Painting the believer
He, wears his pale hands like a birch its peeled spine. its embossed wound. its phantom sleeve of aces. its brow of coal and eye shorn by rain. its peculiar health. its implied shriek. You're a way of seeing the dark, without darkness actually entering the eye.
I'll close my regard, and for a moment the world is a plexi-trove of softly effervescing stamens. you're the kind of darkness, where shards of china start collecting into forms with nails, oxygenated and deft. You're the kind of darkness, where dozens of edges in the hurt marl intersect in water, agate hinges float open, converging on equinox. I feel the world is lesser and somehow stronger than the idea of your skin. its rungs and rungs of spoken calc. wheels of Artemisian song and black grasses. The harshest whispers of love hone your eyes. the jagged circumference. the tempered lid. static convulses your seeing. its Mars on soot. some critter might yet chip out of its webbed husk to extend its neck for song
You're the dappled world, brilliant toxin. a choate reprieve. Hair, a triptych of flax and rippled sheaf at break of day. You bear your assiduousness cleanly, your sharpened jaw, your forehead, those enamel cliffs. A ruminant has strewed you thus, over the paper weirs, over the torn lip of the world, its heft of blood. sleet in-the-voice touch. My engrossment, a kitten in snow. beyond ode.
When he is looking at something and beyond the exigent gaze he is an atonal spirit, a little bullied, a little too intent on an sheet of paint its epileptic proportion its yielding stems and cedar crowns. He is bound to his carapace so sweetly, meter, navel, impurity of line. he's a terrible ally for the geometric soul. its not an attractive entrancement. he's the kind of darkness, that eats eats eats the scintilla of an offered sentence. he's the kind of darkness that shears the ray
of the rounded question that aqueous tern where dreams un-prism,
begging to continue
un-finished
The poet's neo-planet
The principles governing
the leonine furies
aren't aerate
or atwinkle like the icy steeds
of Earth's physical clarion-
one tenant unites the flurry
vampires in their patched tuxedos
how the bodies hover, in their nursery blues
a single white rose lumbered with the
ringed pirouette
the prolapse-
a jaguar's chronic harp-lava
Vampires at pith marauding feud-volts
bones, shellacked
in the great infraction of nova
strummed and strummed
corseted jag of that forge;
Vampires waltzing in Vienna
the entirety of ambient tinfoil heaven
against the wailing cortege of black
and the memory of facelessness-
rivers enjambed into champagne bays, like
topaz its square-smoke across Vampire-clavicle
jungles with their smooth baritone
are overcome with hot ebony gospel
How the star newly tossed to fire- mort
girds its sour tongue upon itself
and purls into detonations,
its telluric sickle cracking
the Vampire argonauts
lifting its eye, only once
to diadem of raw salt
its long throat stooped to acquire
the shard pendant,
the Zeus collar,
as
vampires revel a hundred feet below the
paper ear of the sea
Poem in which the memory of love (is pain)
I gave you the key when the door wasn't open,
just admit it.
I gave you the plates of sound where stars veer,
just admit it.
I gave you the sky seething with the nakedness of stars,
just admit it.
I gave you delight and fury, launched above us like clouds,
just admit it.
I gave you months of, flowering months of metamorphosis,
just admit it.
I gave you those about to die at the turrets, mortal,
just admit it.
I gave you the gardens of France, the missals of vanished centuries,
just admit it
I gave you sound painted on lips, as fruit is hung among leaves,
just admit it
In the very middle of our tragedy,
I was martyring memory at your pleasure
and you, a long day seated at your mirror
Combed your golden hair
Every rose I sang, I invented
for
I was on my knees when nobody else was praying
yes, amongst the bitter-rose, the moon rose, the rose of fear
I was on my knees when nobody else was praying
(Composed entirely of lines found in the song 'Where are you now' by Justin Bieber and the poetry of the surrealist Louis Aragon)
Afshan Shafi lives in Lahore, Pakistan and has studied English Literature and International Relations at The University of Buckingham and Regent’s University London. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry Wales, Blackbox Manifold, Clinic, 3am magazine, Ala Champ Magazine, Ink Sweat and Tears, Uut Poetry, Muse India, Full of Crow, New Asian Writing, Black heart magazine, and others. Her prose has appeared in Libas International, Pakistan Today, Daily Times and Good Times Magazine. Her debut chapbook of poems 'Odd Circles' was published by Readings (Pakistan) in 2014. Her collection of poetry (with illustrations by Samya Arif, Ishita Basu Mallik, Marjan Baniasadi) titled 'Quiet Women' is forthcoming in 2017. She is a poetry editor for The Missing Slate and the forthcoming Aleph Review. You can visit her site here.