IN ENGLISH

POLITICS IS A DRUG // BADER NOAIMI

I spent last night tossing and turning, thinking of things that I wanted to say to my parents, to others, all about politics in Bahrain.

I had an argument with them the same night, suffice it to say, we didn’t agree at all.

I recalled what they said; what I said; how I called different people to get their take on the subject before I tried to explain to my parents that they were unfairly accusing people of politicization and possessing political agendas.

I turned off the lights and tried going to sleep but sleep never came. My brain was running at 100 KM and the brakes were busted. All I kept thinking about were things to say to them, things to say to other people, ideas and perspectives and opinions; ones that were mine or otherwise.

That was when I realized for perhaps the dozenth time that I keep drinking poison.

This poison – the politics that we can’t shut up about – it’s taken over our lives. I know that I’m not the only one to have experienced a restless night’s sleep because of it.

We’re reminded of it every where we go but even in those rare moments where we’re free from its grip, we invite it into our homes.

My stomach churns at the thought that politics has crept so deep into my mind and subconcious that I’d obsess over the subject this way.

I let it in and I don’t know how to detox, I can’t stop and that scares me. Because it makes me think that if I’m always looking to talk about politics; think about politics; dream about politics; that I will never ever be at ease. I will never be able to rest and I will never be able to be sleep.

Politics – it’s a drug. I keep taking it every single day.

I’m an addict.

POST-M*STURBATION ENLIGHTENMENT // SAEED

I’ve grown sickened by the self-told deception
Loathing the vague clarity induced by the intoxicated haze
Loathing the numerous cancer sticks I’ve burnt to touch a brighter beam in my blue days
Rejoiced with the slaves of placebo through rituals and ways

I’m sick of all of this bullshit,

Empty conversations under the table
My monologue is on a high and I can’t find my cradle

Lustful masked angels whisper half of the truth
The other half has ceased to make it to my youth
Raging away from my reach, as it slipped out of yours

I’ve grown resentful listening to the sweaty religious figures preaching their views in the dews of dusk and dawn
May that be a reason for me to frown?
Had they put a thought into God?
Had they forgotten how little their righteousness is beneath the seven skies?

I’m sick of all of this bullshit..

Conscience dearest,
Dare I not to have introduced you to my five long lost soul-mates ?
Here they are dancing in the flames of hate
Here they are longing for your return
Scream the truth into their eyes for they are numbed by a new-found light that burns

Because I’ve lost the friction with their shoulder-blades along the front lines
And I demand for my mind to be ejected and tossed away in the land of God merciful
I want my sip and I want my dose
Return to me, and I vow to drop my pen and go home

I’m sick of you
I’m sick of me

"أديـنُ بدينِ الحــــبِ أنّى توجّـهـتْ .. ركـائـبهُ ، فالحبُّ ديـني وإيـمَاني" // HAYAT

Thoughts on my religion being a person,
I go to sleep with an aching heart and drained limbs, happy, licking honey off the ceiling after a phone call that raised the prayers, laughter, and tears there. Don’t tell me this isn’t the reason Moses talked to God.

At my highest, I clench my hand pretending its theirs, they rarely exist by my side, yet they are there at every breath, every moan, every “Me” I speak and every “Us” I dare to also speak and all the steps I drench my feet with to get where I want.

I wonder if there is a God up there, one who actually made me whirl in my skin without actual music in the name of love, and I end up doing nothing but thank him in case he actually created all of this and tell him about how beautiful my God is, if you want to tell me there has to be only one God, I’ll swallow a flower and some poems and lick my lover’s fingertips and show you how I, too, can glow and breathe more softly than a mountain, how I too, can be a goddess. 

The superiority of the believed to be the only God is in the huge doubt that he might not even exist, yet all of this does. I read one day “I don’t know if you or I exist, but somewhere there are poems about us.”.

The chances of us human beings being Gods are the same chances of the most called God being a god. It baffles me too, but I stop doubting it once I am kissed by my lover.

One might argue that a human is a horrifyingly mortal creature, that one moment can make us not be anymore which makes the Gods mentioned in books more powerful than we could ever be, I say, the power we put into being constantly kind, is mightier than anything, that in itself equals us to any potent higher being. 

When your religion is a person, when your God is a person and all the magic they create to whatever you were before them makes you walk in days feeling every bit of your surroundings, being humbled by how alive everything is, at your highest and lowest, you fall on your knees in awe towards the majesty of all that exists, and all of what doesn’t, and you love all of that and what is in between as well with everything you are. Everything around me is a part of me, my lover’s body can compel me to give so much to whatever I breathe around, their lips can shatter me and have me praying loudly. Their mere being, leaves my shoulders more persistent to lift themselves up rather than be lifted.

Don’t tell me this is not why Majnun found no shame in leaving his kingdom, found no shame in being the weakest beneath all of those layers of skies praying in howls, tolerance and confidence of his religion even when Layla spoke nothing to him. 

Yesterday I read somewhere, "الصلاة خير من الحب." "Prayer is better than love." What is a prayer without love? What, if not sincere, selfless love can make you stand in reverence and repeat to yourself that you are weak against all of what comes before and after you and repeat the name of the one that has all of that higher power on you?

And just like a whirling dervish spinning in ecstasy, even though a hundred religious scholar can argue that what he is doing is complete blasphemy, I, just like a dervish, arch my back, quiver and exhale nothing but their name. And with each repetition, with each veneration comes a trance into every bit of both me and the whirling one leaving us bigger, smaller, more evanescent, more helpless, more holy than anything we pray to in the first place, anything that exists, and all of what doesn’t, and anything that is in between. 

