pulled down, nailed down
but the earth can't stand to swallow me days ooze, or burn, or float (metaphor fails) cinder block sadness stigmata of welded irony -im wheezing the words, im wheezing these words- will my hair fall out tonight ? will i wake with rotten teeth ? will my bones forget their solidity ? this can't be real blood. where did i put it all?
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that of an injured animal caught in a tangle
of thorns and shrubs awaiting apocalyptic fire; that of a fool caught in a tangle of lies, unsure of what is real; that of a mosquito caught in the tangle of your lives, seeking blood, losing blood; that of a ripple caught in the tangle of time, in the fractal tangle back and forth and simultaneous; a star on the verge of a black hole, losing light, limbs stretched infinitely; i return to my most secret instincts and most obvious intuitions: to destroy, to escape, to set fire, to fly like the smoke, to crumble, to be dust for the wind, to dissolve, to let flow down the drain. once again an amorphous carcass on the edge of an ocean of tears, on a shoreline between death and dreams and death-dreams and dreamy deaths, feeling the ebbing ache of life and wishing for silence. a̶ ̶l̶e̶t̶t̶e̶r̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶q̶u̶i̶e̶t̶ ̶b̶e̶t̶w̶e̶e̶n̶ ̶u̶s̶,̶ ̶
b̶e̶c̶a̶u̶s̶e̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶e̶a̶s̶i̶e̶r̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶a̶d̶d̶r̶e̶s̶s̶:̶ ̶ ̶ D̶e̶a̶r̶ ̶S̶i̶l̶e̶n̶c̶e̶,̶ ̶D̶e̶a̶r̶ ̶D̶i̶s̶t̶a̶n̶c̶e̶,̶ ̶D̶e̶a̶r̶ ̶V̶o̶i̶d̶,̶ ̶ o̶o̶z̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶o̶u̶t̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶u̶s̶ ̶l̶i̶k̶e̶ ̶a̶ ̶n̶o̶s̶e̶b̶l̶e̶e̶d̶,̶ ̶ D̶e̶a̶r̶ ̶S̶t̶i̶l̶l̶n̶e̶s̶s̶,̶ ̶D̶e̶a̶r̶ ̶E̶m̶p̶t̶i̶n̶e̶s̶s̶,̶ ̶D̶e̶a̶r̶ ̶B̶i̶g̶n̶e̶s̶s̶,̶ ̶ f̶o̶g̶g̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶u̶p̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶g̶l̶a̶s̶s̶ ̶b̶e̶t̶w̶e̶e̶n̶ ̶u̶s̶,̶ ̶ D̶e̶a̶r̶e̶s̶t̶ ̶L̶o̶n̶g̶i̶n̶g̶,̶ ̶D̶e̶a̶r̶e̶s̶t̶ ̶W̶o̶r̶d̶s̶ ̶C̶h̶o̶k̶e̶d̶,̶ ̶D̶e̶a̶r̶e̶s̶t̶ ̶W̶a̶i̶t̶i̶n̶g̶,̶ ̶ ̶ i̶ ̶h̶o̶p̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶l̶e̶t̶t̶e̶r̶ ̶f̶i̶n̶d̶s̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶w̶e̶l̶l̶ ̶(̶b̶u̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶a̶ ̶l̶i̶e̶,̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶c̶o̶u̶r̶s̶e̶)̶.̶ ̶ ̶ a̶n̶d̶ ̶w̶h̶o̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶ ̶d̶e̶l̶i̶v̶e̶r̶ ̶a̶ ̶l̶e̶t̶t̶e̶r̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶a̶ ̶c̶h̶a̶s̶m̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶ g̶r̶o̶w̶s̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶g̶r̶o̶w̶s̶,̶ ̶a̶n̶y̶w̶a̶y̶?̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶h̶o̶w̶ ̶ e̶l̶s̶e̶ ̶d̶o̶ ̶i̶ ̶a̶d̶d̶r̶e̶s̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶s̶i̶l̶e̶n̶c̶e̶,̶ ̶a̶n̶y̶w̶a̶y̶,̶ ̶b̶e̶s̶i̶d̶e̶s̶ ̶ i̶n̶ ̶i̶t̶s̶ ̶o̶w̶n̶ ̶l̶a̶n̶g̶u̶a̶g̶e̶?̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶l̶a̶n̶g̶u̶a̶g̶e̶ ̶o̶f̶ u̶n̶s̶e̶n̶t̶ ̶m̶e̶s̶s̶a̶g̶e̶s̶,̶ ̶c̶r̶u̶m̶p̶l̶e̶d̶ ̶u̶p̶ ̶l̶e̶t̶t̶e̶r̶s̶,̶ ̶d̶r̶a̶f̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶e̶m̶a̶i̶l̶s̶,̶ ̶ c̶r̶o̶s̶s̶e̶d̶-̶o̶u̶t̶ ̶p̶o̶e̶m̶s̶.̶ "will the ducks eat these
apple peels?" i drink cups and cups of cofy until there is a black hole in my tumy maybe i;ll fall in, maybe i'll bounce off . no dreams tonite, no sleep, no sleep earlier yesterday i could smell the dust over the phone, over the phone with my dad i could smell the dust that's settled over everything in my old room he sits there to spend time with the ghosts i left behind but he keeps stirring the dust and i smell the old jenerick tree in my neighbor's yard, and the sickly sweet detergent they use for their laundry, dancing like ghosts in the wind, and the rust of the old water tanks in ours.. i drink enough cofy ,, i down it till i am shaking like the leaves of the tree they planted when i was born "you can never escape your roots," they scolded her they know she can't carry fruit. perhaps now this poem will end even though i never found out if mom fed the ducks oh well last night i dreamt of shame
