http://whossane.tigblog.org/ What's on the minds of young leaders from around the globe? en-us http://whossane.tigblog.org/post/475461
Look to the stars and search for the answer
Divine spewing of infinite enclaves
Amidst the deafening silence of black seas
All at peace with the beating of your heart

Look beneath a rock and search for the answer
Mighty creatures in constant battle with a universe
Far greater, far detached from the simple truth
That you exist but not to them

Look in his eyes and search for the answer
The ball of light makes him sweat
Drops of life only water can redeem
Not your love nor his, not you

Look in the mirror and search for the answer
A woman staring back, glancing, laughing
A familiar face of a mother to a child
Enfolded in answers one sees but knows not
]]> Wed, 10 Sep 2008 23:14:00 EDT http://whossane.tigblog.org/post/475461 35.0 135.7535.0135.75 http://whossane.tigblog.org/post/475459
Hugging the arc of a hipbone, his passed-down pants
Hung precariously low, both tips unable to touch
To make one loop around a gaunt exterior.
Bending, kneeling, kissing earth, hidden under mats,
Woven by virgins who could not bear children- five times over-
Were what made the day of a sinless boy.

A true angel he was but not for a day,
For he laid and he laid without giving much thought
To the consequences of a doubt, of ambition
That played games only rabid dogs played.
Aha…
His hands slid down the weathered fabric,
Feeling a thing that his pockets did not have,
A coin that seduced him.
]]> Wed, 10 Sep 2008 23:13:00 EDT http://whossane.tigblog.org/post/475459 35.0 135.7535.0135.75 http://whossane.tigblog.org/post/475457
Scrawny as a leper
whose head had fallen.
A name. A babel
of some blind cuckoos’ cry.

A battlefield of children,
where words were honed
like an ax to the back.
Another dead 10 y.o.

I stood up. A hermit
from my cave- a chair.
Space I barricaded
with closed ears and a toy.

Ugly as an old cup
that no hands shall seize,
except my little ones.
A thirst for bliss to quench.
]]> Wed, 10 Sep 2008 23:13:00 EDT http://whossane.tigblog.org/post/475457 35.0 135.7535.0135.75 http://whossane.tigblog.org/post/475455
Flaco con lepra
que había caído la cabeza.
Un nombre. Una disonancia
del grito de algun cuco oculto.

Un campo de batalla de niños,
en donde las palabras se afilan
como un hacha a la espalda.
Otro niño de diez años muerto.

Estado parado - Un ermitaño
de una cueva - una silla.
Mi espacio que cerqué
con oídos cerrados y un juguete.

Fea como vieja taza
que ningunas manos agarrarán,
excepto mis manos pequeńas.
Una sed de alegría a apagar.
]]> Wed, 10 Sep 2008 23:12:00 EDT http://whossane.tigblog.org/post/475455 35.0 135.7535.0135.75 http://whossane.tigblog.org/post/475453
The hands of a leaf-shaped clock raced
Like caterpillars on their tips, crawling about,
Round the numbers that looked like spears-
A falling apple clockwise,
A pilgrim otherwise.
And then, a lullaby began to play.

But still, outside, the moon was kind-
Borrowing light from a distant star,
To light the plaza whose guests appeared,
Sporadic as an itch on the back.
Fingernails clawing, hives reeking;
Someone lend them a wooden hand.

Again, the motor rumbled, stirring the night,
Engines scolding the nightmares that lurked,
In alleys between two houses, of one god,
Where smuggled tuktuks turned into bread
On the dining tables of guileless fathers-
Who never slept past the lull of dawn.
]]> Wed, 10 Sep 2008 23:11:00 EDT http://whossane.tigblog.org/post/475453 35.0 135.7535.0135.75 http://whossane.tigblog.org/post/475451
There is a time, it looks so gentle,
A secret so vast, crossing miles
Of whispered oblivion. In truth,
There never was.

As a child, I never found
Answers that a child always finds.

