nakasthelhun

zuleikha’s apples

for nasty cockroaches

Pick out the reddest ones, the most luscious, with the sexiest worms within. Pull them out from the pack, let the others, the blemished and the yellowed, roll and fall and break open on dust, for this is a time for only the ripe and the youthful. Let the flies come, their little tongues outstretched. Feast upon the juices, for tonight we are having a party my friends.

Laugh at me now, if you must, my friends. Laugh at me now and feel the braids in your hair tied up so tight they pull at the corners of your eyes. Laugh now at my trembles, my indiscretions while you carry your pails home, your bottoms rigid like unripe mangoes, the kind that turns your teeth shivery and soft. Laugh as loud as you possibly can with the binds that flatten your breasts against your chests like unleavened bread.

And when the sun descends, when the birds close up their wings and tuck in their beaks, when bellies are full and your husbands leave home, stifling their burps and shaking out their robes, draw the shades around your laughter, and bathe.

In water and attar, uncoil the limp strands of your hair, brush them out until they shine wild. Kohl your eyes, rouge your lips. Lick your teeth, get ready to smirk, for tonight we are having a party my friends. Shake out your breasts, uncross your legs. 

Welcome, welcome, I am the epitome of love and joy. Your leers are faltering already, are they not, dying in the confines of your faces? Where is the food, where is the … your greedy curious eyes are already licking into the dark corners of the house as you enter, coy and sharp. He is not here yet, ladies, settle down.

Lift up your legs, exclaim at the apples, for your are about to get lucky. Now begin, in the rose light curling about you like languid cats, peel the skins, the leathery coat that hides the sweetness and the juice. You each get your own silver paring knife inlaid with embellished coital couples. Men and women, men and men, women and women, women and horses, men and chickens, who cares, let them fuck inside your sweaty palms while you, yes you fill your hungry minds like smoke inside a fired oven, the slow trickle of want that will glide down your backs and turn into a melting, boiling mass of redness within.

Remember Eve, remember the darkest dreams you have of being touched by strangers in places your husbands cannot reach. Feel that, do you? The thick roundness, the redness in your hand, and in the other, the steel resolve and keenness? And finally, the slip and pierce, the fallen fruit? 

Oh but why do your hands bleed so red? I want to lick them, is that you shedding your mockery? Shall I taste the understanding, the unraveling of the ties that bound you so tight once, is that the unfurling of the buds that you have tried so hard to keep closed? These red, dark drops you rub on my face as you kiss me goodbye, is that a covert thanks you cannot now hide, like an egg you kept warm in your hands now bursting forth, the bird flying out, a flash of wing and beak too high to catch, too large too beautiful too happy too free, yes?

roanu maamaduvvari

We wonder on a moonless nights, how did the hanging buoy look, when illuminated whitely in a milky gaze? How would that bird be outlined in silvery ink, spun sugar? Tut-tut-tut.

A world is around us, a geoid blanket of everything, and our island is in the middle. We lay in our beds, watching the little flame in the jar as it falls on the grey wall. We hear the crickets, a mistimed rooster, the rustle of a moth trapped in a plastic bag, and the silence of lives lived in private, behind closed doors and eyes.

Why does the hoanu tut, when stories are told of 1992 and undone shirt buttons and a nice breasted girls? What do they agree with; are they familiar with this clandestine concurrence?

Where is the sponge coral of hope tonight? Is it sleeping with old love, their breathing synchronized like twins in a womb? A child bride frowns in her sleep, somewhere in Bangladesh, and her braids are like oily ropes on a pillow that does let her rest. Only we will know what links them, only we can detest what it insinuates.

Tut-tut-tut

Don’t agree with everything you frail wall-dweller, it makes you feeble, it makes you fickle. Ignore the expectant pauses in the maudlin and the mundane of the newly loving; find your flies and fight for yourself, don’t exist to fortify the sounds uttered by the frivolous fools farting in the bed.

Fa faa fi fee fu foo fe fey fo foah f

So tonight my sister will throw away the cardboard box, and the hulhangu rain will wash away my wishes, the ink staining the stones below. Oh earth, please eat my words, and feed them to the sexy worms in your depths, those that fuck you for food. 

And then we laugh and it breaks the darkness like red and gold glitter that floats midair, and then falls lightly, disappearing as they mix with old footsteps of visitors long since gone. And then we laugh again and our hair is caught up in this imaginary confetti, like shimmering strings erupting from our scalp that were made of joy so pure, as though from the waters of the moon itself.                                                                                                                              

clockwork junkie 1

Inside a greying nest lies a small creature, as small as a fingernail, as tender as the skin on ripening fruit. Its eyes are closed; they have been, forever. Its fingers have not touched anything except themselves. 

It moves during daytime, small fidgets that amount to nothing more than movement for the sake of it. It hears the rustles within its own self; they too, smoothed familiar with each shift and turn. The rest of the time there is stillness, a noiselessness that is defiant, uncompromised.

What do you think it dreams of, without ever having seen the world; how complicated or serene will be the skies that it conceives? I wonder. What about gravity and science, what about figures and poetry and movement, how will they shape and turn and merge into one another, inside the biggest unknown? I ache to know. I really do. 

What will you say if I said that inside the furry aliveness, deep deep inside, in a secret red pocket, hidden within its fleshy folds are two metal cogwheels turning slowly, steadily, silently?

What then, Siththi, what then. 

the death of small bald men with knuckleduster ambitions

three days ago, this huge thing fell from a tree, on the ground, loud as a motherfucker, and the elderly cripple would have jumped in shock if he could move, poor bastard, but he couldn’t, and his heart literally fuckin’ exploded, didn’t it, right there in his chest, like dynamite in a water balloon, all rubbery and boom, blood splashing his insides. blood painting his insides, imagine, right, that his chest was a hollow room and there was this thick red stuff, black in bits, on the walls and the doors, and dripping from the handles, long after his body was cold and lying on the slab in aasaharaa. unexpressed, aimless blood, with no place to go. state funeral, they thought. outside, people came to check if he was really dead, they grasped his purified wrists and felt for a pulse and then celebrated the silence with grins inside, and unravelling outside. state carnival, i said. you looked at the sky and didn’t speak.

and later we check, you know, our bodies still smelling like the crocodile tears of the despicable, the ground beneath the tree, and there was a dent in the pavement, a grey right-angle, but whatever had fallen had long gone, picked up or walked out of its own accord, no doubt unaware of  the reasons why we live and die. you look at me and you see my face, and because i am smiling, because i made a sound in my throat (i was going to laugh), and because you know me from the knot in my stomach to the fucking split ends in my hair (inside and out, i mean to say), you sneer and you say, you are a fucking disorder. you said i am a fucking disorder. you don’t walk away but you look away, and i stand next to you, a fucking disorder standing next to your sneering beautiful knotted neck.

he is dead, i think, and my soul unravels and travels in the breeze, towards north and south. i don’t care. this day has come.