Kyla Pasha | Poetry

Up Next, Lahore Song

Kyla Pasha — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 16:16:22 +0000

Now that you’re gone, I don’t write
anymore. Once it was all muses
with midnight snacks and now I
can’t even feel rancour for fear of
hurting you with it. Now that
you’re going, my art is siphoned out
to fuel small efforts in rare buildings
and foreign men looking for understanding.
Not even that – without you, this town
is a tombstone buzzing with flies
and they resound in my head like a
broken record – you were only
dancing in this small room, twirling
like a dervish beyond God,
you didn’t ask for this – This
end to a life you weren’t even sure
was born and look how now I
can’t even love in other directions,
how my mind is caught in its own
throat as it holds your hand
that’s leaving and is held by her hand
that’s never going away. Look
how the car screams down the road
as we three are bound together in the back
with every kind of love between us
and no succour – no relief from breathing
not even a careening telephone poll
to wrap the car around.

I didn’t ask for this permutation
where love that stays holds
no sway over love
that’s leaving, holds no candle
except to light the path that
you’re now going down.

Too much gravity ill becomes
what was created under tables
and on dance floors long forgotten,
stop this pulling, stop this loving,
I am ending now that you’re gone.

The Poet at Every Fest

Kyla Pasha — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 20:03:41 +0000

If you were not looking, I would not
be here. Caught in the cross
fire of defiance and desperation, I
am poet, sorry I am poet, speaking
my own demons like they’re yours,
my own anger like it scores an
orange alert on the universal
terror scale. You should be worried,
I want to say, but words
open and close at the behest of
clicking fingers and I
am small. My friend, I am small.

If you were not looking, I would
almost have nothing to say.

Defiance and desperation, fuck you
but please listen – this pain, bear
witness, this is flesh that’s bruised, this
is blood this is the news of my life, Listen.

I am not your bastion, I am not
court jester, I am not a man
with teachings, I am not
an open wound. You are not
my therapy. Sorry but I am
a poet and these are my words
and you have words and you have bruises
and this is a fire between us now.

Sit. See us
warming our hands.

Exit

Kyla Pasha — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 13:08:57 +0000

I slept at the foot of the bed
every night for forty years and I thought
this would end it – rapture
would lift us, move us and
we’d entwine. We entwined
but rapture bled us dry and now
the dogs bay; and we
are sanguine. What light
falls on us feeds us up
to the cameras, to the barrels
of guns glinting, to our
angels, better and worse;
and love is nearly insufficient cover
on darker nights. We entwine.
You turn over and breathe
evenly. I write poems.
I pray for stories. I listen.
5:55 on a Monday morning
and every night for forty
years, I listen for the covers
pulling back. Where my unhatched
children, too, breathe evenly.
I am sanguine.

~~~~

untitled napowrimo poem

Kyla Pasha — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 13:02:13 +0000

You are asking y name as if your
aplomb will ensure the safety of
my soul when the end times come.
You are not a friend
of any revolution. Could’ve been
a harbinger, could have been
news, but you are too
parasitic to sound the final horn
or call us home and happy.
Write your paean. Write your
liberalism into history and call me
all of thsoe names. If I die
at your pen’s carelessness, know
not only that your desire for a thrill
killed me, and my friends, and all those
who bother to stand adn be named,
but also that you died nameless
while we made ourselves free.

