When Green Fades

When a wife, Snigdha Sarkar Dipa Kills her husband, Rathis Chandra Vhowmic and plays their adultery or sex game with her lover, Kamrul Islam through out the whole night—

When Beauty, a name of a young girl raped and killed by the rapists and her dead body found in the green field where the national flag symbolizes the color of her with the natural beauty ——-

When a competition goes on the high ways and snatches away one hand of Rajib and after struggling some days in the hospital with life dies on the hospital bed, when the other day Najim Uddin run over by the speedy bus in the same case ——

Not only that

When every day at least ten or fifteen people die in the road accidents —–

When people are yet begging from door to door

When today our daily Newspapers publish fifty suspected drug peddlers killed in the gunfights across the country in the last ten days —–

And MPs are advised to buy expensive mobile sets from the govt. fund —–

And we celebrating and broadcasting to be developed or developing one

And that Stock Market falling down regularly, for this depression of the investors losing all the money bring down in the darkness of the night not to move, not to die, though even many died by themselves. People are groping and rushing under the shade of the banyan tree and their eyes fixed on the green fields that mark the national flag —–when and where the farmers are very busy with their cultivation. We always miss the glory of the color, green.

My  Sleeping Cat

O my cat, why are you sleeping

In the morning sun and shade on my roof?

The sun is going to be so hot but

You don’t have the sense of cold or hot

Deep in sleep as though you never slept

You make me think the days when

I was in depth of sleep like you

Having no attention for timetable

After waking from bed

I felt so fresh to the eyes and heart

I am sure you enlightened your eyes for love and care

And it is for the whole night you guarded your surroundings

And did your job burning the eyes as the lover’s red sparking those

O my loving cat, you are my love mate, love is sleep like

Show me the path to go ahead

With the passionate eyes throughout the whole night

Love is peace; love is sleep lying side by side.

In Chain

When I see your face

I can imagine a light

When I reach your home

I can think for rest

When I see the marks on your wrist

I can think for devotion

A sanctuary where I want to be regular to serve

When you make a journey

I can think of the life you led

I always try to struggle with me

To travel from this to that new

But I see myself always in chain

Not to move in the open sky, on the land or water

Always in chain.

Hyphen

I raised my head towards the sky

The sky is so high

Then kept my eyes down to the ground

Where only grass and soil lay vast

To the horizon – the mixing point

The ground and the sky

I found another sign of joy

There goes long and high

A thin branch of a tree

Separated from others seem to dance in the breeze

The leaves spreading a light

A glow to my eyes

Souring higher and surrounding the earth

A shelter to have a rest for joy

I am the branch separated from others

Make my songs and play on my tune

Just at the time the heart to dance

I find myself hidden to the bush

Only birds cry. 

Football, Another Name of Heart

The heart is like a football

You play with

Again the football is like a sun

You burned with

Look before you kick

Don’t try to maze the eyes

You can shoot the ball to the goal post

A source of joy for the audience

A joy for the love I wish you desire

I must be the one of your shooting point target

You play with me

The world will appear then

The new sunny morning with the new dewy scented rose

We both open the door

You, I and the new born one

I like to stick to for ever and for ever

Take a great attention before the kick

Take care dear or get lost.

Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh

28/05/2018

—————————–———————————————————————

Secrets

So, mother, like Johannesburg, you cut me in deep, imaginative and raw ways. A cut from you was a project. Thinking of you, staring at you, looking at you, your progress illuminated the world around me. Everything was brighter and so, I was always regaining strength.

The love I had for you was lost on the pages of my journal. Lost (always lost). You laugh and say nothing and it hurts. The bright heights of it. Lying on my back I’ve been draped with a blackening world’s information. When evening comes it is even more poetic than the previous day’s evening. And when I spy the afternoon sun, that great yellow balloon, I am a woman found who dares not speak of the insanity found in her family and whose shell of pain is wet and bitter.