Not fewer than the careless lines
On the palm of my hand, have I
Tried to outgrow this naïve mind-
Pages I planted with bookmarks
So thin they were no longer there.

And thus I stepped into a puddle of certainties,
Feeling my heart throb inside a mass of meteorite
Orbiting the universe, beyond what light permits
For my searching eyes, to find the end of time.
]]> Wed, 10 Sep 2008 23:11:00 EDT http://whossane.tigblog.org/post/475451 35.0 135.7535.0135.75 http://whossane.tigblog.org/post/475449
I cannot survive the Kyoto winter. Not one more.
The familiar sound of herons, flapping their wings,
Wet from the splashing of children taking nosy distances-
Vanished.
Fled they all have to their moist nests.

And has the cold harvested the promise
From the little plants, that bore no fruits
Nor smelled like heaven? They chose to endure
The religious visits I paid
To the river that ignored me.

Could I be damned for throwing stones at the river
That assumed a blessed immortality?
Circles rippled away and back
As cold water crawled up my socked feet
To my spindly legs, leaving a blistered trail,
But not the pain I anticipated.
]]> Wed, 10 Sep 2008 23:10:00 EDT http://whossane.tigblog.org/post/475449 35.0 135.7535.0135.75 http://whossane.tigblog.org/post/475447
Edna, why is it you weep
Over hollow graves so deep?
Time, like scars of the heart,
Has left, no trail; do not part.
Idle slippers, under the street light
At midnight, is the most woeful sight.
Passing sorrow, a fading spell,
Fresh crown-wounds shall swell.
Foregone memories, lost in the cold,
Child, confused, her story untold;
What horror seen, the windless night-so bestial,
Almost afraid of happiness adrift-so celestial.
Oh, fret not, my hylic Madonna,
Weep, for I am here, my Edna.
]]> Wed, 10 Sep 2008 23:09:00 EDT http://whossane.tigblog.org/post/475447 35.0 135.7535.0135.75 http://whossane.tigblog.org/post/475445
The blades of grass
cut the bareness of my feet,
as my weight sought the voice
of mother earth pulling
my ebbing thoughts to its
center, where cold fire
slept and condoned
the devilry of my fathers
who fought and spilled blood
on this barren ground,
waiting to devour flesh
ruined by its own soul.
]]> Wed, 10 Sep 2008 23:08:00 EDT http://whossane.tigblog.org/post/475445 35.0 135.7535.0135.75 http://whossane.tigblog.org/post/475443
Oh sun, why the trade
Of poetry for singed flesh?
You are not a whore.
]]> Wed, 10 Sep 2008 23:07:00 EDT http://whossane.tigblog.org/post/475443 35.0 135.7535.0135.75 http://whossane.tigblog.org/post/475441
Tell me, do random memories
Cheat you, of a time when we shared
The same plate, in the putrid womb
Of a mother, blackened by dust,
Digging the mud for jewels
Thus for the self and no other?

How you defied the woman’s blow.
You, unrelenting as that storm’s eye,
Saw the birth-maid pack her sack
Of dead lizards and rust-bathed tools;
You, a child so amazed the world,
Upon which your tiny feet had treaded,
And the sun had parched trees,
Kissed the sand in your hand and blew it.

It was you, my Sara,
The black wanderer
Who gathers wool still.
Hands locked, yours and mine,
We seared the nights.
Fire to the dulcet verses of a book,
Holy as we were, prophecies
That burrowed their way
Through mountains across great oceans.

But greater far than this age-old fate
Whose changing patterns conspired,
The tender elements had now been darned,
Like plastic buttons on your ironed shirt,
Framing your shoulders- Against the wall,
Opposite this pretense- fingers tapping.

