكت على هلاكه. أفتح الصفحة المليئة بأفكاره في كتاب مليء بأفكار الكاتب وأنا غارقة في محيط من أفكاري أنا. آه، ياليت لنا رصيد محدود من الأفكار في حياتنا حتى لا نغرق في أفكار غيرنا وأفكارنا وأفكار شخصيات ليست حتى بالحقيقية.

أُغلق الرواية وأقرر أن أغرق في بحر آخر من الأفكار أمام غلافها الخارجي، كيف استطاع مصور الغلاف تصوير هذا المنظر الذي يبعث للمتأمل شعورين متناقضين غير مفهومين، شعور بالإحباط والاكتئاب والذُل وشعور بالأمل والحياة والفرح.. كيف استطاع أن يجمع متناقضات الحياة، بل أن يجمع الحياة كلها في ورقة سميكة من الكرتون الذي يمكن أن يتلف بسهولة. ولكن ما يدريني أنا ولماذا أعبأ بهذه الترهات والسخافات، إنه مجرد غلاف لرواية بائسة حزينة تبعث الاكتئاب أكثر من بعثها للحياة على أية حال.

أستلقي. أنظر إلى سقف غرفتي، غريب كم ينظر كل منا إلى سقف غرفته ويستوحي  له بأفكار لا يستوحيها مكان آخر، غريب ما يفعله مجرد سقف لا شكل ولا زينة له. أغمض عينيّ وأتخيل اللا وجود، اللا كينونة، اللا شيء. أتخيل الفراغ والعدم وأتخيلني لست هنا.. لحظة رهيبة من "الانفصال عن الواقع" أو "اللا إدراك" بالمعنى الحرفي. شعور سحري ومليء بالتخبط في نفس الوقت، قد يُحدثك من حولك وأنت غير واعٍ بأنهم هنا، أو بأنك هنا، ينتابك شعور بأنك في مكان آخر وأنهم ليسوا حقيقيين وليسوا في عالمك وإنما هم غرباء، دخلاء، على أفكارك.

أبدأ في كتابة شيء ما عن هذا التردد الذي يُغرقني وعن هذا العالم الذي يملأني بالكلمات المتخبطة التي أكتبها ثم لا أفهمها ثم يفهمها غيري وأتعجب مما يقولونه وكأنهم يتحدثون عن شخص آخر كتب هذه الكلمات. أكتب وأحاول ألا أترك الخيار الأخير لي لأتنفس نوعًا من الصعداء، قليلًا من الصعداء. القليل.

ثم أتوقف .. 

Please forgive me, Sir

For having taken an empty oath,

And instead of telling your truth,

I told my own.

Words slipped like a stream

Because truth also has

An hourglass.

And then it’s set free

You looked at me,

A crowd; alone

And yet my tongue did not

Shiver.  It wasn’t me, talking.

-intertwinement-

Kill me, Sir -

Outwardly, I'd be bleeding

Whilst inwardly, I'm too,

too strong to fall.

Another version of an old piece entitled "It Never Happened".

اتركوني أنصرف

اتركوني أختبئ

تحت طيات السنين

بمَ في أهترئ

فلم يعد للقلب لونٌ

لا خريف أو ربيع

لم يكد ظلي يشٍفُ

ليحنّ لماضٍ فقير

فلا ماضٍ يطوله الذكر

ولا حاضرُ يكفي النحيب

بينما ضاع مستقبلي

بين صديق و غريب

أطلقوا روحي إلى

بحر أسئلة بعيد

فيه أين و كيف و متى

يتحرر العبيد

اذكروا لي وصفةً

دون موت السجناء

علّ شمسهم تحرق

أرضي أرضُ الداء

أو قولوا لي ماهيتكم

قد يدلني فكري الكفيف

حيث تقطن ضالتي

لأحرر بها الضعيف

اتركوني...

10:49  24 سبتمبر 2012.

