I’ve noticed, the closer you get to the real thing in
any bout of writing, the more formidable are the perverse
interruptions, the deflections, tempting diversions and sheer
obstacular incidents. The Alchemists were so familiar with it, they
gave it a name – Ophiucos i.e. the Great Snake (no less!)
(Ted Hughes. Letter to William Scammell. 2 October 1993. Letters of Ted
Hughes. Selected & Edited by Christopher Reid. Faber & Faber, 2007. 648,
649).
The heart is husbanded with your deeply serious moon-bedrizzled eyes
A mysterious dead-bright-diamond tear-crush
‘Shaken in a dice cup and held up to me’
Wine-lipped, it talks but does not talk
It shares its grief with an innocence clean and pure as dead babies a
Thousand lineaments and taut strings
All late coming to the courts of God
Girl, you do not question the life
‘out of living’
You do not question an embrace
You hold it hot, feel all the shipshape heart fill up into it
You feel it heave with blood-throbs
It Survives
On shoots, leaves, air, guilt
Curses and verses -
As for me myself!
I dribble with poetry
As black as does not trigger-rush a happy smile-child
With a healing saliva because it cannot
I am the stuck rat, cockle, mucous-eating membrane
I am daft with the drug that sizzles in a girl
My art is being driven to the brim of a precipice and taught not to jump
An Aunt Sally to frigid stoners
Comical, curlicue-like mokomoki
“He is not to be allowed to sleep” he hears the pick-a-pockets say
“He is not to be allowed to weep
(Or keep)
For that would mean another life
And he mustn’t be allowed to have that
You see, he is not to be allowed to live
Except in disguise, of course
He is not to be allowed to rise
He is not to be allowed to give” he hears them beg
“Or receive
He just won’t be gone”
Like That? On on on
The the blood gush
It is all good
So not the devil but the devil disguised as the devil disguised
And trying hard
To be content to be just that
O gape, enunciate, hawk up gobfuls
© Rehan Qayoom, 2007, 2009.