-no, the dream itself was shame i dreamt of dreams dashed, chances squandered of the vile refuse i saw my life becoming of fingers fumbling to free myself from its grip my own grip i went to bed last night and the dream was shame and i woke up with nothing left to lose there's mortar in the veins
limbs filled with cement lids made of concrete marble curtains, chapped columns, cracked asphalt on the skin coal in the belly heavy heavy like slow, heavy like ice, way too much ice. heavy you can't breathe, heavy you can only breathe. heavy until you rot, heavy even as dust. heavy tripped over the edge. so heavy -made of gravity. to be gravity. to be the earth's core, warm, warm, warm -smoldering scathing scintillating yearning -but too numb to feel the peel blistering off. this poem is too long drenched in moist clay "You're fired." wowow second year. is over. oof. OOF. a big yikes but also. noice.
Here's one thing I'm happy I did: a circus performance choreographed in response to Atlas Unlimited, a multi-national project by Karthik Pandian and Andros Zins-Browne that had a stop in Chicago during my winter quarter -at the same time I was interning at the gallery that would host them. At the end of Winter Quarter of this year, on March 8 and 9, I performed in the Le Vorris & Vox Circus' Winter Showcase, in which individuals and groups create their own acts independent of each other. At the time, I was interning at Logan Center Exhibitions, where the show Karthik Pandian & Andros Zins-Browne: Atlas Unlimited (Acts V-VI) was up. In efforts to promote awareness of the artists' work, I designed a performance piece in response to that exhibition as an excuse to tell people to go see it after watching the showcase (both were held in the same building). In coming up with the idea for my performance, I was particularly interested in the artists' counterargument to the phenomenon of the refugee spectacle, by which well-intentioned writers and artists present migrant narratives in a way that deprives the original authors thereof of their agency: some of the work Atlas Unlimited does is shedding light on the revamped nature of stories retold and the ways tales can morph and evolve as they travel from one mouth to the next. I wanted to create a performance that similarly betrays the very fluid nature of storytelling and re-telling, and its contingency upon the narrator. Thus, one connection between circus and Atlas Unlimited is the concept of the spectacle, which is entrenched in the history of circus, often manifested in ways much more negative than creative works sympathizing with immigrants. Figures like P. T. Barnum exemplify the problematic parts of this history; he contributed to a predominant and toxic of Orientalist culture and worked to exoticize and alienate both the foreign and what was considered abnormal of the local. Modern circus has tended away from this older, non-PC model, at least culturally, although the spectacle is still at its core. It also shares this with the 1893 Colombian Exposition, which featured spectacular exhibits of exotic cultures and scientific advancements and which is very relevant to Acts V-VI of Atlas Unlimited. As such, my performance was intended to be two-pronged: on the one hand, I was trying to decentralize the spectacle in circus by adding an interactive component which would turn my aerial silks act into a collectivist performance; on the other, by accentuating and admitting my control over the story as its primary narrator, I’m trying to cast doubt on the truth-value or completeness of the story as the audience sees it. Specifically, I stationed an overhead projector near the silks and prepared a collection of cutout transparencies that could be shifted around and collaged in different ways to tell numerous stories or versions of the same story (consisting of the same