I have lived in chosen exile. On the surface prayer is like a vision, cold is a delight, the silver lining that passes by, salt and air meeting on the wind. In poverty there is always decay, the song of a choirgirl, crystals of light, a graffiti of them. I trace them on my arm, the windows and my palms. What he, the lover does not know won’t kill him like it kills me?

I am slowly destroying myself. I have nowhere to go but down, down, down and there is no one to rescue me, to pull me out from under the dark towards the light. His roses looked like cabbages. Red cabbages, a red song for the mad girl, a flower for my bleeding heart.

The boy I used to play chess with in the park, sit on the grass barefoot, walk to the library with. He doesn’t have a name. His face doesn’t exist in my memory anymore. He has become a dark line, a dark fantasy although I can still hear his voice but it is from far away.

All these affairs of the heart have made me feel strangely creative. They slide through me, teach me, whisper to me in the dark. I hate the dark. I need the light to burn bright even in the middle of the night. I pull sheets over mirrors. And I imagine the lover whose dark hair smelled of rain. The rain of a child’s world. This is my sky, my grass, my rage (I view the world as an Outsider).

Girls are drinking beers in fancy restaurants trying to make conversation. Crystals of light evaporate in winter rain outside my window. Sexuality is really not of the flesh although most people think it is. It is of the mind. It is of the ego. It is intellectual. When is childhood ever at an end? This planet is unstable. I am unstable. I was tangled in an obsession for being a ghostly not of the flesh sexual object. I thought that that would open doors for me to humanity for humanity’s sake. I thought I would be able to hear the chords of the earth’s harmony. It kills me to say this. Madness can be as magnificent as euphoria.

If only my childhood was different. Anne Sexton. Sylvia Plath. Robert Lowell. Confessional poetry down a brick lane. Confessional poetry for a coquettish girl. How beautiful and extraordinary those words seem to me now and forever more. When is childhood ever at an end for a writer, years of history and the educating of a young girl’s mind? I saw pictures of a formidable brick wall seeming to close in on me in those affairs of the heart and the mind.

Disjointed, evaporated fragments of the spirit. And every one becoming more and more apparent to me as the long days and the longer nights went by of my late adolescence and early twenties. Everything is disjointed, in fragments, there’s no clarity in what I have written down to me the reader. Everything is a journey. I’ve had enough of feeling this wretched way. Enough of the dead of a hot summer season, a season of fruits challenging me to think and to escape into a voyage in the dark, a sheltered experience, the blue-eyed wonder of the sky, stars falling down, stars in my lover’s eyes pleading with me with a clean perception during the midnight hour, scrutinising me openly with likeminded possibilities like clouds gathering across the sky.

Everything in life is a journey. One must walk the path of inexperience to get to modernity, influence, perception and wisdom. I think a writer, writers like Virginia Woolf, Hemingway, Keats, Orson Welles, F. Scott Fitzgerald and a poet like Emily Dickinson knew this. Two Muslim girls are standing outside my office window smoking as if their lives depended on it.  I hated the taste and smell of cigarettes when I lived in my hometown before I left for Johannesburg.

I don’t know where the children get the impulse to smoke from these days. At this moment I am concentrating on improving myself. Having a set routine, sleep hygiene, working on not having sleep deprivation, writing in my journal. And I wonder do they think of me, the men, as often as I think of them or do not think of them? The sexual impulse is sacred but I never saw this between a man and a woman, never grew up with it only with the realisation that sin matters.

I couldn’t stand to be happy. When darkness fell upon the city of Johannesburg, I came undone under his fingertips. I didn’t know why I hated myself so. Why certain books changed my life? Why I could only surrender when a man touched me? Love comes with paradise, tears, the explanations, the words, the observations that comes with gravity, the love songs, and it will leave you wanting lying in the dark.