~~~~

The Man at the Door

Kyla Pasha — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 00:06:16 +0000

Well aren’t you a chocolate Harry Potter
stood at the front steps in your best
battling robes. And me with apples
in my hands. The thought of saving’s
very far from me, you know.
The sun’s
down the window a bit and your
head’s dripping.
You may smile,
as is befitting your haloed state, but
I don’t charm so easily, friend, not
with chocolate, not with saviours,
not with Easter so close by. I have my
eye on disappearances and you look
a sticky messiah. Still. Come in.
You cannot melt on my doorstep, you know,
and I hope you can hold a knife. This house
greets the end times with pie, so get
chopping. Or peel an apple
in one go and I’ll call it a sign.

~~~~

It’s National Poetry Month

Kyla Pasha — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 23:01:53 +0000

…and I’m going to write a poem a day. Of course, I’m late already, being a fool, and it is now 3:53 a.m. on April 2, 2009. No matter. It’ll get done.

I’m doing this partly because I’ve bee complaining for (I just realized) about two years that my poetry is drying up. This is clearly a ridiculous complaint, since I’ve written quite a bit through 2007 and 2008 even as I languished in my own poetical inadeqate-ical languish juice. But my mom says that a writer is someone who writes. So, if I’m truly feeling that I’ve become less prolific, then I should get writing again.

And spring is a good time for making things.

You can read about National Poetry Month and the attendant madness at Read Write Poem, a lovely volunteer endeavour in which poets comment on each other’s work and prompt each other to write.

Please note, though, that in an effort to write more and because I’m both shy and also ham-ish in my tendencies, I’m going to be putting up poems that have not gone through my usual process of thining it’s brilliant, thinking it’s shite, thinking it’s okay, thinking oh I don’t know let’s ask someone, and then settling down to some kind of peace with it. Instead, the poems that are upcoming will only have experienced the first two filters of brilliant and/or shite.

So: these are not my official poems. These are poems as they occur. They are poems en route, as it were.

Here we go.

Hospital

Kyla Pasha — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 07:28:26 +0000

Ask for a world in which
the white recedes and colour
bleeds back in. You can feel a
hand again as it softly strokes
your hair – and you know it’s your own.
Nothing takes you from pain like
its own promise. And where is promise?

Ask for a primrose world, one that means
something beautiful but you don’t know what
it means. You can walk
in its colour, softly, all day and that
will do for when the white comes back, thinking
of taking you. You can’t feel your hand
again but you know it will return when
the colour bleeds back in.

Fracture

Kyla Pasha — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 19:27:58 +0000

You invented India
over my head, called me wet
and pink, and overly looked upon -
You are so benevolent, old love.

I and my girls wanted
a home in the earth
and, among the things we left
behind in the meadows and the alleyways,
was who we were to you.

But the dirt on the ground failed
in love – and we moved on -
and now we’re gone. Here,

curled around your head,
devoted, I suck your
imagination into me.
The earth you claim
is mine back and you
may break to know
that I was here when
you were here and

I was always this old.

I am here now
to un-invent India,
take things back.

Arterial

Kyla Pasha — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 02:59:43 +0000

The earth moved the day love was
an unremarkable statistic. Severed arms
held close to the chest were testament

to who God left behind – an unremarkable
statistic in the centre of the crowd.

Blow me up, I have nothing
to show for my life but these lights.
Pull me out, wipe me down, roll my head
on the ground – I have nothing show

but my eyes, which are closed.

We scraped each other off the streets
on a small end of days when the earth

stopped moving. We poured
each other into bags to be named later -
yes, this shoulder was my lover’s, I know
those shoes. Give them back for me to bury;

I have to love someone new.

And the earth moved again. We watched
our lives unfold in a silver screen disaster,
blood, guts, trauma, a red ticker
rushing past like a train of thought to
take us, really take us, far away – where

you cannot blow me up, though I make
hash of my life; or pull me out, wipe me
down, spread my blood on the ground.

I’ve got nothing to show
but your eyes,
which are closed.

Concrete

Kyla Pasha — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 10:38:47 +0000

These are not our days. Soldiers
paving the roads you and I will drive,
burying the children you and I would
have, could we have a life together.

These are not our homes. Soldiers
patrolling the perimeter, shooting down
coyotes, poltergeists, men and women
looking in windows the see what’s for dinner,
for the days ahead. Futures are lying
to us, in wait for messiahs, or superheroes,
or dead presidents, telling us there are things
in the road, barbs and skulls and mines that need
paving down – that the good books says it’ll be
concrete to concrete when the time comes.

I live in the paving stones. I tried to free myself
like a weed in a crack, reaching for the signpost,
the streetlight, the sky between buildings – but I
snap back. There is nothing for skyscrapers
but creeping under the stones, and growing a web,
embracing the earth – this is my land, this is
my dirt, you are too big, I will turn you over
on your side and look into your windows, see
what you’ve cooked up in sections, see who you have
stored in your cupboards – I will open you up,
I will open you up like you’re sick and I need your
heart out to make you better, I will make you better
from down here, from the paving stones that make you rise.

I am concrete and concrete
goes home to concrete when the time comes.