poetry – lonerloaner

Washing sins away

I had a shower this morning.
These days showers are more metaphorical than anything else,
water beads that pelt me,
and wash sins away,
or so I assume.

Unseen things, unknown things – I thought were my own –
are now on full display like a merchandised window,

and the people always do a double take as they go past.

That’s just it,
knowing people will take a second look,
isn’t too different than them second guessing you,
and sometimes you just don’t want anyone’s prying eyes,
their curious nose,
nor their wondering minds.

What is this mess of a man,
scars, and bruises and well-worn hands,
words thrown up with the same well wishes as rice on a wedding day,
carefully curated,
that no one understands.

And at that point,
when no one gets the point,
when you scream down into your marrow,
‘what’s the point?’
words may as well just disappear.

If it takes the pit to be spat out for people to see that you have something in your mouth,
if it takes muting your voice to tell the world you’re not without a whirlwind of words,
then so be it,
let them taste the shrill of your silence,
and only read you when you’re dead.

Sometimes our sins keep us mute and other times they make us shake violently like an epileptic who has to sweat
involuntary spasms into thoughts,
or thoughtlessness,
inconsideration and worthlessness.

The punishment for the sin, is the sin itself,
and that’s why showers don’t work anymore.

Even throwing myself into the ocean leaves me in a tesseract of inability,
of timeless timelessness looking into time with longing and distance like I can reach it at the end of my fingertips and change it,
the elusive fuck!

If you haven’t let life beat the shit out of you for all that you are,
you haven’t told the truth to yourself,
and your sins still hold you hostage,
and that shower will always be a bandaid.

Wesam El dahabi

When they call you heavy

When they call you ‘heavy’,
I feel like asking, “Heavy how? Like an anchor that holds a ship amongst turbulence?
Or like a backpack laden with books and loaded onto a child on the way to school?
Perhaps I’m a mule, camel or beast of burden that is stubbornly refusing to do another day of work without some rest?

How exactly am I heavy, so heavy, that you feel so light telling me so?
That it rolls so effortlessly off your tongue, that you assume my heart isn’t also just as heavy?

Heavy with hurt, heavy with guilt, heavy with rage and remorse, so heavy that it makes me consider all things heavily, and the reason for my heaviness is that I haven’t yet released it onto you or the world.”

You retract, and change,
reorient your words like shuffling cards, but it’s the same deck and now you say, “No, not heavy that way, but like, you’re too much”.

Again, I ask, “What exactly do you mean? Am I a price tag that you don’t want to pay for, am I a book too thick to consider reading? Perhaps you mean, I’m a plate that you’re too full to even look at let alone eat from. Please, tell me, am I rain that doesn’t cease, heat that is unbearable, or are all my offerings, all that I am, everything I have learned and developed into, is any of that what you mean?”

Maybe you failed to consider a man who has weight will be the workhorse to provide for you if you just offer me enough room to find a semblance of myself, and be the pillow I lay my head on.

I could be mediocre and get by, I could be just a fly in a room, just there, that eventually annoys you.

Or is being too much, only too much because you want to cut me down, is being too heavy a veiled cry from you for me to slow down, be less, think less, heart less, because you don’t want to do any more, or you just can’t tolerate the pain of seeing someone engage with their entirety, whilst you offer…… nothing?

Because, if you prefer, I could be too little, and I could be a weightless thing.

Wesam El dahabi

I used to have a love affair

I used to have a love affair,
some people were jealous,
some, still are.

I saw words as an escape so far from what I had allowed myself to become, that I could be seen glowing when engrossed in their partioning, like I was a lantern lit and was arranging flowers.

Nowadays, even though the only sound I made in composing those words was the indenting of a pen onto a page, the scathing of a pencil, or the tapping on devices, and with my background in music, I not only instinctually layered my words down in prosaic meter, but also in aural acoustic rhythm that lulled the listener into calm, still I prefer silence over words, even if they are only read and not spoken.

I prefer burying them so deep inside my that they sprout by force into action instead, because they can’t go anywhere else.

And if I can’t action them, boy have I learned to sit in stillness.