There is no such thing as organic time or a clock. White meringue weddings are for girls, for orchids, for arum lilies, for tea light candles, delicate material like lace (not meant for a wonder guts like me, a tough cookie). I will not appear the same in the photograph as I do in memory. What do children communicate when they laugh, when they smile? Is their world not filled with joy? Why not mine? The faded leaves of grass under school shoes, bubble-gum stuck under a school desk, reading Athol Fugard’s A Road to Mecca, remembering all of these childhood things brings something temporary to the surface. Not tension, not indifference, but a feeling of love for being young and not being in an adult world yet. A feeling of being fearless, so motivated that I got the lead role of an archaeologist (or anthropologist, I forget) in a house play. I don’t know what courage means anymore.

Can you see the fragments now? How disjointed the narrative is? But is it enough? Is it enough to want desire? Sometimes I think that is enough. The sexual transaction can be far removed from being ‘a moveable feast’. Dampness seeps into the lining of my coat as I enter the hotel in Johannesburg (fifteen years ago) with someone else this time. He does not put his hand in the small of my back. He does not offer to buy me a drink. He falls asleep almost immediately as his head hits the pillow. The relationship is over before I know it for sure. They don’t come back to me.

Am I so forlorn? Is youth and wisdom wasted upon me? Maybe they’re seeking much more high maintenance girls. I just wanted someone to understand me. It wasn’t so much the educating part of it that I wanted. Dead writers have taught me that the pinnacle of creative expression is to challenge conventional wisdom always. I’ve surrounded myself, invoking their spirit, reading and rereading lines of their work, succumbing to their world of madness.

The world is not the same for women as it is for men. The role that women plays is still a diminished one in the equilibrium of space and time although there have been women who have been visionaries just as much as men have been. Women have taught by example, led by example just as much as men have but what these women have known is that wisdom comes later rather than sooner. It comes with maturity. Darkness falls and I feel an emptiness inside. I am alone and I’ve finally surrendered to it. I am more in love with love than being in love with someone. I am Eve taken from Adam’s rib. A daughter doing what her mother did and did not do.

Secrets, keeping secrets is a demanding world. And then there is the rural countryside filled with patches of grass, the history of how to grow pomegranates, catch fish, the heritage of ruins, rain pouring down like a ritual taking its place in the hierarchy of the food chain, seasons that come upon us and pass, steps, leaps, stars, human stains, animal stains, blood, shark teeth, a school of fish, whales.

This world is meant for sessions of personal injury, hurt, deep pain, smiling laughter, you calling your daughter darling, the grim existence, and the caged existence of the young poet. I am capable (every young poet is) even though the cigarette smoke’s vapour’s injury starts with a mocking signal. I am not lost. Bold Heaven is pulling at vital me. I am a Romantic as I become more and more curious and the objects around me transfix me. The death of a relationship is in the air like horses in a race to the finish line, an aloe’s sap and tears, mirrors, your reflections, encounters with angels above and angels below on the earth’s alchemic plane as consciousness travels the globe, alongside the dimensions of spirit, the elements of soul. The poems of Ted Hughes is the music that has shaped my nutritious isolation, my night swimming, my eternal waiting, and my frantic, hysterical weeping.

My night swimming comes with its own frequency and rhythm. My limbs take on a life of its own (so poetic, I am guarded against humanity, my imagination, inspiration, the Milky Way, the knowledge of other galaxies, the light of the shy laughter of a couple not far off from me swimming in the dark), suspended between the pull of gravity on earth’s plane and other parallel dimensions. The parallel dimension of my pure flesh and intricate bloodwork, my dreams and goals, the gift of my personal space (that most private area), an arena that so few have viewed.