Courtesy here

For Syria


I find a way
between my thoughts
and your soul.
A single line, thin and starving,
Like that of a horizon, in a pitch black night

I walk with my extremely long shadow
(Yes, long is the word),
Though I'm short on thoughts;
I'm barely reflecting,
I'm probably just deflecting

From every thought, but you,
Calling in for some hero to
Save you, to embrace your anger
Because it's only fair - 
It's fair for you to be angry enough
To scream, to break the horizon
between us, and make us
-You, I, the world-
One

No, this is not  a love poem
Wake up
From your emotional imprisonment
your sentimentality,

Wake up
Because cowardice is an ocean,
it comes fatal like a single wave
And sometimes so cold,
So tepid you can hardly
feel it on your feet -
Yet it lingers

Breathe in
Breathe in, for the sands of time will
immerse you in dangerous feelings
Like getting used to statistics
Not souls, taken away in half a blink

--

I'm going to break this line even
I'm going to make your soul my thoughts
-My soul, your thoughts-
So we don't recognize
Sea from sky

And your shadow will no longer be
Be heavy on me.
I'm going to make me you
You, me,
And right then,
We will, they will
-the world will-
be free.




*I found myself inspired by the darkness of the sea at night while I was walking with my long shadow ashore. Many parts of this poem are based on real events.
*The last part was not intended, although it appears to be, inspired by Neruda's poem "Perhaps not to be is to be without your being".

Photo Credit to Nonionik

"Poetry is a constant revolution against every injustice"

No no no no, don't seal your lips and widen your eyes as if they're heavy with all the words your lips did not dare utter. Half-close your eyes and pour as many angry words as your lips can carry. And as many heavy feelings as your face can say. Just don't give them silence; I may be able to understand it but they won't. Everyone will condemn it. Like wordlessness over a crime - it's just like committing it.

You can talk about silence, okay? Seal your lips and open them again. Let the pauses and breaks between the two crash the tepidity of the audience, of the world, and burn the coldness of the faces watching you. Just don't allow their expressions to intimidate you, as if they knew you. Never reveal who you are in your words because it's like revealing the secrets of your soul, of who you truly are. And believe me, there is no point in that.

Poetize like you know them, and what they need to revolutionize against. Recite as if you can see your dreams from a distance, trying to get hold of them but something's blocking your way. See how you'll stretch your arms as much and for as long as you can to reach them, to hold them, to fulfill them. Then recite.

And fight, even if you can't seem to find a way to separate your lips.

Unyield.

 Photo© retro

ولكنها لم تَعُد أرضي

..فقد وقعَتْ فكرة في عقول من لا يستحقها

كالفريسة

لغتها أصبحت أجنبية عليّ

كالسائح

دعْهُم  بغرورهم

فيوماً ما سنستردها

بتواضُعِنا

A speck of thoughts
scattered, bruised, in tiny pieces
collapsing in my land
Like a strange land, an exile.
Ideas once flourished
Now hardly beat, thrown aside

Oh, how much it aches
More than physical pain
As if heartbeats are being
plucked out of your core.
Death. Is easier

And worse, my entity,
My "almost" entity is subject
To your black statistics.
Not even a number but
The "nearly" before it.

You killed me,
You killed me before murdering
My core.
And yet  my thoughts
will still flourish in another being

My soul
Will, always rise
In the face of
Your dim titles
That cannot even
Embrace my death
Or the idea of it

Imagine being the "nearly" in a death statistic.

And I can't hold you and faith on the same palm - my right one.

One of you always slips away without the other. unfreely.

I was exiled to the one country I belong to.

You slip through the tip of my fingernails into a breathless city of forsaken dreams, lost in heavy-hearted boulevards.

Wading your way into every vision; you know where to find your end in this darkness - though the light of faith is always sinking within the clouds of treason.

Shaken. Frightened; you take a step into the first alley:

A different kind of sky, agitated, and screaming buildings of terrible shape carrying angry dreams of the poor, having one scene in common: a just life in the eyes of the decayed..

At ease, you carry the most horrifying and reach the end light, escaping the most saddening colors to get to a city where black is an alienated vision.

The greenness and the free air paint a pure blue sky at daylight, and a barely cerulean view at night. A sun that kisses the moon with its amber light at dusk, and a bird that sings of no defeat. A still life, a surreal piece.

But dreams? You're almost through without a thing in your pocket, only miserable ones of the needy.

while at the gates of the city you find yourself soaked in another alley, of the starving and the severely brokenhearted. You beg your feet to move, but hungry skies hold you captive, pour their nation's dreams and free you; drunk on semi-dreams, semi-nightmares.

And then you pull yourself back to me, asphyxiated by dreams and pleading for my words to say it all, to save you.

But my pencil, it shivers.

And their dreams, they hold up, for the moment to rise.

Written August 3rd, 11:53 PM.