And that’s what happens when you follow the prophetic saying of ‘Whoever believes in God and the last hour (meaning they understand in the pits of them we are both collectively going to experience a time where things will end, be it our own personal journey on this earth or our collective human experience where God will sanction the world and all that is in it to end) should speak goodness or remain silent ‘.

It subdues you with and organic resonance, it pumels you and humiliates you kindly without embarrassing you outwardly.

It ironically elevates you to a noble throne of beholding as the world hears nothing but absolute necessity that is good from you.

Thomas Hardy the poet once said, ‘That man’s silence is wonderful to listen to’ and this had caused me great grief and joy. I understand the litmus of it, but I know the sorrow that must insue for the beauty of it to manifest.

And that’s just it. Silence and sprouting actions, have become a state of wonder to observe for me, even though words have always nurutred me into a world of my own, traversed me across lands without moving a muscle, soothed my heart from wretched heart break over heart break, accounted me from guilt so dark and brought me to the surface of being able to deal with myself and amongst other things, being able to curate words has helped me see, feel, express, be a voice, a sound board, a receiving vessel, an ear, a heart and soul for others to pour secrets into me that if I were to divulge would ruin their lives.

And the irony is, it is they who have become silent towards me, 1not for noble development and spiritual enhancement, but rather openly disregardingly, neglectful, ran their tongues with rumor, heresay and false narratives until amongst their circles, they have lulled and comforted themselves into a caricatured meme of me with words and labels they cannot arrange in any particular order to save their souls, to make a coherent, logical nor gramatically correct arrangement, something metrically sound, something prosaically soothing or at the least something from the depths of their hearts, even if expressed dyslexically, but contains beauty in expression, sounds out a sorrow, joy or stoicicm that enhances the reader rather than entrapping them into a sinful state of sharing absolute falsity because it makes for good time fill between unconsciously hating their lives and not amounting to anything of worth and the dopamine hit of being the giver or receiver of backbiting.

Perhaps you will understand why I choose less words, even with a volcanic heart, and what you receive from me, even if you draw your fingers over my writing with caress, assume they were written for you and you alone, you should perhaps know this, I am not even divulging a crumb of who I am, because I am riddled with a fear and insecurity of there ever being a soul out there capable and worthy of catching it all.

Irrespective of their actually being a soul out there with a baseball mitt of a heart, I choose not to let you in, my family and wife absorb and give enough love to me to exist in my silence.

Where this fear and insecurity comes from, I understand and I have married silence enough and we have become intimate beyond acceptability for me to have seen my wounds and hurts sources.

I’ve chosen to sit with them rather than to heal them. I don’t want pity, I loathe hearing voices attempt to understand me.

The prose has to live on, if only as the seed to silence, so I can sprout enough beautiful action and be remembered not for a collection of burnable books or words I write, but an unforgettable pheromone as I walk in a door, a garden that blooms and makes souls happy every spring, a legacy of wisdom that carries on in the veins of my children, something that benefits humanity in the slightest and reminds them, ‘verily actions are by their deeds’, an anecdote of proof for people that God chose to inspire his Prophet to the word ‘action’, not ‘words’, nor even ‘silence’.

Silence is only the catalyst, it is the action that God waits for….. that is prophetically reminded to us, because quite simply, quite plainly, without complication, right there is the fruit that comes from the seed of silence that grows into action.

Wesam El dahabi

Introversion waterhole

Sometimes you have to write poems to yourself,
OR,
to just throw prose to the wind and hope a heart catches your temperament.
Assume, for better or worse, that your marriage to nature is a reciprocal agreement to truth, find vows in bloody and torturous confrontation of the innermost core, of the innermost core.
I have an infatuation with the carcass of things, seeds don’t sprout in mid-air, but buried in the fabric of earth, that very fabric which clothes us.
Often time’s reclusing is the only way to have your poetry received, in irony we find pathways to other souls when alone, or do they find paths to us?

Are we creating waterholes in all this solitude? I think so, and that’s why the earth is so barren, as souls gather to conform in an agreement to pathetic herding of our values, or lack thereof.

