Now you see me
I was taking close ups of the flowers, it was only back at the laptop that I saw something extra in the picture.
Now you see me
Author: Ali
The Million Words
The Million Words
A sestina on word use
There may be as many as a million words
In English – lingua franca of the world
Which sponge like soaks up other tongues
And claims all new inventions as its own
Despite this fruitful garden we still choose
To limit the range of language that we use
Is it abuse to not put into use
The full breadth of the lexicon of words
To slam shut the brace of Oxfords and to choose
To constrain ourselves into a smaller world
Do we forsake the very thing we own
By shackling the freedom of our tongues
Or is it that we fear speaking in tongues
Turning phrases others do no use
If we claim the rare and complex for our own
Always ready with les mots justes, perfect words
Do we depart from the rest of the speaking world
Is true erudition something we can really choose?
So, fearful of ridicule, we choose
To lay conforming yokes upon our tongues
Denominate ourselves low in the world
Demote to the demotic what we use
To the commonest and easiest of words
We bind the cadences of what we own
But what if there was more that we could own
What if we were truly free to choose
From that list of nigh a million words
Free to twist and stretch our willing tongues
Bring the forgotten and obscure back into use
To enlighten and enrapture the whole world
Will we deal a recumbenitiban blow to the world
As we autohagiography the expressions that we own
And manifest what could be put to use
Or, revealed as philosophunculists by what we choose
Will we trip upon our hamartithic tongues
As we dentiloquently squeeze out words
The world I fear will judge by what we choose
Nor are we free to unfetter our own tongues
We will never use that million list of words
Me
Today.
Older Gods pt10
Older Gods 10
Our minds were not made for this intense attention. Exhausted we fell senseless to the floor and the fluid form flowed back into the pool. As in the dark reaches of the ocean where the God we thought both lone and mad had been sequestered, there was no means to measure time beneath the vast weight of the mountain.
Our minds, conjoined, slowly shrugged off the blankets of somnolence, awoke with drowsy kisses of our shared reflecting thoughts, accreting over ages sense enough to instruct our bodies to arise. The mountain God lay quiet, unaccustomed to the presence of believers and the drained of strength from the fraught tale of ancient sorrow.
We explored the temple, marvelling at the carved shapes shown up in sharp relief, as the blue green glow of our bodies, twice reborn, brought forgotten history back to life. We traced the tale of two Gods, potent and passionate, sustained by worship of every living thing. The early record crudely drawn and barely visible, scratched into the basalt, grew bolder, more elaborate and intricate, until the power of prayer and the marks of gratitude were lost in grandiose confections, art for the sake of art alone, the artist announcing their own skill without a greater purpose or direction.
It ended abruptly. Beyond the swirling self-absorption of the carving were a few scratched messages. The last adherents who had borne the remnants of their faith to this lost temple, long after it had been abandoned, to save one part of the dual deities against the hope someday they may return.
Above us the mountain trembled, as the enormous presence of the God’s awareness shifted in the pool. The pillars shook, dust drifted down in choking clouds, the burden of attention settled on us once again.
“I have imbued you with a fraction of my essence, blended with my lover’s shaping of your form. Go forth, retrace your weary pilgrim’s path, and quickly. Winter will weaken you, fed as you are by sun and starlight, the clouds and stretching nights will sap you in this northern hemisphere.
“Go. Let my blessing speed you, and the last of my strength save you. We have been waiting centuries; at long last you have come.”
