Tag: spirituality

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

Immorality

I want to know the turning point of when it became normal for someone to say, ‘I’m not judging’ a person when they find out that person has had an extra marital affair. At what point did society sell its backbone, moral nerve network and courage to the truth, in favour of cowardice, pseudo niceties, and immoral acceptance of lewd and reprehensible behaviour?
What am I missing?

How has it become normal to feel guilty to use words of condemnation against immoral behaviour and normal to excuse that behaviour with faux language of non judgement and reluctance to speak truthfully?

Where in time did the hijacking of language and moral compass take place so that we allow it become so rampant in our society, that by default, anyone that speaks out is supposedly policed and accused of being judgemental?

It should serve as a warning to all that we’ve become complacent and accepted the narrative of a few weasel like post modern pseudo activists who are so far disconnected from the reality of activism that they wouldn’t know what to do if someone stole their lunch money let alone what to do in a real life situation where wars break out and front line men and women are needed to bravely stand against real tyrants and real threats.

They cannot operate on the battlefield, nor in the capital or political spheres. They cannot rub shoulders with intellectual, spiritual or philosophical giants and so they have created a fake arena where they enlist the support of the naive layman to justify themselves not through proper dialogue and solid arguments but attempt to drown out narratives through numbers only.

Notions of patriarchy, false morality, pseudo activism and fighting for causes that just do not exist have become the only currency they can trade with.

Alas, I digress, it’s still our fault as a collective for not standing up to these shills and intellectual dwarfs who sit like trolls at the end of rainbows. Rainbows are, optical illusions after all, and trolls exist in so much as they believe in these illusions.

W.E.

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

 

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.

The virtuous wolf


Where is my prose snarled a hungry witch,
of crimson cheek and skin of lavender,
ego unfulfilled and hips that bare,
oblivious to the lurking scavenger.

The remnants of rib and soil,
pheromone for severed souls,
a waft, a zephyr, myrtle and sage,
and lustful pangs that she can’t control.

With whisk and ease came the wolf,
hearing her plea for excavation,
with a lifetime of ravage and hurt did he answer,
aloof with misery and devastation.

We perform best where our habits  reconcile,
where we return to our defaults,
I ravage because I’ve been ravaged.
I do to others what’s been done to me,
it’s how I love, how I hate.

I eat away until I reach the pit,
by then, I’ve become my prey,
or they’ve become me.
It’s hard to tell the difference.

This attachment is beyond the pull of gravity,
this attraction more like blissful insanity.

A man  waltzing with prose between his teeth,
ever an incisor for a willing player,
blood covered hands, nails and underneath,
content only as a soul slayer.

This grief, this wail, this mourning and shrill,
this distance and indifference, and reality pill,
this noise, and orchestra, and blunt tip quill,
this rapture, sin and Frankenstein will.

It’s grotesque and tender and poetry at once,
a culmination, an opus and the crescendo waiting for a home,
a bare skin canvas waiting for the cut,
in the end a wandering sail boat,
taken by winds, a storm and white wash foam.

And there resides that scavenging wolf,
torn between hunger and the thrill,
ever the demons, a wrestle till death,
hell with every pant, a battle of will.

This carnality for the pulse,
the race for fulfilment and satisfaction,
the lure of the woman, the dance with the devil,
the lustful glance of distraction.

-Wesam El dahabi

There is no prison worse than the one of being trapped to base desires.
The wolf is the carnal ego leading us down the path of destruction.

accidental poet

 

Some things are beautiful to watch.
Like a child finding an idea in the midst of play,
or an adult, even if late, falling into comprehension,
seeing beauty, truth and balance where previously everything was chaos.

Even more, I enjoy seeing everything through others eyes,
becoming their tongue for that moment,
I know how they feel without them telling me,
I know what they want to say even if they don’t know themselves.

They’d refuse to accept that I do if I told them so,
so I write it instead,
and watch them nod in agreement.

I accidentally stumbled into expression,
of imagery through words,
this thing they call poetry, prose and the subtlety of it all,
accidentally a poet where I’m meant to be anything but.

W.E.

I’m not socially awkward, I’m socially unwilling

Sometimes I wish I could dance with the rest of you,
but to waltz into conformity,
leaves me two left feet awkward,
stumbling over myself to find a foot in mediocrity.

I’ve been guilty of looking down on others,
and what a bitter lesson it is,
to taste my own bile,
and stare straight at a victim in their eyes.

I’ve no boat big enough,
to carry my remorse out to sea,
the most restless winds,
won’t blow my shame away.

So when I see how easily,
everyone makes the same mistakes,
it hurts to be reminded,
to have a replay reel of who I am inside,
flickering perpetually,
a self fulfilling prophecy is inevitable,
if I don’t pretend not to know how to dance.

That’s why I shy away.

I can love with the best of them,
boy can I love,
I can laugh and play,
I fight with a rage so turbulent,
it attracts even those who hate it,
but looking at innocence is too much for me to bare.

This comfort with the quo,
is the mediocrity that pains me,
alas, solitude is a great shackle to wear,
and if all else fails,
a great anchor for this flailing soul that won’t behave itself.

If the boat isn’t large enough,
and the winds aren’t strong enough,
the sea bottom is surely large enough,
to swallow far greater than me,
far worse than me, far better than me.

Here I am all Pharaoh like on display,
waiting to be swallowed whole.

All this,
admittance,
ownership,
accountability,
and still no acceptance.

How then,
did I find solitude in separation,
calm in introversion,
whilst others are out wrestled by urge and inclination?

How do I pause when others impulse?

There are still a few of us,
who shun the outer for the inner,
but society has been a frequent customer,
of the comfort world.

We’ve learned to avoid pain so well,
that we’ll inevitably stagnate and whither,
if people don’t remind us,
that it’s OK to see some ugliness,
some bad shit,
some gross stuff inside you,
not to accept and parade it as acceptance,
and contentment with ones’ self.

Rather, it gives you the incentive to improve,
to learn – in the process – what it takes to get away from all that unsavoury stuff inside.

Any process that allows you that,
will inevitably add value to your character,
be it in a month or twenty years.

Pain is not there to be avoided,
it’s there to jolt us into growth,
a reminder to manage and push through it for adaptation.

Avoidance, only limits exposure,
and lack of exposure leads to oblivious ignorance to a better way.

I recluse,
cocoon into hermit disregard,
to bathe in pain,
because I want to grow.

How’s that for a dance with ones self?

W.E.

Art by Viviana Gonzalez

release

Give in to being overwhelmed,
or don’t,
you’ll be overwhelmed either way.

The reality is,
choice is only a comfort idea.
The mature person knows,
it’s a thing ordained.
Is it hopeless?
Hardly,
rather, it allows you to focus on what’s important.
W.E.

Image Credit: Brandon Kidwell
http://www.brandonkidwell.com/wisdom-for-my-children