Daughters do not always become mothers and mothers are not always perfect. They have their flaws. Ordinary mothers. Extraordinary mothers. Put them in a box. Every goddess-mother. I see my mother’s brilliance pick a valuable and beautiful object up and suddenly I’m transported to the room in a mansion. And there I shut Pandora’s Box. Plant a flag there. If only God could hand out a medal for every birth-pang. Every mother has pulled funny faces when she was a child, held a cloud of a helium-filled balloon in her fist by its string before it became a shred, dreamed of a childhood continued when she became a youth in her sleep, as she paged through fashion magazines reading her horoscope not knowing yet that her future was predestined, that she was predestined to be a sexual object on her wedding night, a friend and confidante when she was wooed by her future husband, that her eldest daughter would be a failure, her second a major success and her third child would be a Scout, a quiet, bookish, loner as a boy who suffered from asthma and a beautiful intellectual, funny and sweet, a deeply imaginative-thinker, oh-so-serious who would be charming and artistic, sensitive and understanding as he grew older, and that this introverted leader would be both spiritual and show humility when it was called for in political meetings, a man after Winston Churchill’s and Abraham Lincoln’s own heart.

Betrayal is lethal. Plath a gone girl in young womanhood reaching dazzling heights like me. Live or die. Those were Anne Sexton’s words. Pure. Introspective. Demanding a haunting interpretation. Yet their craft and bittersweet verse still defies terrifying and manipulative electricity, attachment, movement. Clever girls. Mother had daughters who were clever girls. You were no woman in black, mother. I put my suicidal illness inside a jar like a butterfly and leave it there for the moment. I escape into the pages of my journal, those hard lines, the physical, emotional, and mental appetite beckoning.

The landscape changes every day in leaps from green. Once I was in pursuit of Hughes, advancing upon him, closer to the flame in his psychological framework’s psyche, harvesting his cool gaze, that tower, that secret winter. His throne burns me, my guilt flares lap after lap in the Olympic-sized local swimming pool like diamonds in the sky marking the distance to the stairway to Heaven, the ladder to the Milky Way. Hughes sits at my table (I want to say that he should explain himself).

Mice in the kitchen, tails between their legs in the universal-solitary-shape of death after being wounded by the mousetrap, no survival guide for them, escape-route, seductive exit and their whiskers no longer move baffled by the world around them, there’s just an ode to the mute and I begin reading my letter from home that serves to improve the fragile, loved half-lie I’ve been living. Where, when did Pablo Neruda find the time to write twenty love poems and a song of despair?

Hughes is in my life again. His Winter Pollen. I’m staring at his photograph. He comes to me as if in a dream sequence. He is even more handsome than I remembered. I remember going back to the city’s elements. The city of Johannesburg. The watery-prophetic eyes of women and children, decay, dirt, spiritual poverty and that there’s nothing pretty or picturesque about the pain of the mind. It can be more acute than the pain of the body. Johannesburg to me is a kind of Hemingway Paris. A psychological construct made up of childhood dialogue, the female writer who speaks in code, the young women who would slip away in the early hours of the morning arm-in-arm with their dream man of the night after a nightclub closed.

Johannesburg was a Freedom Land’s anchor, a feast where the abnormal became normal, running with scissors, poetry in my twenties, knives, guns in the air. Sacrifice is not effortless. Midnight is but a voyage into the goal of a dream. Laughter keeps me alive. I seem to have been born with this intuition. Even now Johannesburg makes me think of the stale smoke of a cigarette and men who have moustaches. Boats have become arks. Girls have become quiet women. Here there are no ducks in the park in their own world of silence marking time with their song.

My sister adores her reflection, her face is a lake, the face of a scholarship girl. I watch her swallow shiny things, flicker, go up in flames, rise towards truth in the flesh and the spirit, her celestial madness and I ask myself does she never feel fear or vulnerable, does she never meditate on the sun only on our silence. She was a pianist when she was younger, tap-tap-tapping the clouds of the keys.

I can only survive with the memory of my Johannesburg. I can no longer kill the sirens with their elegant-shapes. The sirens who slit their wrists, jump off bridges, leave the car running, and hang themselves. They’re becoming as rare as the rainforest, pilgrims. Perhaps they were too pure for this world, the heat of their sensitivity could not withstand any thing, withstand a pilgrimage, listening to the noise in a glitter-ball-world, arrows of ballads flying through the air landing at their feet like dew, sounding like a symphony or Beethoven.

