To and Fro

By Shaikh Aafreen

Critisism 

Why do things become difficult on my tongue?

These pills claim to offer salvation and peace but leave a taste of nothingness: numb, dead and unease. The taste of gelatin coats melt in my throat yet the thoughts immune to madness push limbs out the cavernous tummy of my curious mind. 

Walk forward and see the place where "I" blind to the world around me, allow the hunger laden beast a feast, but he remains crouched in mud scrambles for scraps, someone please ask him to stop! 

He bleeds red, brown and blue 

and dares to think of God's hue. Do you know his end? It is as you imagine, pitiful. The dumb creature and its idiotic wishes lay splattered on the floor deliriously choking on medicine—medicine meant to keep his dreams at bay. The same dreams where he speaks in his sleep, his knotted words disrupt the air but his world remains unmoved. Habits always prevail protest.

Self-preservance 

[8:05 pm] Custard apples

[8:09 pm] Layers of flesh—sweet, grainy—layered in between souls and dollops of juice. There is something 

atrocious about the remains, the peels that fall by themselves. The seeds in it remain ignorant to the exterior, ignorant to the fall of the world. The mess that remains equals pleasure, it is unbelievable.

[8:13 pm] Blood that seeps in through these cracks is alien and an aberration to the lexicon of normalcy.

[8:13 pm] Quiet tremor throughout my veins couldn't equal the quiet tremor throughout my fate/faith?

Abominable sins, too sweet and almost enlightening.

[8:20 pm] Consuming this monstrosity wears me thin. Contrary to the act of ingestion, this demand of increase makes me chew down my bones and skin till nothing remains—i wish desperately but refuse in my arrogance to ever be completely inhaled in this void.

[8:21 pm] Nothing climbs out of it or "nothing" climbs out of it.

Self-sabotage

You don't know how to ask people for their presence, you don't know the words that buy closeness so what do you do? You go and close the door to yourself, close the windows so that no one can peek inside, you push others away to get hold of the touch you suppose would be last from them. You imagine and imagine and keep imagining scenarios where someone, anyone, a stranger, neighbour breathes the same air as you and gets visions, visceral and tormenting visions that will only end on a meet up with you. You make a world of your loneliness and slam a solitude sticker on it, shaming both words. You chant thousands of prayers trying to manifest any form of intimacy, you come close to begging, but all of it is nothing but silence if not done with actions. You can't expect people to come without invitation unless you have made one before. Your push can't hold them back unless you have told them so.

By Shaikh Aafreen