manchaliaina

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Hospital by manchaliaina, literature

Literature

Hospital

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.

The Heat of His Departure by manchaliaina, literature

Literature

The Heat of His Departure

He didn't suffer much. The agonies of measuring the streets would never have him, but at least he knew to count the days by who has not yet died. He meant to map a city with his feet and bring home to her new pictures of his heart. But she never heard the music of roads and shop lights, she only knew his feet that beat the pavement dry. She left home without him. He grew tired of walking but failed to stop, didn't find an edge, didn't fall, but slowly, without a thought to her clouds suddenly above him, dissolved into tar and concrete, wet in his own way. Years later, she would still feel the heat of his departure as she rain

Names Will Never by manchaliaina, literature

Literature

Names Will Never

Write me a poem, I am too tired to write my own. I have no words for beaten women and men in jail, I have a love of love poems - drumming the ground, flying the oceans, sailing - in my mind I have a love of sailing. Write me a poem, I am too sad to beat the drums you'd hear inside oceans, those drums were for love and this isn't love - Write me some quiet. Four days and not one silence came my way. There's just the noise of sticks on ground and sticks on bones and I was wishing for rain and song when the rain came - and that was all I wanted. The rain comes. It washes nothing away from the streets, it sings nothing. It sm

Tulips by manchaliaina, literature

Literature

Tulips

I'm sorry we're still talking about this. My body and your body and bare bodies abounding - there should be nuclear physics in our bedrooms instead, the politics of elevators that go to the moon. Oh I am so tired of tulips and veils. The internet will take me out my windows and doors, the colony gate, into the street and out where I can know I would have been shot but not be shot, see the carnage, not be the carnage (a bomb rips through the city killing one-thirty, two bombs rip through the city killing one-thirty) I'm sorry at one-thirty ay-em that I am still talking about liberation and counting four walls, I should be past

The Rain Came by manchaliaina, literature

Literature

The Rain Came

I dug around for you for days, unhorsing worms from clods of earth until I found the shine that meant you lay beneath. You came out of nowhere, you grew, you wanted to leave. All I had was a shovel and a packed lunch, five pence of foreign money, and all for you. But i ran out too quickly and you wandered off with nothing - not even flowers from another tomb, not even stones or the prayers hanging over long-rested earth. You just went, in the way that you do, and now I wonder where you are and what you do for food and succour. You mustn't worry. I worry (who pulled you from damp earth) but you, you run free. If there is anyt

Sunday Love by manchaliaina, literature

Literature

Sunday Love

any given Sunday in your church - see me taking communion in whatever has become of us - nights flowing to morning like water to water again - any given Sunday of remembrance and your church - and your altar - and your vaulted love of man - see me I am small - my knees rub the earth, I look for Mary and her bright heart - pincushion heart - to toe the line row the boat home - our lady of perpetual holding - water, flooding - mother - mary - mother - mary, see me - given a Sunday to love and no days off - communion for dead hearts in live hands, wet mouths in wet mouths - bombers flying over looking for an earth to land - you

In the Pure by manchaliaina, literature

Literature

In the Pure

She says she doesn’t know love. But in her drift on the sea, there is a love of sand and iron. There is a love of the dead. She won’t come to you like this. A slip of the whirlpool and she’s gone and who knows what she reads in sea beds in that moment in the dry? She is the woman at the shore, the man at her feet and the waiting. She is what you ask for when you say mum - and then more - for a love of the dead keeps her floating and her arms stand open - and it’s your face in her palms you can’t stand - but she loves you. She doesn’t know in the drift of her sea where you’ll be in the

Beatitudes by manchaliaina, literature

Literature

Beatitudes

Suffer the lovers to follow you blinded - they will hold you to the line when the time comes. Suffer the lovers to take you to their city, that would be your city were you wearing the torn-neck clothing they’ve never taken off. Suffer the lovers to hold you because it is love and not wishes keeping you warm and suffer the lovers to leave you dry when you leave them crying at bus stops and coffee shops, a cliché for future stories, a metaphor, an anecdote, a passing thought. Suffer the lover to kill you every night and bring you to life and expect salvation and be decimated. Suffer the lover to love you in ways you

The Flowers Are Dry by manchaliaina, literature

Literature

The Flowers Are Dry

I noted your birthday going past another time. I don't remember your age, but I feel you've moved to some new place and while I don't even want to visit, I'd like to know if you still watch September passing the way I stop to sniff the air in May. You were my first friend in the bunker - and I may hate you now by common formula but I love you in still memory for holding the gun to my loved ones in some vain hope that we could make a run for it together. And so I love another man of slow temper and hidden angers.

