dementia is the gradual impairment of personality integration due to loss of neurons in the brain

the place of no return
doesn’t always have to be death –
death is overrated; I watch my dad
die everyday and
everyday he lights his pyre and
toasts to his histories and geologies of
a lifetime as though he were the last living
remnant of all there was of him; and everyday
he pries open with his bare hands the archives of
an era that give way to more eras before him and
he scoops up in his palms residues of
his loves, the forfeitures of lives lived or
those that weren’t, and he crouches there day after
day upon his cot, fingering the altered maps of
his body and what it is now, or how it will be
so; and his losses tail me across continents and
seek me out, and I live with his shadows bounding
like antelopes that are wounded and left for
dead everywhere; that’s him now, sitting with
himself in company, and that’s him knotting then
unknotting strips or shreds that once strapped his
flesh and bones in place; he rinses off grime from his
hands by the hour as though that were his blood or his
bloodline staining all there is; and often he places his
memories like a montage before him, then all day he
sifts from there the vestiges of what once was
and is now; no,
the place of no return
doesn’t always have to be death –
death is overrated; I watch my mum
sip potions of
his death each day like
sacramental wine and I wonder if
she will return one day from this place of
living where he dies every day

~~

earth song

you draw me close and drink
my nectar, you kiss

my blossom flower-heads, you
enfold my brooks,

my purple falls, my lissom
snow peaks, you

sink into the dark ravines of
my olive forests

my swirling seas, you wield
your love, your primacy

over my flesh, my bones,
my blood. I cannot

be possessed you know. I
take your infinite

seeds into my womb. I
sprout your love to life

~~

pearls

why don’t you and I string
these pearls scattered

on the dressers and floors
of our lemon-peach house?

white, pure, eloquent:
they were nurtured in oysters

deep under water for years
and now they roll and flounce

about the spaces, waiting for
the first needle prick,

the gentle tug, the lissom slither,
to pearl them together

and hang around our necks
like dialogue

we wished to wear forever

~~

LOVE

Who says that love’s blind?
I saw you at the railings
with your hands
stuffed in your pockets
awkwardly
and your speech faltered;
your faults glared at me,
I saw the chipped tooth
marring your looks
…and still I loved you.

~~

STRANGER

I’ve known you for years
now; these roads narrowed and
clattering structures sprang up
in our knowing; we moulted
our innocence together and
gravelled paths replaced the
daisy-strewn ones; still there’s
the wood-screen between and
every time you become
stranger and stranger.