End
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Monsoon IV
Monsoon IV
by Ruswa Fatehpuri
It does not rain in Singapore
The heavens weap single tears
Four miles wide, six miles deep
The pavements that we thought so even
Hide inch deep pools to soak your feet
As I once washed your mother’s
Before the thought of you
Small hand in my hand, ice cream sticky
Humid, wet as we splash puddles
Bath water warm, spring water clear
You learn what it is to love the rain
And I learn again
It does not rain in Singapore
And this small hand in my hand is not love
But something deeper, wider, something more
You can find more of Ruswa Fatehpuri here
Older Gods pt9
Older Gods 9
The apparition spoke: “I can taste where your scent skims the meniscus, grass after a storm in brilliant sunshine. I remember. I see a shadow beneath the veil of your constructed bodies. I remember. My voice echoes alone around this chamber. Where is the voice that I remember that would never leave me unanswered? Who are you to bear the traces of my lover? Who wakes me from my paradise, eternal slumber, with a taunt, the merest taint of something greater?”
Our bodies chimed like bells, as form emerged from the bright cascade of water. A resonance, reunion with a long lost mother, and the overwhelming rush of knowing something forgotten we once knew. It washed over us in waves as the form collapsed back in the pool, then spiralled up again, spraying a mist that scattered torchlight across the chamber in dizzy arabesques.
We saw within the swirling shapes, projected symbols from an ancient time, the writing from foundation stones of ruined temples and crude marks on cavern walls. Your years of study in the tortured time before we fled; the time of jibes and the cruel connivances of our abandoned tribe, the taunts as you turned yellowed pages, ancient tomes, while outside I railed, fought and defended; had shown something of this.
Another older God, the twin, the lover and the partner. A God beneath the ocean, and a God beneath the mountain. One we sought from signs that you deciphered from crawling scripts, one sought out from a new compulsion woven deep within our bones.
There were no words with which we could convey time’s brutal passage, the birth and death of nations, and the lost millennia. Nor was there any future that we feared but separation. Hand locked in hand we stepped into the mountain God’s black pool and finding no floor allowed ourselves to sink. Dissolution. We dissolved.
All that we knew exploded: the distant prison in the ocean, the rise of newer Gods and the world’s collapse towards corruption. The lingering sense of everything that once we had been, and all that we became, sluiced through our disintegrating bodies, a stain within the darkness, spreading, glowing brightly blue.
In return we learned the ocean God’s old shame. This Earth, this creation both Gods had spawned to share their love had turned from a floating bauble hung within the starry sky to an obsession for perfection. The ocean God had drawn out of himself the spread of lands, the fields and trees, and with the potency of Theic love had made mankind to glorify his lover.
The water holding us suspended trembled, sending shockwaves back and forth across the pool. “Fool, fool, was I” the mountain God cried out. Tears falling from the liquid frame collided underneath the waves with our dispersing forms and made them once again. On a surge we were cast out of the water, choking, whole and living. The vibrance of two Gods now beat within our breasts, we could feel the weighty restlessness of the rocks above our heads, the earth below us floating on a lake of liquid fire, uneasy as the God so long asleep cried out again, “Fool, fool, was I.”
“We poured our love into this thing that we had made, not content to spin within each other. What he gave life I gifted sentience, what he planted I made grow, until that same creation grew to know its grand progenitors. And still this cheap thing spun from ether absorbed all of our energy, to make it better, brighter, more capable of adulation, able to choose and pray unfettered.
“What he planted I made grow. The search for betterment and for improvement, spilled from him unseen upon the fecund earth, and spread with the winds to sprout as sustenance. We seeded the poison of desire into our own creation.
“Yet so absorbed was he in his grand work, so desirous to demonstrate the great expanses of his love, he could not see the taint that followed him, and I devoted to his cause, adoring every bead of sweat and tired breath made myself the seive to stop the stain from spreading.
“It rooted, deep within the living heart of this bright planet, sucked its own sustenance from the sun and distant stars, while I weakened and in growing desperation he ploughed all of his energy into the very thing that was killing me.
“So much of ourselves was spent on this obsession we became dependent on the power of worship and belief. What blessed relief when arms were raised in sacrifice, and heads bowed in fervent prayer. But it faded in the relentless press of sprouting weeds and dandelion Gods grew up out of men’s greed.
“Broken, I became the ghost of this lost sepulchre, until drained of belief I fell asleep, hearing the distant yapping as my love was hounded to the sea.”