Why, so consciously (perhaps an expectation
Of a woman wrapped in oriental habit)
Ever so sheltered from the disc of yellow,
Can you ignore the yearning of my heart?
]]> Wed, 10 Sep 2008 23:06:00 EDT http://whossane.tigblog.org/post/475441 35.0 135.7535.0135.75 http://whossane.tigblog.org/post/475439
I.
Wake up, murmured the morning drizzle.
Light rain seeped through feathered wings
Of birds cowering still. Cicadas rubbed
Their bellies against trees that wept
While mosquitoes started laying eggs on a leaf,
Verdant and restless- hands reaching out
Towards the infinite grey sky. Wake up.

How books could cry I could not grasp.
Had I sympathy, I could not say. Awake
In a dream, eyelids strained, half-closed.
Fizzy spit, I imagined, crept its way
Out of her tender mouth thus a rendezvous
With a relative in this paper-bound headrest.
Slowly I turned my head to the side.

Was it a bed that killed the cunning Galileo?
The bed appeared flat, bereft of pleats
And curved horizon. Flatness loved solitude.
My hands grazed the warmth of crisp satin sheet,
Falling, like guilty suicide by the cot’s edge.
Last night, the world was round- it yearned
For her dust, as our weights left a blithe print
In the shape of Galileo’s discovery.

She was my lover. She was mine.
But did she love me? I could not tell.

II.

Jamilla. A name that enthralled me. A lady
So calm, speaking a language of innocence
Like mockery of my conscious sexuality.
Alone did she suffer the nights in this house,
Where I pleaded to sleep till the moths dropped.

Tired was the face that she saw,
And cruelty was not there to greet me.

III.

(Counting each letter, was a reason for unknowing
Time). What dread had I known not
The letters that spelled her name. No one
To send my love notes to. No scratching
On my sun-dried arm, the one that held
The watch- handmade and boring- but wait,
Whose nails scratched those letters on my arm?

Knock. Knock. Knock.

IV.

She was a story-teller. She was nine.
Her hair turned curly one day,
After a long mid-day nap, while
Her bothers played in the sun.
Tranquil siestas made her bridges
That she crossed to her dreams where
Trees were violet, frogs had hirsute faces,
And a girl had a name, just like hers.

She was a story-teller. She was fifteen.
Her cheeks turned pink. The altar boy
Passed her as the school bells rang-
What melancholy din! She wept when he touched
The hand of a girl (And he gave his heart away).
She went home. And she took a nap,
Then she kissed him goodbye.

She was a story-teller. She was a woman
Who spoke words that only Jamilla,
The girl in her dreams, could hear.

V.

I cupped her breasts. My hands trembled
When her breath touched my neck.
Hoping, my eyes met hers, those almond-shaped eyes
That made me pause. Her curly hair brushed
My shoulders as she closed those almond-shaped eyes.
I closed mine, feeling our bodies contort.
And then she slept in the comfort of my arms.

VI.
Wake up.
]]> Wed, 10 Sep 2008 23:05:00 EDT http://whossane.tigblog.org/post/475439 35.0 135.7535.0135.75 http://whossane.tigblog.org/post/292921 Sun, 25 Nov 2007 23:43:00 EST http://whossane.tigblog.org/post/292921 35.0 135.7535.0135.75 http://whossane.tigblog.org/post/273123 Mon, 29 Oct 2007 04:00:00 EDT http://whossane.tigblog.org/post/273123 35.0 135.7535.0135.75 http://whossane.tigblog.org/post/245069


Blue rose. Folded Petals. Soaked in dew.
Cold bareness. Dancing line. Traffic brew.
The morning sun. Shadows cast on a sun-baked block.
What wonder. New beginnings. A strutting peacock.

A famed man. Reminiscence. His famous line.
Clock-hands ticking. Tropical summer. Sixty-nine.
Morning yearning. Come now. My phantom night sky.
Proverbial queen. Savannah lion. Hear me cry.