characters, settings, and motifs). These images created by the viewers were projected onto the aerial silk as I performed. However, the projections were only able to manifest when the fabric of the silks was spread wide in order to receive the light; otherwise only slivers of those images could be seen as they reflected off the bundled up silks. Whoever shifts the transparencies was the original author, perhaps the conceiver, of the stories told. As the silks acrobat, I acted as the re-teller of these stories, as I controlled what parts of it were clear and visible to my own audience, the spectators. The performance is hence was meant to explicitly betray my control over the projected narratives and the way I can shape them, which relates to the way that Atlas Unlimited highlights the way narratives change and evolve as they pass across different geographies, histories, and personalities. In terms of the content of these narratives, I’m thinking of tying it to my own cultural history rather than just regurgitating the tales told in the gallery, although, according to Builder and Near Eastern Archeologist Tasha Vorderstrasse at least, this history is still relevant. The main narrative I’m telling relates to the Circassian exodus of the 1800’s -I am a Circassian and my great grandparents fled the Caucasus mountains under threat of the Russians. They settled in Jordan, but many others settled in Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Turkey, and other places. Therefore, my story adds an additional layer of questions to those already in Atlas Unlimited regarding the ownership of stories and the validity of retellings: as merely a descendent of a people forcefully displaced, what right do I have over their stories of migration, especially when my own story has a much happier ending (migrating to America for a better education)? In terms of audio, I asked my friend Jeremy Lindenfeld majoring in creative writing to write and narrate a short story shifting between the Circassian diaspora, modern-day Circassian life, and my experience specifically, written from my perspective. That way, the overall performance consisted of me re-telling the audience’s re-telling of Jeremy’s re-telling of my re-telling of the Circassian exodus, all across different media. With some sound-editing, I was able to interlace Lindenfeld's narration with clips of Circassian music, my mother speaking at a 1980's concert, and some other effects, further fragmenting the story and distempering its chronology. My ultimate goal was to destabilize the spectacle by giving audience participation a crucial, active role in the performance, disrupting the passivity of their viewership, while at the same time creating a network of storytelling and retelling that exposed the various narrative formations that occurred between each agent. Here's a link to the performance! Thank you! stiff limbs calcified thoughts I'm in a cocoon of rotting peels cannot escape its toxic appeal shoulders heavy arms naught what am I doing here what do I do I forgot Spring is the time of waiting for the weeds to grow out so they can be uprooted -of waiting for the flowers to finish blooming so they may be stolen from the soil and discarded -of waiting for the fruits to rot on their branches so that a gentle breeze can pluck them. Spring is the confused time between the heavy raincoats and the tie-dye crop tops -between the wet mud on the earth and the dry concrete just inches away. I think I'll wait this one out, honey. I think I'll take a nap until the sun slips out behind the trees. It seems always to be the sixth week that this happens. When my brain feels clogged like a shower drain and nothing but time, not even the most vitriolic solutions, can resolve the blockage. I can't think and I can't remember anything. I am asphyxiated by knowledge -or maybe by my choker. Maybe by my choker. Actually, I feel better now. I like that the thought that one day I can disappear under your noses and you wouldn't have a clue.