Image Source

Before you finish your statement

I was already choking in mine because

you couldn't let me say the truth.

And I stumbled as you thrive

in defeat

Sooner, you'll be like the wind that blows with a famous aftermath. Your shouts will be heard from a distance yet not when you're shoulder-to-shoulder with humanity. Sooner, your words will be devoid of breaths. And you'll forget, you'll forget that oneday they saved you. Because the next day, they killed you.

Sooner, you'll raise your head up high and find infinite nothingness above you, and then you'll remember that you used a whole constellation to make wishes that never attained to beating. You'll wish you had freed those dreams for someone to at least grant them half a life. You'll want to grasp them dead while their echo would still be pulsating. You'll just wish you'd done something. Anything.

Your ideas will melt beneath the impulsiveness of sentences and the rigidness of indifference. And you'll be sleeping on pillows of simple-mindedness, suffocated by blankets of clichés. You'll pretend, but pain will always manifest itself on your empty shoulders, heavily.

Hear me. Words will prove themselves dominent over you, when once you had them and the power of silence. And you'll weep words, bleed silence, but you'll never learn until you unlearn and teach yourself the right direction of your wind.

Jan.18th. 2012. 12:11 AM

See how they do it? They move colors in your life and re-sort them like a huge puzzle. Like a game. Like a fun riddle. They stop time in your watches until the moments disappear into the darkness of hours, and slowly, you've got only events in your memory. Time never has and never will matter, unless they be defeated. Forgotten is time.

They push your words into silence, not knowing the power that lies within silence itself. They evoke the winds of fear so that angry seasons would burst, clutching at your being to destroy that moments when you thought silence mattered. Because neither words nor silence will. Unless you expose the idea of their being. Silence is as empty as words.

The fear of insecurity will be your skin. They will discriminate against you. They will haunt you and perhaps win. They will publicly execute your bravery, for it was too cheap to be kept, and even if it wasn't, no chance for survival with that skin of yours. Unless you free your soul. You are a mere slave to their filthy power.

You will. They will. And only the bystander wins, in the cave of fear.

They run in the depth of your being

And disappear in the shallowness of life

Until they are a

Shadow

In your core.

A ghostly grayish being

And happy, they linger.

There are two things in this life that if you practice, you have to be extremely cautious while using them: Speaking and Writing.
I, as a writer, seriously thought of killing my ability to write, or perhaps just write every once in a while and avoid getting into deep, detailed or controversial articles. One of the very main drawbacks of being a writer and a thing that renders me sleepless several nights is the fact that words are as dangerous as silence, equally dangerous. They're a double-edged weapon, and if you're a writer, you have a knife or a rope right on your neck, and once you say something provoking, you unintentionally let that rope/knife slay you. Yes, responsibility that is.
The media; the tv and the internet. Those two have played an essential role in getting people so mystified that it now feels like the words people heard have cast their shadows upon their thoughts, their views and their minds until a heavy dense cloud befogged their existence, until everyone now wants to just, survive- not to mention that surviving has become a great achievement these days.
I don't think those who appear on tv realize how crucial and important their words are to the society, and like those who are and always will be silent, those who talk will always blabber, just for the sake of it. Both are diseases that have the same symptoms yet a different result.
Either way, what you write is spoken aloud, and what you speak is read in silence; it all leads to the same conclusion, but the question is, how much do you give and how much do you take? Because you can give one tiny thing yet it would provoke a whole nation, and give a thousand things that are usually wasted. Impulsiveness Vs bullshit.

Let's be honest here, people talk more than they do, so at least if you're talking and not doing, let others hear some sane words, and let yourself raise the doer, directly or indirectly, or just shut up and spare the world your never(s), spy talks and forever doomed(s).
Let the sheep decide and let the free be free, because after all you don't really care about the sheep nor the free, it's you who matters the most to yourself, and that's just how corrupted it is, always has been and always will be.

They all have been waiting in that infinite space. The talks lessen as time carries away their excitement, until the tic tocs are the unbearable sound filling the room with too much impatience. The destinations vary, sometimes even purposes in the same destination differ, too. The facial expressions shift from enthusiasm to bewilderment and mystification; words become devoid of meanings, as if they are some sort of a time machine, to waste time rather than fast-forward it.
Who controls the silent can control the poor. And who controls the rich can control the ignorant, and finally the end is one: a fine depiction of the coward crowd.