Our bodies began to change, the glow bled from blue to green, the limbs stronger and thicker though still recognisably the median of the shapes we once had been.
“You, denizens and avatars, will bear my message to my love, and the sign of my forgiveness.
“I have been waiting centuries, at long last you have come.”
End
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Doodle Time
You’re at the airport, your flight is delayed for six more hours, and none of your electronic devices is working. How do you pass the time?
Some of us still travel with pen and paper.
Room to Live
Even out in the open we are crowded, boxed by unseen eyes, every step recorded and cast in stone.
Older Gods pt8
Older Gods 8
Our thoughts were bound more closely at the times our bodies wound around. The idea that started in your mind traversed through our skin ending and reflecting in mine. We saw shared memories from the perspective of each other’s eyes.
Feet buried in the foreshore, head to head and hand in hand, we saw each other as seen in the lens of our own eyes. My reckless exuberance, your cautious contemplation. My doubt once off the precipice, your soaring certainty. How I urged in stolen moments our only course was that we flee, how long you pondered, read and planned, and then when I thought that we would die apart upon the sands that spawned us, you said “the time has come, we shall be wed under the aegis of our lost deity.”
But now, joined, so much more than married, it is my headstrong rush that pushes your foot into the yawning void, your need for evidence and analysis that holds me at the door. The sudden flush of joy in remembering what we have overcome brightened our glowing skin, parted the darkness, we stepped within, as one.
Stairs wound into the mountain, a throat which swallowed light and us, spiralling down through air unmoved for eons, smooth walled and dry, without a trace of dust. There was no fear, not trepidation in our long traverse, but sorrow sweet and bitter hanging heavy, absorbing sound.
We grew dizzy through the long descent, surely far beneath the surface of the earth, and though ice locked the world above a dense and humid warmth enveloped us. Darkness sapped our strength, we could not fly, and in case of falling stepped resisting the steady pull of the unknown lying in wait.
And then it ended, a sudden flatness over which we stumbled, muscles still accustomed to the twisting of the stairs. A tomb, chapel, sacristy, broad pillared hall, a central pool and as if responding to our presence torches flared and filled the scene with dancing shadows imitating life.
The surface of the pool throbbed and rippled with our hearts. Here was at last our destination, the place our God had re-formed us both to find. From one corner of the world and to the other we had come, a journey long, marked with a moment of the deepest sorrow and mile upon smiling mile of happiness.
We gave no thought to what might lie ahead, what our God had brought together, nothing could tear asunder. We lit the chamber with our own unearthly light. Our hearts which had so long beat to the time set by this hidden sacred pool now set the pace of hammering until the waters rose to our accord. Our celebration of a life now lived within two lives awoke the spirit slumbering beneath the mountain’s weight. We heard the voice, bone deep and echoing as our own God’s voice had done.
I have been waiting centuries; at long last you have come.
End
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Older Gods pt7
Older Gods 7
Flight. Wearied and worn by the rejection, the fresh evidence that our union was forbidden, we fled, borne on the wings of our compulsion.
Flight. The precious freedom of the air, the cooling dew of heavy clouds, the enlivening chill of the rampant winds, the succour of sunshine. We watched the stars wheel across the sky, the joyous dance of constellations.
Exhausted we alighted in a forest, curled in the moonwashed branches of a tree, entwined, within, without, blue bleeding into blue until we were a single mass of angel flesh, a glowing visitation for the night hawks and the owls.
We sought our own healing in the blissful arms of sleep. Absorbed and accepted in our lone place against the world, representatives of our forgotten God, who gave us the gift of unity, for the price of our lost lives. And yet the yearning pull remained, despite our blood now blue, our hearts enlarged, our bodies merged, amended; the whisper of the waves on clear sky evenings, and the terror of the sudden summer storms were written deep within the locked vaults of our souls.