I like the idea that I can somehow see the future. I like the idea that I can make my own decisions. But I feel the tension there, because I shouldn't be. My heart pounded in my chest like the beating of a ritual drum. Nestled beneath the overgrown roots of a tree, I was hidden by poisonous shrubbery and vines; the skin on my forearms and neck burnt for an itch, but I couldn’t risk making any sound as I peaked through the dark leaves onto the clearing beyond.
Sleek and soundless as shadows, several hooded figures congregated under the light of the moon, which was full and plump like a fig ripe for the picking. I could feel a warm droplet of blood trickle down my forehead, set loose by the branch I had cut myself against while trying to hide -when she told me to hide. She knew where I was, and her back was turned to me as two others approached and addressed her, looming over my hiding spot like spiders. “Ready?” The word was barely a whisper, and yet it felt like it had been uttered right into my ear. The question buoyed in the air for a few moments before Sarah nodded and produced a small clay pot from within her robes. “I used henbane and thornapple like you asked, Belladonna.” “And nightshade?” “Of course.” I knew they were referring to plants because I recognized the native thornapple, but the other two were foreign, at least to the soil here. As I pondered this, I saw a sickly pale and wrinkled hand reach out from one of the black mounds cornering Sarah and gently grab the handmade vessel she was offering. “It smells about right, but you’re missing a key ingredient,” the words slithered from the darkness beneath the figure’s hood like venomous reptiles about to choke Sarah. “Secrecy,” the other figure pointed out, their voice muffled by a black balaclava and their eyes obscured by large, round sunglasses. “I’m afraid you’ve compromised the mystery needed to perform this ritual.” I could feel myself and Sarah alike growing equally red with panic. “But nobody’s seen me-” she began to protest, only to be cut off: “The moths have. The rocks have. The stars have and the beetles have. Most importantly, she has.” At that, all three looked up at the moon, an effulgent disc white as marble. “We do not own our identities,” the cloaked figure began to reprimand. “They own us. It is only when you have no identity, when you conceal every trace of who you are, what you are, and why you are, that you can play the strings of this universe. Ancient gods have fallen into the realm of fiction and popular culture because people chained them with stories and descriptions, imprisoning them in paintings and freezing them in sculptures, rendering them completely powerless to the forces of chaos which govern this reality. Do you really expect to perform magic when the sparrows have seen your face or when the hyacinths have heard your voice?” It then occurred to me that this speaker’s thick French accent might be a ruse, to fool the flowers or whatever. There was a long, painful pause as Sarah stared down at the soil in surrender, before the second figure delivered the final blow. “And this unguent is now utterly useless. Really, Sarah, how could you be so sloppy?” She flinched at the mentioning of her name, right before what appeared to be her superior threw the clay pot to the ground, where it rolled towards me and stopped in the soft mud on which I was crouching. The lid had fallen off, and the ointment’s odor wafted up and made my nostrils curl. It smelt just like the one my mother used to use whenever I got rashes as a child, and so I figured it might help with the unbearable itching I now felt all over my face, arms, and ankles. Very silently, as Sarah and the two mysterious strangers deliberated in whispers only a few feet away from me, I rubbed the salve onto my irritated skin. By this point, Sarah’s company had departed, and she was left alone. I glimpsed her packing up her pin-covered bookbag in tears and getting up to leave -she had completely forgotten about me. She paused only to stand mournfully over the pentagram she had so deftly drawn into the dirt when I had found her earlier that night. A single tear slid off her cheek and plummeted towards the ground, right at the center of the ring of symbols etched into it. Just then, as sudden as a shooting star, a slight tremor shook the earth in that abandoned and overgrown Shmeisani park and a fleet of insects charged forth from the trees and bushes towards the circle at which’s lip Sarah stood. That must have been when she remembered her potion and me, because she called out my name, her voice barely keeping afloat against the ocean of buzzing and chirping constantly escalating in the clearing. Cicadas and houseflies, honeybees and wasps, and ladybugs and fireflies alike scudded like bullets towards their target. Even from my tight, arboreal chamber, I could see spiders and all manner of terrestrial insects speedily crawling out towards Sarah's ring; I quickly hurried out as well, lest some of them sting me in my frenzy. Once out, I spotted Sarah lying face-up on the ground and rushed towards her, failing to avoid any insectile projectiles in my path. "The unguent!" She yelled, almost ecstatic that her magic was