fruit

There’s another self inside yourself. Another you

Like the core of a fruit

The flesh of the fruit is plump, juicy, sweet, filling, refreshing

The core is hard, coarse, inedible. A stone to be thrown away

and discarded. A seemingly dead thing, with a perfect tree inside it.

But the bitter stone is as much the fruit, as the sweet, nourishing flesh

It is the soul

The base

The beginning

The root

Without it there is no sweetness, or juice

There is no fruit  

There is no flesh

every month

Every month

my female severs the pink velvet ribbons that bind her

The quiet calm prairie, turns into a gruesome battle field

a hibernating black bear, disturbed 

a beehive, harassed and shook

She awakens in a pool of dark red blood, disgruntled

My modest breasts, two voluptuous, snarling wolves

My dormant uterus, a two-headed venomous snake,

My tender white orchid, a fierce, carnivorous flower

Sorrowful, angry, and confused

she weeps;

something like a cry of loneliness

something like a love song

something like a violent threat

her soft, placid canary, a haggard squinting vulture    

enraged and fiery, she wishes she can smash her womb

her womb

an empty vase, with no flower in it

the brute

6:00 pm, the day already feels old and chewed up,

like a worn garment, that’s lost its morning freshness, drab and clammy,

My thoughts of tomorrow already full of dread. Tomorrow, when it comes,

eager and uninvited, like an odious, old habit, nagging me to do this, forcing me to finish that.

The familiar, tongue-less voice, reverberating within the walls of my body, small and defeated:

I’m tired.. I’m tired..

I measure the distances, relentless travel hours, to where I wish I was

Six hours and forty three minutes to Morocco

Seven hours and twenty seven minutes to Mauritius

Nineteen hours and twelve minutes to New Zealand

While my existence grows shabbier, my bones heavier, my tread more stooped

Damn time, damn distance, damn existence

Damn this bewildering feeling of hopelessness..

And then, the final absurd paradox the miserable day manages to wring out of me  

what a powerful, ferocious a brute, a tyrant, a dictator hopelessness is.   

  

depression

My body is an old, stiff, corpse    

I wake up every morning to manhandle it, I am not inside it

I shove my heavy, rigid arms into shirt sleeves

I force my aching, limp legs into trouser legs

ground meat stuffed in skin encasing

I standup straight, my back complains, it wants to bend, it wants to curl

my body refuses to be a body 

feeling disconnected, and defeated, and poor

was I ever put together?

rusty daggers thrust into my brain, the taste of something metallic in my mouth

an exhausting din that will not stop, a foggy dim that won’t clear

I do my duties, nothing is delayed, nothing is misplaced, or forgotten

I’m not sure how I face day after spirit breaking day, but I do

dread, like poisoned blades of grass push through my veins, freshly cut reasons not to go on

my eyes, murky ponds that reflect nothing, the slightest light insults them

a bruised fatigued creature has replaced my heart, its beating strenuous

my will, a runover fawn, raspy breath, and wheezing, a wild eyed, dying animal

nearing the end of the day, I fall into an emptiness so vast, so lonely, so incoherent

was there ever anything but suffering?

somewhere in a parallel universe

someone sees me, someone loves me, adores me

someone understands my eyes, someone knows me

someone believes in all the goodness I carry

in a parallel universe, someone fights for me

somewhere in another universe

if only I believed in love, more than I believed in pain

Apathy

Apathy is a painful indifference

A lack of caring that eats away at you like a swarm of ghost maggots

Like a tree that shed all its leaves in autumn, I woke up caring for nothing

I don’t belong to anything in this world, nothing belongs to me

I’m so far from everything

A Godless hell, a phantom guilt beyond wrongdoing and right doing

People, like lifeless mannequins, I expect nothing from

My heart, a locked cold damp basement, I’ve lost they key to

The dreams that once hung from my laden branches, ripe, and heavy

fell to the ground, bruised, worm infested apples

the memory of living for a dream lingers, a faint nostalgic scent

I wish my apathy would let me laugh, I wish it would make me cry

Instead of floating aimlessly in this emotional limbo,

A starless, moonless sky,

A sunless day,

A laborious, eventless week, without rest.  

On being sick

The illness starts small. A familiar aching in my bones and joints, the heavy, uneasy movements, the itchy scratchy feeling in my throat, a numbness in my ears and nose.