We looked back frequently in those early days of travel, passing canyons deeply shadowed, lush woodland, plains groaning beneath the weight of endless herds of cattle. We stopped at first at settlements, to bring the old God’s word, but the world was unprepared, unwilling, dismissive and afraid. Few, too few, followed our direction to look within themselves, nor had we the freedom to teach them our new old lore. For the imperative grew stronger as the land around grew colder, and we closed upon the unknown, our far destination.
We flew lower, the colder air could not support our phantom weight, ice formed against our eyes, and our joints would freeze in place. We tired as the sun grew weaker, although our blue blood was immune from cold, we rested longer in the boles of massive pines and dark beneath overhanging rocks. Nomads, seeing us fly, skimming the earth, and soaring up the sides of mountains, fell down on their faces thinking that we might be their Gods, but the compulsion beat too strongly now for waking moments to be spent seeking the company of men.
A single mountain rose, a spire of ice, a monument that we approached for days, unable to comprehend its size, and when we landed in the foothills we knew we had arrived. The compulsion beat against the pounding of our hearts, the mountain throbbed as if it lived perfectly synchronised.
We sought out a sign between the rocks, and then beneath the snow, until above the veil of clouds, we saw a mark against the wall of white, a line of blue that echoed in the blood that coursed our bodies. And there, outlined beneath a sheath of ice, a door, portal to the unknown. Our hearts hammered hard enough to shake the mountain to its bones. Ice melted and flowed away upon our touch. Hand in hand we stood upon the brink of our long quest.
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END
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Older Gods pt6
Older Gods 6
What are the ties that bind a life to other lives? We, whose love was leashed so many years, looked back with longing at the fading shore when we first took flight, and we were drawn back in like kites in the eager hands of children when the evening breeze stills and the call for supper comes.
And so the tether that turned your head, blood calling to blood, your mother in the deeper shadow beneath the palm tree.
Nor were we yet accustomed to our shared physicality. You turned to look, I missed a step, you stumbled, I tripped and fell, your hand slipped from my hand, a spear pierced my thigh, you screamed, I added my plea to the imperative still singing in every sinew. “Go.” You stretched for me as blue blood sprayed the sands which birthed our hearts and where they had burst with longing. My body begged you stay while every sense said, “Go” and “Go.”
Past times our eyes in human form had found each other’s eyes across crowds and tides and distances. Perfected now and paired they locked for a fateful instant as the fishing net descended and trapped you underneath.
Chance, instinct or cruelty made them keep us apart and locked in darkness. Your leg ached with my wound; my head throbbed with the stunning blow that silenced your appeals. We crouched by the northern walls of our separate cells, blood still beating to our God’s instruction, craving the lost proximity that made us as we were.
Relentless, they questioned us, two beings reminiscent of those who fled across the sea, found by the body of the patriarch, and captured trying to flee. But not as they had known us, naked, shimmering blue, some of what was once in me, now found in you, and you in me. Alien but familiar, terrifying and similar, and stained with remembered shame.
Those devoted to the new God’s cause, the vain pursuit of more possessions, gaped unbelieving that there was indeed an older God, one in whom we must have once believed, and seeing fervour fading from the eyes still filled with grief, cried “treason” and “apostasy” and bid us to be burned.
How weak the ties when faith is lost or doubt sprays its venom deep within the chambers of the heart. My sister whispered once my name, your mother bowed her head and turned away.
They bound us back to back within a pyre, and though we twisted north against the binding knots we could not fly. Your hand brushed against my hand. Our fingers found each other, and the power shared between us flared back into life. We feared no fire, no simple flesh were we, the heat that blistered wood and pulled the fibres free was reflected back by our blue blood, the light, too bright to watch directly, sucked in as sustenance. Hemp charred and parted, we wrenched ourselves out of the conflagration, leapt into the sky, cried “no more,” and “let us be,” before we soared away, hand gripped in grateful hand into the clouds and out of sight of land.
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END
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Ali Abbas 