indeed working, despite the words of who I assumed were her mentors. Her countenance immediately sank back into despondence, however, as soon as she saw her concoction rubbed all over me, attracting a couple of mosquitoes and flying ants. Realizing my mistake, I tried to apologize, but she silenced me. "It's too late. It has to be you now. They'll just eat me alive if I try." She paused, her eyes were downcast, not noticing my bewilderment. "Quick," she continued, now looking up at me with jealous but dutiful eyes, "you have to walk into that circle. They'll be upset if they think we've summoned them for nothing, and go on a rampage. We don't need another genocide right now." Seeing my still immobilized posture, she got up and grabbed me, barking into my ear for me to enter the circle she had drawn, now completely concealed by the amorphous blob of blackness and irridescent specks. Still unyielding, I was pushed in. I struggled against the raging army of wings and stingers that now encompassed me, snatching one last glimpse of Sarah and her two returned accomplices before giving in. Hood down and sunglasses off, I could see they were her grandmother, the principal at our school, as well as my old Arabic teacher. "Who was that?" I heard, before Sarah snapped a bloody twig in her hands, paused, and replied: "I don't know." "I don't know." The clearing was gone, as was Sarah. There was sight nor a sound, not even a sense of where I had been before being consumed by the swarm. The writhing of insects had dulled down to a grand, black homogeneity in which I was swimming. My anxiety had subsided, and all I felt was a strange serenity that swept over me with each heartbeat, except now my heart thumped slower and slower each time, and I gradually lost sense of my limbs, as if they were gone. I imploded into a dark peace, and was one with the blackness all around. Faceless, nameless, headless, bodiless -I approached selflessness like the moon arching across the dome of the sky, and nearly made it before a voice rang out like molten iron in the nothingness: "Who are you?" "I don't know." And then there was light, and warmth, or the ghosts thereof. The bog is dark and silent. Moist shadows creep slowly under the moonlight like salty tears across skin. My senses spill over like uneaten moss and whispers lurk beneath quivering black waters teeming with the whispers of things lost but never found. Somewhere far above all of this, the moon hangs full and plump, like a fig about to fall off its branch. There’s something serene but sinister in the air, like a disease lingering in warm blood, waiting to strike. The pungent spiciness of blossoming poisons stands out against the mild scent of midnight dew, and I recall the isolated atmosphere of a stuffy college dorm room inhabited by two hermits who never seemed to notice each other. Every inhale is acidic; the walls are sweaty; light bulbs burn away the hours of the night and the day like they were one and the same. Here, a crumpled-up paper is tattooed with esoteric equations, its wrinkles and crevices hiding the answers to the universe’s most arcane questions. There, a diagram sees a deluge of tears and blood and coffee, and then it dries up and gets torn up. Nothing breaks the quiet besides the occasional frustrated grunt or the muffled music of a party one storey away. My memory forms distended islands like algae on a pond; I grasp at them like Tantalus and fall back into the water with empty hands. There is nothing here but the swampy silence of mud and the seductive smiles of Venus flytraps. Wade as I may through the marshes of this foggy dream, I find nothing around me but the evaporating wisps of a reality I can only guess was once mine. Somewhere beneath me, methane bubbles in the dull, breathless ooze, and I think back to gas pipes in the basement below the laboratory in which I must have spent most of my time as a mortal. Every now and then I will remember something like that -the tinkling of test tubes or the suction of pipettes or the heat of a soldering iron. Sometimes I tell myself this story: I was once a scientist, or one’s apprentice, and I worked diligently in my laboratory day in and day out until one day some high and corrupt authority decided my advances to the field of electrophysiology (sometimes I tell it as biology, or even chemistry) posed too much of a threat to their dystopic vision of society, and so they threw me in this swamp to fester eternally. Other times, when the water is too murky to see through and I am not feeling so good about myself, I imagine that I had been some inferior being in my life, some verminous beast or even a bacterium, and that I was punished for my vile nature by being sent here to stew in my wretchedness for ever. The fact remains, however, that the tales I tell myself are about as solid as the mists that glide over my marshy tomb. I am nothing here, and nothing is me. Perhaps, one day, if I ever do remember what shape my existence took outside of this swamp, I will sigh with relief mixed with disappointment or slight surprise, and continue rotting in the filth until I completely forget who I was. They sat in their bedroom writing angsty poetry about dead birds.
