I, Whom Time Abandoned

~ it’s all too familiar, you see ~

photograph by author

Enter.

Ah a bed in one corner.

Watch the walls

Empty

So

Alone

Somewhere in a

Pocket of darkness

A stranger in a stranger land.

Shiver

It is hot then cold.

There are the stacks

Books

Dead on battlegrounds of indifference.

Dust crawls, ants trudge

A tired infestation

Pulls tighter and tighter

Too spent to let go

Veins flow

As a naked light bulb blinds you

And exultant it watches you cringe.

Hide from pain, truth

And all that

Forces feelings so

Savagely upon you.

No ambuscades here —

All too familiar, you see

Whir of fan moves to a

Somnambulist dance of loose papers

All too familiar you see —

Time piece of my life

Broken or lost who knows

Time a commodity as worthless as gold

Throw them away and watch them bleed.

The doors. The doors!

The anguish of doors

Whisper carnage and death

Then scream and scream

But you can’t change it

Never can

Always the doors

Pushing and pushing

Waiting for a savior to free

them from their wall-embrace.

And inside my

Killing fields of tormented howls

Burn of the bulb and

Whir of the fan fall like whip lashes

Rot of dead books is

Viscera of covenants

Absurd and divine.

I lie on a straitjacketed bed

Lie and wait for it to end.

Shiver

starve

and burn

Like the children of execution wastelands

Far away

Farida Haque

i write i paint i dream i weep

and so i am