Afraid of confinement, we inevitably end up parched and more alone than if we had just excused ourselves from the world for moments at a time, for calculated growth phases in solitude, aloneness being the catalyst to forging a forage of fauna, a flurry of fleeting thoughts, a fountain of hope and an elixir to drink from whenever we need to feel alive and worthy again, introversion is life giving potion.

I guess we’re all so severed and dishevelled that we’ve lost our way back inside ourselves, and there is that point, that you become so far ruined, you have to create back doors into yourself.

That takes courage most won’t taste in their lifetime.

Those people are usually the artists, writers, poets and musicians. They’re the love drunk war lords, the battle hard Jannisaries who don’t blink at the thought of dying in pursuit of honour.

A person swaying in the hammock of comfort is never going to be remembered, and I don’t trust people who don’t have back doors.

It means they’ve never stepped out of themselves to hold themselves to account, everything is comfortably dandy in their homes and that’s no place for noteworthiness to foster.

I’m afraid then, that my children forget my ways and introduce comfort to their children, I’m afraid that a notion of empathy creeps into their veins, faux empathy that does nothing but eat at courage like cancer. Courage is to watch your child suffer and grow, with a heart that loves. Courage to not shed a tear when they cry uncontrollably, to stand stoically in front of them unperturbed so they know, they feel, they believe, that whatever the circumstances, they must go on, they must know that your eyes are telling the truth, they must push through, they must push through.

I find myself in despair at that thought, and that alone drives further need for solitude. I can’t let the world see me like that; see me afraid to be afraid.
I can’t show vulnerability when vulnerability is the prize I am trying to carve into everyone’s being.

It shouldn’t be this hard to inspire people, it shouldn’t be this hard to have them believe you’re being honest and truthful, but it is, because everyone is afraid of being alone and nobody recognises the contentment in your soul for spending all that time confined, all that time reconciling and debating in your mind, forty voices of self-reflection that ensure every party is heard.

Have we been deceived? Have we been lied to, that there is anything wrong with hearing more than one voice? Jordan Peterson said, “How does thinking occur if not a conversation of more than one voice?” The more the merrier I say!

Alas, those voices can often gang up on you and present a pretty convincing argument as to why you’re not even good enough to be residue.

Doubt has been a companion, an ever familiar acquaintance and it streams as fast as if not faster than all other voices. It seems to always win the race and hasten me to hesitance, a clemency of vernacular and a suffocating of forbearance.

Be still you savage heart, rest you wagging tongue, and go numb you squeaking mind, there’s residue yet that doubt hasn’t found and you’re going get us in trouble…..
Find me, and lose me at once. Let me know you have those back door keys in case we invade ourselves and hurt becomes the familiar metallic taste on my palate.

And yet doubt in yourself is the gateway to conviction in God. What else is worship except relinquishing of your order, your truth, your set ways and acknowledging the sliver of doubt, and then transcending that and realising, there is no doubt with Him.

Is then the accumulation of wealth, even if it were for the nobility of being a provider for your family, directly proportionate to the level of doubt one has In God? The assured man knows, that he himself is not in control and does not bother with the over accumulation of material, in the pursuit of security, security after all comes from God. Where else can one put their faith if indeed it really is faith?

Are men who are amassing billions in effect the most insecure, distrusting and faithless? How much is enough to give one conviction? Is this why J.K. Rowling donated millions of dollars to remove herself from billionaire status? Subconsciously, is she aware of this and feels she doesn’t want to belong to a group of people utterly insecure of themselves? I’d love to ask her, heart to heart and know her deepest reason why, but I allow myself as I do many things to romanticise the idea that she indeed is that noble.

But that’s a mundane topic and I’m still at the sticking point between procrastination and imposing my philosophy on myself. Isn’t that where we all are? Over exuberant in expressing our deepest fears, camouflaged as opinions, with the hope they are received as intellectual musings and reluctant to have them thrown back at us or open to scrutiny and criticism by anyone? What’s the point then to all this lip service to vulnerability and openness, to sharing and being kind, to living with nobility and generosity of spirit towards each other if all we’re doing is functioning on a level of carefully scripted acceptances?