A knife. A mind. Show me your hand.
Bleed. My feet. Deep is the sand.
To walk the path. To hide behind these walls.
One choice. Untold story. A grown child calls.
]]> Sun, 02 Sep 2007 06:28:00 EDT http://whossane.tigblog.org/post/245069 35.0 135.7535.0135.75 http://whossane.tigblog.org/post/29585 Sat, 10 Sep 2005 04:35:00 EDT http://whossane.tigblog.org/post/29585 35.0 135.7535.0135.75 http://whossane.tigblog.org/post/21518

Amidst the rubble of a blood-drenched village,
Once filled with voices of playful tranquility-
Now disturbed by echoes of departed laughter,
Sat a woman with void tears, alive yet abandoned.

Hair billowing against the contours of her broad, naked back,
As one clasped the calloused hand of a loving husband,
As a thumb grazed the flushed cheek of a beautiful daughter,
She called out the names of her loved ones, and waited...
]]> Thu, 06 Jan 2005 01:18:00 EST http://whossane.tigblog.org/post/21518 35.0 135.7535.0135.75 http://whossane.tigblog.org/post/21114 Tue, 14 Dec 2004 00:19:00 EST http://whossane.tigblog.org/post/21114 35.0 135.7535.0135.75 http://whossane.tigblog.org/post/20956
If anyone is as nonchalant to even give a dang, then just pretend to read over my blog and close this window before any more muddling is done.]]> Fri, 03 Dec 2004 03:05:00 EST http://whossane.tigblog.org/post/20956 35.0 135.7535.0135.75 http://whossane.tigblog.org/post/20307 -a short story by Hussein

The phone rang. Once… twice… why didn’t I pick the receiver up? It just laid in its rest as the answering machine triggered another round of tedious blabber by an electrified voice that uttered “Not home at the moment. You know what to do.” As if the person on the other end of the line had been hurled a bolt of electricity, he started talking without even waiting for the ‘beep.’ My cousin, Kaine, had always been a restless, spirit-wired little kid, but this time, he was talking to me as a full-grown man, stumbling here and there but, otherwise, unusually straightforward. “…pick up the phone. She’s dead. She died from a car accident on her way home from the city yesterday. Her dad wants to talk to you.”

The moment I heard that Kristine had died, I plummeted deeper into the hollow of the bed. “I was just holding her hand yesterday and now she has left me, without giving me any premonition,” wait, she wanted to give the necklace back, the symbol of our relationship. She said I would never see her again… “My god, she’s gone.”

The light from the lamp invited its bleeding presence into the four proportionally disturbed corners of the half-lit room. My throbbing chest had swallowed the warmth of the sea breeze, followed by a pregnant silence. The silence had crept inside me, engulfing every explosive ‘tick’ of the wall clock that vomited a primeval bird with eyes on the outside. My bare feet napped blissfully abandoned, lost in a smothering of some counterfeit Kashmiri blanket. They were numb to the mercurial cold, while my arm was pallid, the other fast asleep, and a diaphanous image drifted over my waning thoughts.

I tried to recall the day I last saw the only one I loved.

Kristine walked in the restaurant with a smile on her face. She was wearing her usual look -- wash-and-wear denims, snug-fit white cotton shirt, and a slanted crown of soft, dark hair. She just turned 21 a month ago, but her youthful countenance was always coupled with nippy wits aimed at juvenile jokes, which I never ran out of. She saw me before I waved at her to tell her that I came ahead of time, a rarity in most, if not all, of our dates. I sensed a feeling of hesitance in her eyes but she kept walking towards me. She sat across the table, looking me in the eye, imploring the first words to be mine.

She spoke first. “I’m pregnant.” She knew that those words had taken me by surprise for I could not hide my unspoken ‘WHAT!!’ We had always practiced safe sex but this time things went awry on a fast curve.

“What do you want to do? I don’t think I’m ready for this,” I asked.

“I’m not either, but I can’t abort this child. Not while I’m alive, no.”

“But Kris, you know we can’t support this child. I’m not ready.”

“My dad’s going to kill me. She didn’t want me to go out with you in the first place.”

