Misgivings

You paint and I ride the curve of that letter

Spirituality is where the well is 

Dry tears and split hearts 

If I unpack the earth then how will we know what will grow 

The thing is these seeds are unrecognisable

These words have merged into the same end point 

There is no thirst where we have been consumed 

A heart is not a heart when split in two 

Drift

You drift back to old dreams, and try to pull the fallen light into reality. Here where your flesh wrote and your heart felt, you've left something of yourself.  If I told you where I'd been the people I met , the things I'd seen. Look at me, would you still look at me. These black hearts and eloquent tongues pave paths we aren't worthy of walking.

Apt

Dear readers / assalamu alaikum

I didn't achieve even 1% of what I set out to do when I made this blog.  For reasons that are somewhat painful to explain I will no longer be writing poetry . I just want to apologise to all the people I haven't replied to/ kept in contact with properly - I don't really have any excuse just shortcomings in character.

Alhamdulillah I am well for those who have asked.

Please remember to make dua for yourselves, God listens to the one who is need .  

I feel like I've been watching home videos , you know the ones that are slightly lopsided and the colour is fading at the edges. And this is the last reel of tape.

Gardens within Gardens

Life is bitter but God is sweet
All the endings are rewritten to have twice what we leave
Oh dweller of the grave speak
Gave away your world
Six foot deep remorse
Thus your return was peace , complete

( in reference to an old favourite )

Dua

I am grateful for the sadness

That bloomed into their joy 

This is what I asked for 

I mutter prayers so only God can hear me 

Between all the mundane happenings of living

The sky has been all the shades of bluebells recently

I've written beautiful things in untraceable ink 

The corners of their smiles don't know their own roots 

Imam shafi said about the arrows in the night 

They've been orbiting you since before you knew 

...

Are you afraid of sadness
Do you think that this will be like the heavy rains you once knew
The type that mould the earth they land on

In my mind there is a bench of iron
Sat beneath bubblegum cherry blossom
A little girl is singing her voice sounds like tears

I have happy poems beneath a thumb and a finger
Between promises of a tomorrow that is sweeter than today

I see beauty and it swells in my heart
it overfills , spills onto grey pavements
Moments I can't keep , can't share

If my eyes are a prism
Then I am looking for space for all this light

..

Apne kushi meh sab ko takleef deeya.

 Distorted and bruised , the heart still feels what it feels.

My safe space is getting smaller and smaller and I've been folding in on myself like dark matter.

My fingertips are blue because of the cold, because I am tired , because simple living evades me , because there is nowhere to unpackage these dreams. But second skins never shined so bright.

' They passed right by and never knew'

Gibberish

It's been raining for two and half hours , trust me I'm sure
And your freeze frames are piling on top of each other
Like bedazzled mountains blinding the peasants
Nobody needs to know how it feels to fall into a fissure of time itself
Or how the white tiles reflect back words repeated again and again
And you're choking on the silence, on the space between understanding
Like someone you should recognize
From an old poem I gave you a copy of once

I finish the paper exactly thirty minutes early
the admissions that hit the paper warrant only broken smiles
I would've done anything to take the sadness from your eyes that day

When I tried to ask the answers came quicker than my question
The walls of this box were tighter than I first imagined
So I learnt to breathe shallower
Then the words came abruptly
Like driftwood tossed by the sea

My riddles weren't riddles
They were tongue tied , suffocating
Between reaching something they could not reach

Really I'm a coward
always afraid of the things I want the most

My words hurt me before any one else gets a chance

A hodgepodge of untold stories
Of narratives that do not match

The whole world is one colour
And I am another

Maybe one day I could bleach the jagged edges to these sentences
And forget the watercolour rain

There is a price to being free
and there's little in me to give

.

It feels like my insincerity is making a noose around my neck.

This narrative is laughable.

The light burns inside.

In the end, my end will be others beginning.

Grind my bones into dust and a singsong for the children when they sleep.

Minutes

I'm taking time and redefining it to end points I don't share with anyone
Because I've found burdens are more often offloaded than dealt with
Let me show you the detour every day until we run out of days
And I never get round to carrying it too

I've compartmentalized destinations into narrow strips of land
Where my kingdom collapses in on itself with every resting of this eye

They cant find these roots like the statue of a man
Knows nothing of whats beneath his feet

Help me.

Laws

Winter tried to strip the trees of sun 
Our practicalities become unnecessary realities
Create elaborate labyrinths 
Where what is to be or to come 
Is a mindset away 
Because all it is , is outreached palms

It is cold and the laughter marks an old poem
Made young
False youth , and truths
And all these false appendages 
The wild baggage shall fall like leaves
Soon to be free



Thy Lord bringeth to pass what He willeth and chooseth. They have never any choice. Glorified be Allah and Exalted above all that they associate (with Him)
Surah Qasas

Impressions

The storytellers are scribing their lives with the clouds
Strings drawn out , weaved into soft hammocks where only the children sleep 
Calculating probabilities of catastrophe
Like mushroom men whose furtherest stretch of reality
Are worn knuckles and greyed hands

There are lives that try to bypass God
Who sit in these fields and stare at the sky
The stars shine for all men

But the moonlight is mercy  

There are nights that shall speak
And rains that shall cry
And golden portions of time
that make clockwork of our lives

A decade old request turned into a breath

For all , for them , for us. 


