On the Old & New Self

By Azaan Izzam

In the true depths of this hell,

I am the devil, the punished and the punishment.

With no shallow way out,

Except through what is written and re-written,

for 10,000 years past.

To gaze deep and find the thousand-legged horror

The centipede, our spines.

To accept the neutral element of holy survival,

And do away with the delusions of grandeur.

To have a self, taking this for granted - an error of star sized magnitude.

But to find it in all things big or small, yet how?

With alienation I greet, I welcome.

An initiation into myself, I beg for it please…

I must acclimatize myself to this body over and over

I must board a tiny passenger of identity into this ship past its prime.

And the ship must enter the tunnel.

Must sail through the bloodening heat, face the snakes,

Against all the cries and odds.

The time in this tunnel is unknown,

And the hour of liberation from my undesirable habits, a farce.

Where the minute is of concern & and not the hour.

And true jewels are those memories of comfort,

that we have promised to climb over.

Where sleep comes from tiredness of the soul,

And not from banal pleasures and indifference.

Where my eyes shut from the impossibility to upkeep.

In the end we run out of this voluntary rut.

We are back in form and factor,

And uphold a glistening sense of novelty to all things old.

But these tribulations of the tunnel become stories for the hi-tea

Under the surface, we have already wriggled back like a snake biting its own tail.

By Azaan Izzam