“I know that he hates me and this is not going to help,” I jokingly said.

“Please say that you will go through all this with me.”

“But Kris, I don’t think…”

She started crying. “I can’t believe you’re saying this. Here, take this,” she handed me the necklace but I refused to take it. She took it back, put it on, and scurried out of the restaurant. “You will never see me again.”

Those were her last words. I didn’t even have the chance to take back what I said. I could have said sorry to her that night, but instead, I ignored the guilt and shame that told me to run after her. I called Kaine and another friend, and we went to the theater to watch a movie without a name. A name that could have existed but still escapes my memory until this moment.

At the movie house, there was a girl who was sitting two rows down and she could not stop glancing at us. She would turn her head towards our seats and I knew that she was looking at us, or at me. The room was quite dark but once in awhile a sun-drenched setting in the movie would light up the room and there I thought I saw Kristine catching a glimpse of me and smiling. That was a little after 11:00 pm, twenty minutes after her car crashed.

I couldn’t believe I lost her. I didn’t want to think of her, stuck in her car while the last piercing pain finally robbed her one more breath of life. My Kristine, my love, why did you leave me like this?

I gently lowered the lids of my sodden eyes, dilating in the dark. I pressed my left ear against the sunken pillow while the other was jutted out as calmly as the night perpetually went by. My tongue brushed the contours of my mouth, purging it of last night’s unfortunate incident, which I could still taste with every effort to cry her name out.

I quickly turned and laid on my back as I felt a gush of panic as if someone was choking me. Then I felt a cold metallic object brushing against my neck. I opened my eyes and I saw Kristine floating right above me with eyes wide open, the necklace hanging around her pale neck. I closed my eyes and said ‘Forgive me, my love.’ When I opened them again, she was gone but the necklace was heavy on my chest.
]]> Sun, 31 Oct 2004 08:15:00 EST http://whossane.tigblog.org/post/20307 35.0 135.7535.0135.75 http://whossane.tigblog.org/post/17783
I was perched on the edge of a stumpy chair towering over an army of red ants. It must have been the reigning lassitude that made me plant my foot in the army’s scent-trail, thinking that a giant’s sleepy foot could be just as harmless as a wall; but one soldier fought back. The sting was quick but perpetual, or so my dream told my brain to heighten the working of my sweat glands.

The other workers were blind but they seemed to have borrowed an impeccable 20-20 eyesight from a pretentious bum as they ran away from their end. The soldier faced me, meekly braced to the ebbing hold of gravity that abandoned another of its expendable champions. David and Goliath, in a dream where the small is anything but the victor. The crushing sound was not even close to the buzzing of a mosquito from a faraway planet but I could see that the red ant left a gaping hole in the face of my own universe.

Then I felt what my worthy enemy did to me. It gave me poison. A poison that could not kill a mosquito, not even the one from the faraway planet. A poison that did not show an X over a picture of some famous skull. It was not a snake’s spit. It took the form of saturated glucose and it flowed in my blood. I could taste the sweet in my empty mouth, smell a whiff of honey from an unseen beehive, and see the lines of red ants running haphazardly towards me. The red ants were real in my dream.

I was devoured alive but not completely, for I am telling you now.

Back in the real world, I sat, stirred and soaked in sweat. My left arm felt numb, my pillow gone. I could see the markings of my own head etched on the brown skin that ended in the black of space. “I had a dream,” I said before I thought.

I touched the ground with my bare feet, feeling the warmth that refused to leave with the drowning sun. While the cold wind brushed my nakedness, my feet, ah, they giggled. Left foot first to keep my balance, my left arm still asleep. I headed to the sink, opened the valve, and swallowed. I drank. I swallowed.

Four hours and twelve minutes past midnight. I puffed my last cig from a box that said “6mg tar, 0.5mg nicotine.” Looking out the window, I saw another hole in the universe, this time it was for me, placidly waiting in time, maybe longer than what the doctor had told me. But he told me ‘there is no cure.’ I am dying. Positive — HIV.