My temperature rises, the perpetual sneezing is so powerful, every sneeze shakes my whole body violently. My brain slowly turns into goo. I can’t focus on anything, my sight is hazy, as if I’m looking through several thick unwashed windows

Every step is a swaying clumsy effort. I throw myself in bed and surrender. This is exactly where the virus wants me to be. Here, it can attack me, fully, with zero resistance, it can take over me entirely. Rid me from all my energy, and vitality. And brutally, savagely torture me. I take two paracetamols at a time, hoping for some. kind. of. relief, any relief, temporary relief, but in vain.

An earsplitting alarm has gone off in my mind, screaming shrilly SHUT DOWN, COMPLETE SHUT DOWN, ALL SIGNALS AND FUNCTIONS OFF. My joints and bones turn into stone, there’s a vicious creature gnawing at my skin. I can’t feel comfortable no matter what position I’m in; I lie down, and feel like I’m being choked to death. I sit up, and crumble into pieces from the effort of trying to keep my head up. I try the fetal position, but there’s a rusty hand saw cutting through my back. The small of my back is being sawn-off my torso.

Under the cover everything in me is burning, a suffocating, oppressive heat. I pull the cover off, and I’m shivering, with cold sweat dripping off my forehead. I say something like please, my voice tiny and pathetic, and with two hundred rhinos pounding from my left ear, through my head, to my right ear. I can barely hear myself howl with pain.

My mind reels, unstoppable, vomiting images, like a poisoned stomach needing to empty itself clean. Painful memory, after lashing painful memory; remember this awful thing? Look at this dreaded memory. Oh! remember that? That was the worst. All I needed was for my mind to stop. To just be quiet, and stop remembering the most painful, most horrible things. But no! the fucker kept going! Picking at badly sewn wounds, throwing salt on throbbing cuts and bruises. I wondered why it hadn’t run out of fuel yet? Shouldn’t it be tired by now? Shouldn’t lack of food, and plenty of sedatives bring it to a halt?

The pain, almost a separate living thing now. Slithering like a fat snake inside my body, too big to crawl smoothly, it pushes my bones apart, destroying me on the inside, breaking everything in its way. My heart is a massive overworked, overheated machine, pulsing so fast, trying to keep up with the unimaginable damage. I want to hold on to some small hope, that the worst is over, but there’s no end in sight.

At this point breathing is an overwhelming effort. My eyelids will not stay open, but closing my eyes means seeing the most chaotic, most disturbing, most unbelievable (and yet believable) images, sounds, and scenes, my sick brain can conjure. I never knew how creative my mind can be, when churning-up so many different scenarios in which I die in the end. The classic falling off a cliff, the horrendous car accidents, the cobra bites, the dying of thirst in the wilderness of an endless desert.

On the third day, emptying a fourth box of tissues, I’m convinced that this is not simply a runny nose. No, it can’t be. A runny nose would have run dry by now. This incessant stream of nasal mucus, I became convinced, is my brain. It has deteriorated into this disgusting liquid, and is now coming out of my nose. Which also explains why I still don’t have any of my cognitive skills.

A final roar grips me. Like the ferocious arms of a Greek God, shaking me; Enough! Have you had enough? And throws my body, lifeless, like a slab of unformed clay, on the cold marble top of a pottery maker’s table. Neglected, and piled up.

My arms and legs are huge sleeping animals. Tired, and hardly breathing, as if after a long, and wild thrashing. I don’t want to move them, I don’t want to wake them. They will want me to do things, drink water, get out of bed, go to the toilet. And I just can’t.

I lie there, unmoving. Knowing that if I was by a seashore, I would let the waves take me, drag me away, into sea. Silently, gently be taken, and swallowed up entirely by the ocean. This is what I imagine the ocean to be. A God. A great God. When tranquil, and calm, the ocean is the most magnificent, most breathtaking vision. Unfathomable, mysterious and all knowing. But when angry and provoked, the dark, furious, rising waves, hurl a strong, healthy body against the black jagged rocks, break the skull, shatter the spine, and regurgitate tattered flesh, as flimsy as wet, torn up tissue paper, letting it silently wash up to shore, without apology, or regret.

I open my irritable, red rimmed eyes. Even the faintest light of dawn, coming through my bedroom curtain hurts them. I sigh. This new year feels so old.