And the waiting is pointless.

©Euphoriaofbritt @ dA.

Cities of guilt and chaos, cities of anarchism and ignorance. Cities of you, cities of me, with too many feelings that are our own, only our own, alone. Selfishness.
Rivers that carry words; awash, words that can no longer resemble us. Words that can no longer fly in our lands carrying freedom. Nothingness. But they are not trite, we're the archaic. Ageism.
Seasons don't change. Wait, they do, just not in our colonies. Everything is the same here. Today is a replica of yesterday, and a mirror of tomorrow. You think our lives are a déjà vu? No. Repetitions.
You're not hallucinating. You do not even exist. You. You're the remains of your dreams, the remains of your memories, if there were any, in the first place. You're the figment of their imagination. And you don't know who directs the puppet show, because you just can't see above when you are the puppet itself. Despotism.
You ride the wave yet you can't be going with that flow, because you ride their wave. You talk but only from their dictionaries: We live and we learn and we obey and we support and we die. You die. But those who live forever, are never remembered. And you who live, don't die. Manumission.

Discolored sentences
Cross bridges between you and them,
And the traffic of words is
Unbearable to deaf ears

(The nonexistence of you)

They, long ago, burned down bridges
That could lead to you, or
Maybe they feigned they did,
Yet you believed

(The age of the diseased)

And they reigned their own colonies,
With rules on walls of
Your nonbeingness,
And papers of their ego

Oh, fever of the self



Written 12:57 AM. 11.16.11

Note: This was supposed to be talking about Solipsism (Yes, the philosophical concept) but it somehow took a kind of a political direction.

Sometimes you don't know whether silence would be more hurtful than words or the other way round. You just don't know if that silence would be decipherable or would it leave you mystified with too many thoughts soaring, sometimes none of them is even close to reality. You just think. And think.
Sometimes words are unnecessary yet you find yourself saying anyways, in fear of what? Nothing, probably being accused of apathy or indifference. Does it matter? deep down inside it really does, but on the surface you’re all confident nothing’s worth it. Don’t worry, we all have those insecurities and the need to be loved with our imperfections, no matter how perfect we try to act.

My current situation with life makes me too burdened or blown to speak, I can’t write (don’t mind the fact that I’m writing now), my poetic life has become this ridiculous way of expressing before all those huge events happening lately, you know? It’s like whatever you’ll write and whatever you’ll feel is just a tiny bit of dust and ash that the world doesn’t need. So you prefer silence. This time silence is heartfelt and true, however, until when are we going to keep out words because they would add nothing to the world while they could add something to an ordinary person that might run into our words.

Is there something more than words to this world? Oh yes, patience. I think patience with prayers is a great, holy escape that makes everyone feel relieved at heart. You know, the older we grow, the harder it gets with patience; it’s like a harder lesson everyday that you cannot seem to understand, yet life doesn’t wait for you to get it, it just passes you by, and you either hold on to your patience, or you’ll never, ever, get it. Only Allah does.

I have been reading so much recently, in bed or at my office at work, cross-legged and comfortable, with the most terrible psychological aches ever; the ability to read and feel yet the inability to really feel or get involved in something that would be of any use to the country. I do understand that we all feel this way, that’s exactly why I’m writing this, to let you know I feel for you and ask you to smile because I know you feel for me. It’s just that we need patience, whether with words or with silence. I know that we have a terrible attitude when it comes to waiting, but if only, if only we knew the reward of what’s happening. At least daydream and smile.

I’m not really trying to cheer you up because I can’t cheer up myself, I’m just expressing something we all are feeling at the same time – and it might not be the same for you as it is for me, but I want you to know that this will pass, it has to; nothing lasts like this forever, impossible. So no matter how old you are, how strong or weak you are, no matter your religion, your race or your stream of thoughts or your feelings, at one point, you feel me and I feel you. And this is a test for patience, a test for life.

Shine on so the sun can rise again underneath your feet.

And you could not rise -
For your words imprisoned you,
and silence lingered.


It's a Senryu piece, a shitty one. I'm just pissed off and needed to write something very concise.

And if together we fall,
how many would rise again,
when divided?
How many would gather the pieces
shattered on the roads?
The untrodden and forgotten
within the winds of struggle.

How many words would fade,
unsaid and buried within,
just to drink the toast of
disturbed liberty?

And how many would dream,
when thousands lay insomniac?

Just how many?