A DEATHLESS QUANDARY // HUSSAIN

The day was ready
To be seized at 9:30 AM.
I always wake up
With the sun already hoisted. Sometimes it pains me
To wake up after the sun shines.
The sun’s streaks escalate
Over the desolate cage
Of my cat, that knew nothing
Of being carnally surreptitious.

I write everywhere.
Upon the tapestries,
In a mall,
At school,
Wherever the urge,
The trance
Enmeshes me like wild ivies.

One time, I wrote
Something about
How wretched we are,
And one told me,
“Sir, congratulations on
The writing! Keep it up! ”
And the sorry bastard
Fled without even telling
Me what he made out of it.

And then,
At one sanguine moment
In time, I wrote
About how overwhelmed I was Tethered to another
And I let her read it
And she said,
“Could’ve been simpler.”
The lady killed
Me in a literary fashion.
It was like hearing a world renowned Poet thrash your works.

And at night, I am a hunter that feeds
On the moon’s agony.
I write
And write
And take long pauses
Smoke a cigarette if time
Permits,
Or just sit lifeless
On a persnickety chair
And write again.
Some nights, 15 deaths.
Others, Only 3
Or worse, None.

I write
Until I exhaust myself
And my mom checks on me
Whilst saying,
“Go to sleep,
Or I’ll have to call your father.”
But my father does not
Entertain
Late night duels.
But when he’s
Wide awake,
He’d tell me,
“You get nothing from this.
Focus on other things.
Sports.
Working out.”

Etcetera
Until he vanquished himself
To sleep.

It’s not that I hate them,
Nor all of you.

It’s just that sometimes,
When I write
It’s like talking
To frozen pillars.
To sleeping trains.
To barren terrains.

And I surmise
It would always be
Like that.

THIS IS A THOUGHT // MAJID ALTURKI

Lost in a thought
without any plans on
touching this place again.
I’ve grown tired of
this petty ground,
its decayed stories
and pseudo dreams.
I’ve grown tired of
nothingness;
may I be denuded
physically and mentally,
may I be eternally stripped
from this horrid place
wrought with sorrows and prejudice.
May this thought be endless.
We halt in silence.

ANTIDEPRESSANTS // ARMAN

Realities as decomposed societies set, still lives on.
Society is the crossbred of fables and obsolesce.
Reality for the individual differs, believers in disbelief, disbelievers in disbelief.
Belief is six feet below.
Truth for believers lie in realities. Reality for the disbeliever lies in truths.
Atrocious civilisations nearing transcendental ruin, for the pillars are fractured, the bases decayed and the headstones are unbinding.

INCONSOLABLE WORDS // A Z

I wonder if you knew that
your eyes flicker and fade a red light district red or
that your kiss had a sting to it like tasting a battery.
left to my mangled temple. you've run
our cataclysmic love into the ground.
your jaded demeanor leaving me doors
to unlock even after your gone.
I was your sadist's wet dream.
A psychotics feast.
Armageddons deep blood swirls in my head and
plays its sacrificial drums.
You’re an undiagnosed mental patient.
A death row reject
and I’m drenched in your serial sarcasm fallacies
and wry empathy.
My superfluous soul sinks into a void
as I shower your vagabond caress
with sin clogging up the drain.
My intrepid demon. You've ended me
when I would be ruined for anyone else.
A lust-soaked infatuation.
Honey lip drips that tell me you’re too sweet for me.
There’s a dark solitude that comes with being so broken and lost.
Late at night across a canal I would be another Jane.
A soul you've feasted and consumed only to move on.
Your absent eyes sewn shut.
Your hash mouth fucked twice.
I'm released from my choke chain
but freedom has a severe price
but slavery is a cold slimy processed hell.
Chaos from the devil.
Silence from above.
If I grieve myself into a grave,
would death soothe my rolling soul
or mock my flesh into decay.
I’ll meet you once more
under gods wrath and
malevolent gaze that might condemn us
both to hell for eternity but together again.

THE WORLD IS BUT TWO WORLDS // WAFA AL-ALAWI

The sight of your sole presence sends me into a deep condition of paralysis
And the smallest one of my particles becomes struck by you
And I move into a realm of silence that is disturbed by your short sentences
Silence takes over the room, the house, the town
And I swear, sometimes ..
I cannot even hear my own heartbeats
Buried under all of these layers of the things you make me feel
And I wonder if my living corpse has stropped breathing

My voice
It trembles in my chest
It moves up then goes down
It travels through dark cities and many winters
Failing to reach you
It moves up and goes down to die away
And my lips are hot, chapped and shut
By the realities and the rugged distances that keep my existence away from yours
The thoughts that fight each other in the depths of my skull
Are the only activity left in my world, my science, my anatomy
And I wonder
I wonder
What is it in you that hardens the tenderness I have for you inside of me?
What part of you has conquered all parts of me?
I wonder if the world we live in is but two worlds
One for you and I occupy the other
Kept from you by unreal borders of reality
And I wonder
I wonder
And I fall
I break and I am buried
Under the helplessness of my situation
My dainty exterior, my faulty interior
And my anxiety
And I wait
In my chair
I wait and wait
For you to touch me.

THE BATHROOM SCENE // SAEED

Once loved
Once worshipped
This is no birth, but an abortion
Once in fear,
But I am here.
I promise you now I am the man I’ve always been
My pride and glory I resent
But a fall of a man is so sincere
Let me not take a moment now to make it clear,
For I have embodied a man of truth
Madness and truth had me screwed.
I’m shot in the back of my head by an imbecilic reflection of mine.
I’m standing on the other side of glass masked in mockery.
In absolute redemption and tears
But this is a fall of Man
A fall of man and the rise of God,
To that we are brought down for the sake of his floating on the surface
And this is the fall of Man, turned into God’s glory.
This is the fall of man, I am not sorry.