~~

anonymous

yes, I dropped here from the land of

noise and monochrome, back there every-

thing was magnified to Hermon,

Wadi Hajar, al-Assad and the rest, I’m

anonymous; once we ate mud, ashes and

mortar, lived in houses baked to bronze and

char black, we carried pailfuls back and

forth from trenches spewing flame, gunge and

human blood; once I was swallowed whole

then regurgitated back to living again and things

moved on as before; once I was torn limb

for limb, head, torso, groins, then sewn back to

a piece, misshapen and make-do; once

evenings had the children hanging on by

a thread to tales of honey-baklava, za’atar, or

salvers of  kibbeh bil-saniyeh, growing aches in

the underbelly, mounting shrieks outside of

our nights, the tears were gravel, the eyes stoned

upon the sea of no-return; once I was

born and killed in utero for I didn’t know then

nor will, the secrets of birthing and of

death; yes, I am here now in my 206 or so

scraps and strips, my wedges of flesh, my skin,

my spleen, the three leftover faces that I call home

~~

dads, playoffs & sherry trifle

the widest distance between the thumb and

forefinger – that’s how far removed I grow with

or without you now; it’s all a matter of

puttying the odd crevice onto the strips of those

otherwise evenly painted walls I’m told, and we

could be family again; remember the warmness of

our summer afternoons, wet like the underside of a

tongue whose bloody pinks have blended to pale onyx

now? that’s the span of time between child and

adulthood; and that’s not enough anyhow to wipe out

those creases in a relation now suffixed with the

quintessential ship to it; yes, affixes never last; they

weren’t meant to, nor were roots and root words; they

alter, reinvent themselves, slip to posterity; we weren’t

meant to either; our love was sherry trifle and

crumble when it was and now it eats into us, starting

from head down to the far extremities; we’ll never

shoulder it together to the final eulogies and back, just

as we never did to any back then when I’d waited up

there at the podiums, charged with anticipation and the

promise of many arrivals; yes, mum always did

say I was a trader of emotions, didn’t she? she had hip

replacement last autumn after those ectomies; and she

said she loved the rustle of footsteps up the drive and that

her body reminded her of failure

 ~~

step-by-step study of human displacement: a surgical evaluation

tell your arm to wrench free from

the socket holding it together and

take another body now – there’s a science

to your tissues taking to theirs, there’s

rejection at first, there’s always rejection

of one foreign body entering another, of

your fears colliding with

your recipient’s fears, the weeping and

wailing of the new and old bits of you, the

infighting, the moderating of yourself so

just parts of yourself reject parts of them, so

there’s hope of growing into their

parts as their parts; and you work your

nuts-and-bolts into their armhole, their

hollows, to sit snug like you’re back

home with family or the likes of it, working

yourself to the bone, working your motors

to their tempo, tempering the colour of

your eyes and skin and blood in keeping

with the colour of their needs and

requirements so you’re the malady you

learn to live with – allograft transplant

it’s called surgically (as opposed to

autograft where you take parts of you to

another part of you); and you must hereon

ingest the linctus of your survival

day after day after day

to allow the daily living

to allow the rhythms of you to grow into the

rhythms of them and the other way

around, and you must know you won’t take

to each other easy, you never do, never

completely, and the french call this

depaysment or exile, the feeling of not being

home, of non-being, of being in a distant land, of

being far, far away from where your

mother patted flatbreads at the kiln, where

your son buries himself in the rubble with

your uncle’s son, where the sun never

shines again, where the days are like

night, where the nights are a blanket of

what was and isn’t anymore

~~

your body was my home

 (we meet here every evening to dance before the sun goes down again) 

 and I’m learning to navigate the fractures of your body and mine,

and I’m learning to worm around clefts and curvatures as though

the splints, gridlocks, routes, reroutes intersecting each other

at angles aren’t catches enough holding me up from making any

headway anymore; the shoulder-blades whittled to sand dunes in

fours, in fives of our rivers, our riverfronts have splintered to caverns

where westerlies wail and raid all day long, routing hopes of full

recovery yet persistent like death traps lain upon our thighs, our breasts,

belly-buttons where we were lovers once; it’s true that hairline fractures

are tackiest to tackle: they’ve passed through similar pains of rupture

and breakage as other fractures but are unseen like grief and there’s no

telling of damage or destruction, there’s fear of treading upon or around

pits of pain, and there’s fear of un-treading, of faltering, of falling

headlong into those no-man’s lands, into landmarks where I refuge but

cannot be refugee because some words have outlived their use

or usefulness now, some have altered, some others comminuted or

compounded to newer bits; sometimes I vault across spaces blundering

and flightless like a runner-bird, sometimes I tread gingerly between gashes

that have paused their weeping but rankle still, reek in their festering of

loss, love, the likes of it all; this manoeuvring forward of my body and my

body mass about your contours is a craft I acquire with time and practice

before I learn to master the art of failing and of flying; have you watched

a raptor coax her fledglings, then thrust them headlong over crags to school

them of the fundamentals of flight and of fall and how best to avoid the

head or when to tuck in the limbs when crash landing? have you seen

how the preceding months of their feeding and fending are part of her

modus operandi: of knowing love and all it entails, then un-knowing it all

to give way, to let go, to stop the weeping within – or hope it will? her

maternal instructiveness is after all her longing to expel the ache she’s

carried in her belly for centuries, for nothing aborts the absence of presence

that’s mute but tumorous; I think often about how the breaks and bindings in

your body begin inside me and how they wiggle through spaces I’ve never

touched with my fingertips because touching you is never an option or

can be because touching you is sacrosanct and like touching a rainbow, like

watching the colours crumble to black and ash; yes, we meet here every

evening to dance before the sun goes down, never touching or knowing

touch in the way we must know touch or how touching is another word for

healing but has never made the lexicon we carry about our persons now; and

every time I reach the gateway to your body and mine in its emerald downs,

its pearlescent points, I un-touch your throat and I unkiss your spaces

where I’m told that breath and death are one and the same, and I negotiate,

then re-negotiate your fissures, your fractures, the lines and lineaments of

control that hold us hostage in love or love’s namesake

 ~~

 (every day just before sunset indian & pakistani soldiers meet at the

attari-wagah ‘border’ and perform a dance-off ceremony)