Every dress, every heel, silk stockings, perfume is a gift but who will receive them? Daughters? Orphans? The Salvation Army? A fete’s jumble sale? Is it for a wedding, a baby’s christening? Beautiful women become ghosts of themselves like leaves. Now, weaving delicious spice sinking inside a curry-pot, (wet masala, mother-in-law, ginger and garlic, turmeric, fragrant curry leaves), I concentrate on the bowl, open my mouth wide to taste.

Jessica

and the fog only a dream

high into the sky

not even a sniffle

The silence was your golden ticket

Ssshh

To some, your words were the once awaited fate.

People were waiting with bated breath for the State of the Nation.

However, you gave us your verse.

Instead.

In beauty and grace, you spoke about becoming and what elements shaped you.

So, ssshh. Yes.

You could have released a memoir filtered with politics and power.

But, then, would it not be another power play from the oval to your head.

So, I thank you for your silence.

Ssshhh.

It spoke volumes to the stadiums in the States and South Africa too.

I saw the elegance of how you represented your version of becoming a Black woman in the space of control and power.

Not the oval or paperback can create a nuanced narrative of what they think or imagine the First Black Lady should be in this State.

Ssshhh.

So, I thank you.

I thank you for your silence.

Your silence told us how Black woman have become accustomed to state the palatable to sell to an audience who don’t know that some things are just not ready for you and the world to purvey.

Ssshhh.

So, I applaud you.

First Black Lady.

Mrs Obama.

SSSHHH.

You told them only what they needed to know.

How you became a person in silence as the State of the Nation unfold.

Poverty Porn

I have become eye candy.

A flashy picture to win an award.

An instagrammable moment.

Yet, my belly cries for a good meal just before church.

I held onto my guts for you to swoop in the troops and gain your research grant and scratch off your tax rebate.

My plight is your salvation for the first world problem which is to be seen as helping and also being heard that you uplifting the poor.

But, in my world, I am dying.

A slow death if I might add.

I die every day you post that a fly was living on my face, so that’s that.

This is my norm.

I cannot reach out from this hell hole, because my poverty has stunted my growth and lured a particular clientele to keep me strapped to my bed.

But, once I am fed, you didn’t see who I really was.

You failed to see me for I am other than your project or a moment in the trenches with the squatters for your journals or National Geographic memories.

So, as I age, why do you blame me for using your triumphant poverty card.

I am the beggers, domestic and factory workers child.

This request is profane.

Since your pictures had brought life to what should have been PG rated to be unveiled.

I need a scholarship, a job and just mere guidance since I was only in the slums.

Will you allow me to access your tax bracket friends? Will you introduce them to your porn stash? Am I just the hidden secret that no men should remember again?

So, I beg of you stop asking my brother for a picture.

I cannot stand the manner you have made me your social media moment.

Because, when that little boy will need your help to defend him from Trump or Brexit, you will be gone claiming a past debt with SARS and not help him climb to obtain what he wants.

Condensed biography:

Gabriela Carolus is a budding poet. She aims to write about terms and ideas that people take for granted as the ordinary and intimate. This year, Gabriela works as a Guest English Teacher in South Korea. She hopes that her readers will continue this journey with her to reveal the challenges of living and working across different continents as a millennial. This year will be her first publication to Voice of Eve in April 2019.

Name: Gabriela Penelope Carolus

Nationality: South African

Poetry posts: https://medium.com/@gabrielapenelopecarolus

Blog Posts: https://wordpress.com/posts/gabrielapenelopecarolus.wordpress.com

Short stories and illustrated poems: https://www.patreon.com/GabrielaPenelopeCarolus

Email address: gabrielacarolus@gmail.com

Charisma Jake Can Sell Anything

caskets to newborns

a stereo that plays nothing but the Thompson Twins

bloody tampons as collector’s items

they say he even sold Robert Johnson’s soul

at the Crossroads,

got a broker’s fee and everything

one of those one time deals where

all the paperwork has to be

in order,

and the regulators can’t keep up

with his more clandestine ventures,

they say he is even selling tables

under the table,

that he would have you naming him

your only child’s godfather within

minutes of meeting him;

if you operate in the shadows,

chances are he sold you

those shadows,

if your many tall tales

don’t have a leg to stand on

you know where to go

for a leg.

