I am a body of raw pain,
far away from the apparent surfaces
of bliss. My head is full of weird wars
that even Hiroshima and Nagasaki have never witnessed.
My nose smells of an about-to-be-broken dream
of my father’s prayers. My eyes ached
as exhaustion smeared their lenses. My ears appear
like leftover bread. My hands were too hopeless
to tap the screen of God’s mobile phone.
My legs grow edges of joy within their depths.
and today, as the memories of me sitting beside your smiles
cascaded through my mind, I became helpless as I saw blood
gushing out of my heart through the stream above my nose.
This is a threshold for anything similar to burden,
anything that’s equal to my father’s head,
anything that sprints from a cheerful day,
and anything void of childhood—bereft of delight.
If God would grant my request access to smile even for once,
I would not have turned into a boy who knew how to hawk
Kilimanjaro on his eyes for making ends meet; I would not have become
the directionless boy I am becoming; and I would not have, like the sun,
disappeared from reach before the crescent breathes.
DoubleSpeak 