How did this ever happen to me? I ask myself everyday, and hear laughter, no, more like disdain. It was almost three years ago. I was walking in the street of what people might call the ‘subcity’ where the lights did not shine but rather cast a shadow on young girls. Girls in skimpy skirts and counterfeit pearl necklaces. They were too young to wear make-up but they did anyway even if it meant looking like a page in a child’s coloring book. Three girls stood beside the pavement and held each other’s hand. They had a look of fear in their eyes but they stayed bold.

I walked towards the three girls, anticipating a move from one of them. It wasn’t a move, just a slight invitation. “You wanna have fun?”

“Sorry, what was that,” I replied.

“You wanna get laid tonight?”

“Why would you think I wanna get laid tonight.”

“Well, first you’re here talking to us and second you look like you wanna get laid tonight,” she proudly added.

A smart prostitute, I thought. “I suggest you look again. I am here because I need to go to another place and this is the road that leads to that place. Also, I may look like I wanna get laid but I’d rather if it was clean sex than with you girls.

“Why do you do this kind of dirty job, anyway? Have you ever heard of AIDS?”

One girl obviously looked like she was going to jump on me and bite my head off. But she didn’t. She just went really close to my face and said, “Dirty, yes. But we only want to live. And if living means we have to do this kind of job, or get a disease, then we’ll take it.”

“This is not living. This is…”

“Your words are poison. We don’t want to hear it. If you don’t want to do it, then just go. Loser!”

I would have made the exchange of harsh words a little longer but I just let this one go. Who were the real losers anyway?

“Oh, I have AIDS. Would you still do it with me? I wish you could feel what I feel. It’s great,” the girl with the gruff countenance paused for a while realizing that she said something silly but she started to laugh and the other two joined in. They all laughed at me, with disdain. And I laughed back at them, only in my head.

Feeling defeated, I swore to the grave of whosoever that this memory would be forever buried in the tomb of dead cells, which I kept smothering with deeper puffs of smoke. Death I bestowed, and death to be reciprocated. But forgotten, yes, I lived without a trace of the memory until the day I met an artist with the sterilized needle.

Tattoos. The thing of the day. How about one? Sure, a clean needle is all there is to feel the pain, quick but not perpetual. Oh, how I was deceived to believe. The artist lied about the sterilized needle; the needle, although pristine as it looked, had touched the blood of a girl who was not the girl, but nevertheless shared the same venom in their blood. The sting of the needle lasted for eight hours and more. That day, that year, this lifetime and more.

There was no turning back. I wish I just walked past the three girls in the subcity. I wish the artist had not lied to me. I wish this had all been just a dream. A dream with no red ants. A dream and only a dream.

My tongue grazed the cracked surface of my lips and tasted the sweet of sugar that wasn’t there. The red ant had vanished but the hole in the universe loomed over me.

Important Note:
This is only fiction.]]> Thu, 01 Jul 2004 09:45:00 EDT http://whossane.tigblog.org/post/17783 35.0 135.7535.0135.75 http://whossane.tigblog.org/post/12321
Or maybe the World Social Forum in Mumbai. I will also be there so please respond asap so we can chat about it.

]]> Tue, 25 Nov 2003 00:49:00 EST http://whossane.tigblog.org/post/12321 35.0 135.7535.0135.75 http://whossane.tigblog.org/post/12250 Sat, 22 Nov 2003 03:47:00 EST http://whossane.tigblog.org/post/12250 35.0 135.7535.0135.75 http://whossane.tigblog.org/post/12088 Sat, 15 Nov 2003 09:17:00 EST http://whossane.tigblog.org/post/12088 35.0 135.7535.0135.75 http://whossane.tigblog.org/post/12060
Goodbye.]]> Fri, 14 Nov 2003 09:12:00 EST http://whossane.tigblog.org/post/12060 35.0 135.7535.0135.75