Lenin Lost His Head

Walking through Mandalay Bay we find a large statue of Lenin

outside the entrance to Red Square.  Lenin has lost his head

because people complained about having the Russian leader

adorn one of their casinos.  And a casino is certainly a funny

place to have a statue of the father of Communism.  So they lopped

off his head and put it on ice and the Americans feel better now

because they can drink over-priced vodka off his

severed head.

The Machinist

stood in front of the same machine

with awkward white plastic safety glasses

that slid down his face all day

in ill-fitting blue overalls with his name on them

and a once white undershirt now sweat

through with a dried crusty yellow

and the ear plugs were flexible orange things

that came in a pack of two

and refused to stay in

so that you were always pushing them

back into place

when you were not readjusting

your safety glasses

and the pay wasn’t great,

but the machinist had done worse

with no post-secondary

so he stood there in his steel toes

operating the foot pedal

and clock watching

the sweat running down his face

in long barbaric

lines

working overtime

if he could get it

the back loading dock opened up

in the absence of

windows.

Don’t Mock a Killing Bird

murder of crows

on the hot

sauce

vehicular Polynesia

a man in the shed

is worth two

in the

vagina

predatory talons

sunk deep

indignities

right from

the fountain’s

mouth.

In Vegas

you must

always have your

camera phone

ready

you

never know

when the wookiees

will start mating

with the

slot

machines.

Listerine Bootleg #27

I made a ten and a half minute cassette

of me gurgling mouthwash

which ended with one final spit

in the sink

then I took the tape out of the recorder

and labelled it: Listerine Bootleg #27

with a red pen.

Then I threw the tape into a pile on the floor

with the other 26 and took a hammer

and smashed them to bits.

I unwound all the tape

and covered my naked body in it

like stringy afterbirth.

And I stuck my fingers through the tape spools

as if they were the axels of tiny cars

and drove them back and forth across the workbench

crashing every so often.

And the ayatollah had been ground into horse meat.

And somewhere a piano fell down stairs of imposition.

So I took a cordless drill to the drywall

which left many lines of white powder on the floor

and I snorted them up

pretending I was some Hollywood A-lister

with a dog named Rambo

who chewed up mid-east terrorists

fast as milk

bones.

Brätwurst

be decisive

beholden

not Holden Caulfield

the elders frown

upon that

as though

they were dealing with

naughty children

when thinking up

a new name

for

sausage.

Is It Any Wonder that Freud’s Daughters

Could Never Eat a Banana without

Thinking of It?

When your father will not stop talking about dick

I imagine many things are hard.

Even from a young age.

And all those bananas from the tropics.

So exotic.

Something father would hate if you were

trying to rebel and your father was not

Sigmund Freud.

He’d probably just tell them it was

a mental predisposition

of the entire sex

and to go

to

town.

Flannel, Not Seattle      

Is this a shirt sleeve?

she asked,

and since I was a shirt

that knew nothing of sleeves

I did not answer

and hoped for the best.

Then she buttoned me up

to the elbow

and got on the phone with

her mother.

And we talked for hours

but I said nothing

because I was a

shirt.

Free Range

There are many children about.

Children of all ages, sizes,

shapes…

Milling about in the street

while their parents

are at work.

Running in front of cars

until you hit

one.

Ryan Quinn Flanagan is a Canadian-born author residing in Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada with his wife and many bears that rifle though his garbage.  His work can be found both in print and online in such places as: Evergreen Review, The New York Quarterly, Synchronized Chaos, Literary Yard, Red Fez, and The Oklahoma Review.