I don’t understand myself any more than the next person, but I do not relent in the effort towards understanding myself, and therein lays the difference between us. I’d rather die exhausting all my opportunities to find a trinket of wisdom than casually and passively walk a path of comfort and luxuries and if that means the world mocks my solitude, points a finger at my conviction in my purpose, then it means I must be doing something that scares them, something perhaps worthwhile after all.

Wesam El dahabi

Artistic purpose

There is but one singular purpose for the artist, and that’s to purify their art to one ode, one rhythm, one harmony, one line of prose, one sentence. To the magic elixir of our art, the final opus, as clean and pure as it can be.

I don’t think you’re an artist if through all your work, all your searching, all the things you produce, you aren’t driven by the chase of finding that one thing that exemplifies everything you’re trying to achieve.

This extends into the scientific world as well, perhaps even more-so, for what is science if it is driven only by a robotic, lifeless and mostly monetised objective, by a narrative enslaved to restricted paradigms and formulae, how impure a pursuit is science if the scientist isn’t driven by a romantic ideal of discovery and rewriting otherwise dogmatic beliefs? The purity under their microscope, the precision of the one cut of the scalpel, all of it, driven madly by purity of pursuit.

The silver lining is the purpose, as minimal as possible, untainted.

This chase, this desire is but a longing for our origin. We were born pure, and we spend our lives chasing it. Chasing down the reminder of what we once were.

In our innermost core, we’re utterly and magnetically attracted to it. We linger, we pang, we ache, we feign for it.

The addiction can be so overwhelming that we lose our way, much like a madman searching through the forest looking down for their treasure for so long that when they look up, the world seems so disoriented and your location in it all is unknown.

Some people pop, they have enough and cannot contain themselves, either their outer appearance changes to resemble that of a derelict, for what is a homeless person except someone without a place to return to for safeguarding from the elements? Nay, perhaps those people become the elements.

They’ve lost their home or way back to it that they become the elements they’re surrounded by, is it with this subconscious thought that we so numbingly ignore them as we walk past, they, vanish into the environment, into their surroundings?

That’s not how we understand the outer appearance to resemble, and so we label them mad, homeless, worthless because we attach worth to orientation, to a direction, to a purpose. What if their purpose all along was finding that purity and in the method, have become the purity, outward semblance like thorns on a rose, unkempt to keep people away, so they can guard their secret.

The secret in the Sufi path was never to look down on a vagabond, a darwish, a person humbled before God.

It was to treat the faqir, the spiritually impoverished, sometimes appearing as the materially impoverished with the same dignity owed to a sultan.

And so we return to the artist engrossed in their search for purity, perhaps by God’s bounty and generosity He allows beauty or remnants of it to extend to all humanity through their fingers, through their states as a sign for us to be reminded of our purity, without losing our minds.

Perhaps by His largesse He grants the artist temporary sanity to pursue their goal or at least enjoy the process whilst they are alive.

Wesam El dahabi

charade

It’s only through utter savagery,
through the comprehension,
of knowing how far I can stretch the extremes of my soul,
torch the very idea of my being,
that I came to terms with all the sensitivity of mankind,
and found intimacy with every pain conceivable.

I bathe in that idea,
I drown in it,
that this world was meant for pain,
and those who avoid it,
who shun waging war inside themselves,
against their own selves,
are only pretending,
to experience pain.

What business do you have calling to it?
Pointing the world to a faux trauma,
idolatry of your false god,
worship of yourself,
and making people bend in guilt?

You’re of the worst kind of decrepit beings,
slithery and poisonous,
you are the illness and the plague,
hash tag your mattering to the world,
hash tag yourself into existence,
hash tag your plight to the devil.

-Wesam El dahabi

The serenade of solitude.

The psycho-social pathologies of people approaching relationships in any other way than completely giving of themselves perplex me.

You are given a chance,
to divulge your whole being towards someone and have them do the same in reciprocation and we still approach one another with amputated souls.

Bits of you and bits of me,
is a little too Frankenstein of a relationship for me to spawn life into.

