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"The body leans heavily into language. The body that leans heavily into
language. It is, to begin with, an uncertainty. It is, to follow, a
savagery. It is, to begin with, entropic. Widowing text." Nathalie Stephens

I.

The train is consumed in the darkness of Delhi. Fires around the tracks,
corrugated aluminum roofed hovels. When he was a child he said, I think I can.
A woman hangs laundry on a guard rail. The train in swallowed in the mooring
light and he is still traveling. Delhi disassembling. Tracks and more tracks in
space, tracings of a finger. A chai wallah sings. Figures of speech. A language
of coinages. Mine. Flies breed and yield. Try again in another tongue. The
beggars are herding; they sit in between train cars and he feeds them rice on a
banana leaf. I am a traitor.

II.

Farther.

You deserve a longitude and latitude/ We deserve a match. A match that is
just missed. A train that is boarded for Lahore. It cannot cross the border.
When the train comes to a sudden stop, the mind moves across, momentous. From
Amritsar to Lahore. I drink chai, a haunting song. The chai wallah and
generations of singing. People board and unboard. A man defecates. A pastoral
of arrivals and returnings.

Boardings and dislodgings. Ankles with bells. The sound of a home is real or
imagined/

II.

The main faculty of the house is the attic; moth eaten saris from weddings in
Karachi, picture frames with pictures glossed over and to say a picture
doesn't speak. The lack of walls. I dream of a spiraling staircase and pictures
of Krishna. I am cleaning the glass of the picture. Evoking a past. Cleaning
glass meticulously. The Abba by the well is murmuring om in Jaladhar--in
memory; the main faculty of this house is an attack.

His foot went through the ceiling. He was chewing beetle nuts and blood trickled
off his lips. The living room was amalgamated with the kitchen. A past that
deserved to be revised. That deserved an addition from a father who
chainsawed the catalpa branch he was sitting on.

III.

In Pakistan the kitchen is a place where we roll chapatis, where we could
create our own menu out of salt. The walls are barred in Islamabad. Mother
said it was an asylum. She was the center piece of attention in the room that
homed Matisse framed. She was the center piece on the mantle.

Attention deficit because the sounds of the attic when she returned
home. Every object sounds in space, on the mantle there are no hues, black
and white excised from a picture past. And people say pictures don't matter. The
inability to define dust mite. He might inherit a microscopic eye: the
problem of germs was solved by Pasteur.

IV.

The microscopic ear listens when a father climbs down a staircase. On the walls
there were once pictures of Krishna in a dream. Those stairs ascended and he
was cleaning, his hands meticulous details.

His farther descends the stairs into the basement, because his successful son, a
veritable relic of his own success, has taken over the family room. A memory is
a fossil. And memory needs a mooring image. A dream to live on. Old pictures
from Jinnestan won't do.

III.

...And the water floods again and I must save a father drowning in a dream. A
dream which requires a contrite eye. To bridge a mother tongue and fartherland.
An imbecile bridge. A bride without a chamber, without a calico pillow sheath:
a night without intercourse with a past, or a night with a whore in Lahore.

There are sounding walls; a mother who was once always returning to
Pakistan and a father who turned his back. They switch places, as though
they were always playing each other's part.

IV.

Mother says: who wants to remain here? Uncle tells her that anyone who is sane
returns after success. But when you are transplanted you grow in all
directions. Success runs dry, transmitted like an arm or a leg.

Walls become a fluid intensity and your eyes are aquariums, father.
Pupils which float in diaphanous membranes are always returning. I was a middle
child. The sound of a wall that could not be erected.

There could be a pleasant arbor, a gazebo, a trellis with lattice work in India
without an Indian to chase away crows all day. Father, you will leave again,
success runs dry. You are leaving and I am scattering
crows; a hired servant for one pound a month, with a blackened tongue turned
stone to chisel a lost language, just a lost word. Now I dream in
Siriket, and the walls, or lack of walls, mean that I want to be swallowed in a
father womb.

I want to not want. I want no souvenirs.

V.

The attic is composed on clothes. We are composed on clothes; clothes hang off
the throat. There are no parables here. No arrivals. No returns. There
is space, sounds tattered and torn--foreign words.

-Angrez, they shouted and threw stones at me in Muree. The must on the ceiling
falls and bats flit through estranged moorings in space. We climb a mountain
again, one which is unnamed by language which defecates--my inheritance.

To use English is a contra/diction.

VI.

There are no black bears or hangers on the mountain where we hang clothes. I
want to be attacked. Layers in the attic are a muffled speech. Static between
words filled with walls which we imagine. To engulf a wall, or be engulfed by a
wall. A question.

There is dreaming: neurons splayed open without a brain. Absence breeds an
auditory tongue. It just about about gathers the walls as they vanish.
Imaginary wells where a Baba chants om. A refrain. A possible frame. To clean
meticulously. Details.

VII.

There are dunes and dune buggies in Dubai where you set up a tent. I mean, buy
an apartment between worlds. You explore the Bedouin culture in a jeep. I
always said I had gypsy eyes, or gypsum eyes.

I want to go back, board a plane: to be supersaturated. To maim a word in
English is to maim myself. Accretions of sounds and dormitories of dust mite.
Allergic reaction. Immunoglobulin E, replacing "I."

To acquire eyes that can see in the dark is to acquire wings that flit through
borders in space. Each word is growing an attic, which eats itself even as it
is cut/ Narrative is always only an audition.