'What is the matter with you? How do you judge?'
Verse 36 Surah Qalam 

shame

Shame is where the poem ends empty

In my time of need , God covered me
When I left all honour behind, God covered me

Shame is the shrouds beneath which only God sees
Shame is a stagnancy , a rotting
Shame is left lying still

My eloquent tongue and black heart
My poem ending empty

intermittent

I teach myself lessons I once taught
Closed doors and epiphanies when apologies
Too late , always too late

Maybe goodness will be dispersed
Like flickered light in the periphery
Like something you felt once it was gone

Nowadays I am heavy with justifications
Such that my heart won't give way
Let me explain what its like in the limbo
Between hypocrisy and disbelief
Between too much and too little
Inside the silence of all the things I ought to say

I'm so sorry

Throwback

Here is where the metaphors meet at crossroads
Only the well tread may comprehend
Because the rains fall still
Till I stand on a side of the street I do not know
I do not know what it is like to be the green plastic
The simplicity in ends  hammered into this pacing
Let me say that glass walls taunt
And that perhaps the  mere exclusion could be counted as relief
But we are here counting the shards of glass
And bleeding veins telling one story again and again
But not quite is this light that shines hard
Onto these faulty premises
Wood carved with gaps
Sentences that don't really match up
To a point but to a bigger picture all the same
If somebody could give me peace of mind
That I could be a leaf plummeting
Little time , the presence of the absent
Fills this place with prayers
And the echo of a fear that came true
There is a silence
A held breath
A misplaced intention
Hurt bound in a book
I did not write

This should not be the place for such sentiments
But this is where the string takes root
The knotted tree
Where this brute honesty
Made the empty auditorium
All that more empty

It echoes
What an old friend once said
Whose fruits would've come at the end
But I am not thusly blessed
And ends are not ends
Just full circle , hard lives
And mornings where we begin again

Not a poem

I want to write on muslim youth musings
A little direction and discipline is in order
I wander too much
And all my wonderings cover the same ground again and again
Maybe sow a few seeds of goodness
Maybe this uncomfortableness needs roots
Maybe home is soil , is earth , is us
We are home racing towards home
I want to write like the meanings aren't dripping
Off the page with each sentence lacking punctuation

I want to write

On Finding a Dream

These are the hectic hands juggling
Coals we must collect without burning
Truth is in this darkness no diamonds shine
And what once was a dream resides in an unopened history
I do not have the heart to read these things once again

I know now to grab the glass I break
Whether it fits in the crease of my palm
If we bleed , we bleed , we all bleed red
So let my humanity stain every endeavour
May my regret not tear and cool the coals

May I suffer if it rips my soul from limbs
May I suffer if the sweetness is to teach the heart to want
May I find amongst the shards unwanted dreams

Let me walk if walking is the only way to find a way
And let my hands touch more coals than the wholehearted-
Could dream to know

Spiritual Limbo III

Impressions stamped upon the forehead
We cannot escape
Left unstable with these mounting trinkets
Gold plated wood

The goodness amassed for frail hearts
Reaches no veins and in vain
We wait thinking foundations will not buckle
Under the pressure of the external

I am not rich
Just a poor soul trying to pay off it's debts
Towards God is the procession

Ramble

Compromise is unutterable , an ugly, heavy word, forming uncomfortably in the small print.

It was not my intention to write this here , to write this , to write.

Sometimes I wonder at the paradox of principle . The excellence in the grandiose , the simplicity in excellence . I demean the latter despite lacking the moral fibre to achieve it.

When I think of compromise , I think of betrayal and the bitterness of that gives way to humanity. A compromise rooted in betrayal rooted in compromise.

Life has always been full circle and never quite straight lines .

Are you feeding a hypocrisy ? Or are you trying to shirk your responsibilities ? An old friend told me to give back , I give aghast at the quality of that which I have to give.

Most days I think of the brevity of life.  My bones ache in loss , I trade in loss , I meet and greet in loss , I walk in loss.

She told me that ' every soul is continually tasting death'

I don't stop here. I don't stop at the edge of every unique reality to remind myself there is an optimum . A perfection in the handling of every moment.

We are so intertwined that it has become our detachment . Our pale faced denial.

Do you value love and progress and goodness more than vulnerability. Why is it so often a hidden pride masking all our wounds ?

Dear world, this is where I fell. Do not fall here too.

Numb

Tell me where it is supposed to hurt
On which wound should my tears sting
If all my veins are lined with hypocrisy
Maybe I sold my soul too cheap
Took a faith as fleeting
Can't even pinpoint where
Did it all go wrong ?

I sit with my old self on rainy days
One foot in the grave , a heart filled with dust
Of shame

Its strange

Maybe my mind is fire
That my limbs will taste

Perhaps your words made knots in my fate

Tell me where do I begin
Crave a silence too deep for a body to withstand
Bound to that which isn't sacrificed
Sacrificed along with that which isn't bound

Forgive me for misendeavors
The vilified victim , the victimized villain
The lines blur to no discernible end

It's strange

Tell me something I do not know -
But make me understand