Grotesque, is thus quite a fitting word,
here’s the most vulgar part of me, I care nothing of,
and here’s the remnants of what they want to share back, regurgitated traumas,
damaged and parts beaten to a pulp in the mind fuck,
in the mine fuckery of pseudo vulnerabilities,
everyone armed to the teeth with ego’s and no hearts,
awash with misery and toxic breath,
lip service to love and all that sparkles.

I’ve got a serious distrust of people,
it is tattooed in my brow,
it is heavily abated in my breath,
like a dragon I wait,
for anyone to try their hand.

Some say it is offensive and arrogant to assume so much,
for those people,
cut open your chest and they still won’t see,
let alone feel what you feel.

Alone, remains the most poetic living I have known,
solitude is the serenade of choice,
let the mundane and mediocre,
in their frivolity, rejoice.

W.E.

Introversion – seventy nine

A floor,
a wall,
and light that leaks in.

At times, I don’t even want to share myself with furniture.

Solitude with all the groans of a house is enough,
an intimacy of unspeakable proportions.

Ghosts of longing that open and close doors as they wish,
secrets that don’t pass their lips.

This house has an echo of women who have clawed at my skin for a piece of my soul,

ironically making me turn further inwards to flee from myself,
stay somewhere that I can control.

This light that leaks in,
a reminder that I have fissures that open without warning,
bursting with unspeakable sin.

Let this be a warning to my heart,
don’t let them near you,
remain in that room alone!

Insist on your intuition over their appetite,
insist on your vision over their illusions,
insist on your solitude over their lust,
sit in so much stillness,
alone in that empty room,
and be one with the dust.

The souls that endear you will inevitably be near you,
without formality and necessity for introduction,

we were created from an ether in the pre-world,
our souls will always find each other in this world and the next.

W.E.

Am I selfish for not wanting to share myself?

The gist of tye above poem is an apology of sorts,

try as I may, I often disappear into myself,
ironically away from my Self.

That oft gnawing awareness of the faults you harbour,
that slip between your fingers of guilty frivolity,
drowns you in a tug of war,
of second guessing yourself,

and that’s why I recluse,
it becomes a bit too much to swathe in a world of ‘sureness’, people vying to be the first one to be right.

What does it matter who gets to the end first,
if the journey was filled with dishonourable disregard.

There is a way,
I believe it to be quietude and seclusion,
introversion and accountability,
a slowing down rather than speeding up.

I’ve found myself just as many times as I have veered off the path,
only in the cocoon of solitude,
only ever alone.

I have never read of a man of worth or a woman of magnitude that has needed the masses to prop them up and I think it is deep in that wisdom we can find what society so desperately needs.

I will put this post up on my stories as a poll,
I’d like to hear your comments below on the above, even if in private.

Love has a breath

Drink from loves wine,
so that divinity may be on your breath.

I told myself this when I first learned of a divinity so pure, you could carve yourself to pieces with it and not feel a thing.

I imagine myself to be that person,
only in a perfect world.

Alas I am not,
a lofty aspiration nonetheless is better than drifting away without sails into the obscurity of wallowing.

There is a truth in the most wretched of people.

Most don’t like to get their hands dirty though and that’s okay.

But if you like clean hands,
please don’t pretend to understand.

There’s musk and agar,
frankincense and amber,
a waft of patchouli and rose waiting for everyone,

there’s a breath in us all yet.

W.E.

dear grief – 27

Grief is a scent that never leaves your lip,
with every breath, with every sip,
ever the twisting knife,
ever the fleshen twist.

It hovers over you,
you walk, a carrion,
the parched beaks of time,
waiting for you to pass on.

Like love, it leaves wounds behind
anchors in your heart, holes in your mind,
ever the remnant fog,
eyes, left blind.

What if I prepared for you,
and black was my perpetual dress,
what if burned the incense of mourning,
would you be less of a weight on my chest?

What if I threw you like ashes in the ocean,
let the sea have its way,
cremated dreams and memories,
a eulogy with nothing to say?

What if your colour was grey,
and we spoke in mono-tone,
like numb and algorithmic bots,
or hovered like mindless drones?

At the end of this all,
you’re too platonic, too addictive a distant lover,
so alone I leave you, to have your way,
perpetually a cloud over me to hover.

W.E.