For some reason, they hadn't been able to shake out the useless feathers and bloody beaks from their head as they sat on a musty beige carpet stained with watercolors and stale midnight coffee. They tried writing the deceased fowls into their dairy pages, and when that proved inefficient, they hid the words in the crumpled pages of the tear-signed sheets and hurled them across the room. It was only a little after noon, but for some reason their room was already as dim as their future prospects. It was the architecture's fault, they told themselves: their window was simply pointed away from the sun, wherever it might have positioned itself in the sky, like someone's downtrodden face eternally turned away from some sharp, glaring truth that they couldn't bare. Several buckets of black acrylic paint squatted at the opposite end of the room, their gaping mouths open as if wailing like a miserable choir of unemployed angels. The viscous shadow inside them was beginning to seem less like paint and more like plastic, and several twisted cigarette butts jutted out of the slightly reflective surface like the sad stumps of trees that had died in automobile accidents. Beneath the bed, on their right, was their secret stash of empty paint tubes and hollow buckets that could have been the homes of rats, for all they cared. A rare, single shaft of light somehow reflected through the window and illuminated the facets on one of the tubes, sickly thin for the life had been squeezed out of it during the past week. It was less of a rampage and more of a plague, their venture to cover all their old paintings in a darkness so thick that not even the boldest of contours showed through. The assault had been over, but for some reason they could still see through the obsidian veneers on the canvases, and yet they couldn't bare to break them or throw them out, as they knew this wouldn't do much good either. The leftover paint had been dedicated to the walls, but energy was scarce those days, and surrender seemed inevitable. "I know that even if I burn this whole damn house down, I'll still have those dead birds chasing after me." A wardrobe change had barely done anything to help, after all. All their impulses whispered destruction to them, because they very well knew the alternative would be much more difficult and they had secretly given up on that option before they even knew it. Pale fumes hung over their head, delicate as gossamer and silent as they'd like to be. The previous night, they had eavesdropped on their parents' conversation. "It went something like this:" they dryly recounted to the clouds that had crawled out of their lips. "Mum says: 'I'm worried about him, Daoud. I don't think this is a good idea.' and dad says: 'give him time, he needs to let this demon out. Whatever's in him, he needs to find away to express it, and we have no power over that.' Well, they're right. They don't. But neither do I." The smoky tongues continued to slither feebly towards the ceiling, now slightly more translucent, passive and nonchalant to the shriveling mess of a person voicing their troubles to them. Across the room, in the darkness of their closet, a pair of gleaming eyes blinked. They looked into the reflection of their own sulfurous eyes on their blank phone screen and let out a sigh. They were travelling up memory lane, starting from as far back as they could remember, razing the landscapes of all things past, wreaking havoc across their name, relinquishing their pronouns, screaming chaos into the sweet streams of childhood friendship and breathing poison into everything they had ever loved. The road towards the present was running short, and they knew by this point that if they let the cataclysm behind them follow them to the end, they would destroy all they had left, what was now, as well as all the other parts of the highway of their life. A thick fog hung just beyond the present. They were frozen just before it, unable to move, while an Armageddon unfurled the earth behind them and let fester everything good they had ever experienced. "I don't know what to do." Acid rain tears made the mist ahead even thicker, like sever-year-old lies. "I'm scared." Something stirred in the vagueness, almost imperceptible and quite unknowable, like the near-invisible possibilities that appear in the presence of hope. Like angels gathered around a halo. Like a long-lost puzzle piece finally found behind the couch. Like the end of an uncompleted story finally told: . |
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