If Looking Were Equal by manchaliaina, literature

Literature

If Looking Were Equal

If looking were equal we could call the day "love" and move to a dancing place. Once upon a time, a woman was so unused to being looked at, she broke the mirror, the water, the boat she set sail on. And her lover paddled to shore in desperation, turning back to see if she would show what madness overtook her. And the smile she beamed over the waves as she held tall to the mast of nothing laid it plain: If looking were nothing she would be the Everyman Love, but these eyes that want to open and find and hold will burn as she burns the sun for the light it lends the night. If looking were everything we could write this romanc

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Thanksgiving '04 by manchaliaina, literature

Literature

Thanksgiving '04

What benevolence resides in you, I cannot say; and how I hold you clear and warm against high tide on a rocky beach - it's like glass, a picture windown on a rainy night where you say, "It's really pouring outside." It's still cold; but irrelevant too because you took me home and though I came back, I can say I have seen it - like a sea monster in the surf, of the Virgin Mary in a cheese sandwich, it's palpable - a miracle; a step closer to magic and the breaking of that last barrier before the world turns.

The Revelatory by manchaliaina, literature

Literature

The Revelatory

1. I don't know what's happening. These days the night insists on keeping me bright past the hours of reason and long into the dark sharp time delineated by walls and where the lamp does not swell to. Someone is speaking and I'm afraid it might be someone inside me, quite separate, quite distinct from who I already know to live here. Lines in the mirror, on the shadow are sharper than they were once and maybe even beautiful, but certainly familiarity breeds familiarity and I like it better than beauty. Maybe it's this new body I'm sucking into, sucking and sculpting sucking and refusing out breath - maybe it's malnutriti

Art by manchaliaina, literature

Literature

Art

It doesn't matter a million tongues you wrap around the cosmos as you pass it by, it's what's in the storm of your eyes that'll really move them; and it doesn't matter the miles that you run on the wheel, it's what you said when you fell heel over heel down the toll road to every beautiful land mine; thing is, babe, you're stuck in time and it's not art that'll break your back, it's how you're splayed across the rest of the track, waiting for the steam train to come revelation you home. There's death in it and turning to stone.

I saw you in three pictures by manchaliaina, literature

Telecast by manchaliaina, literature

File by manchaliaina, literature

Letter by manchaliaina, literature

Literature

Letter

for YH and Leke Men are quite wide. Even the delicate strands of them have expanse, the ones voted most likely to be swept away with the tide at exhale or come daylight. It's the set of the shoulders. It's the absence of breasts. There is more room there, in the chest, to make camp for the night, light a fire, peg your tents in deep. It's why, sometimes, people give them the world to hold, why Atlas is always a man - load-bearing silent philosophy, so summer-light warm, so right. It's so summer-light warm tonight. Have you made camp yet, love, are you alright?

Pictography by manchaliaina, literature

Literature

Pictography

1. I have destroyed you in the monochrome. Every time I etch you in stone or metal, print you out on the surface of the sky, I find you incomplete. And eaten. What kind of termite insect blight would take away such ravishment and leave behind no colours? Only archaeological remains, only novelties. I don't understand how I have such power in my hand, how I can bleed you of colour and then erase you of form and how, how you leave quietly, willingly, the deepest grooves in my skin, the shape of where I loved you. 2. Dig up a city to find the long lost love of some unfortunate troglodyte pounding poetry into th

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On the Spit by anarchypress, literature

Literature

On the Spit

On the Spit We don’t know how to be out in the world anymore. Aching with too much love or not enough, I feel obliged to ogle a skinny young woman in a pair of low-cut designer jeans as she squats down and sifts through a plastic bucket for clams. I am the only man around. Her long, dark hair shines, but without my glasses, I can’t make out her face. I jot down words in a beat up journal with my back against a beached drift log. My wife rides another sidesaddle, scrounging for stones and seashells. “Is she pretty?” I ask. “Very pretty,” she teases in her little-girl voice. She may even mea

this is how it is by alyryianis, literature

Literature

this is how it is

you took to Europe to forget. oblivion in the cathedrals, in the Berlin skyline, each train seat as it sticks to your legs a token, the fields rushing through your chest. a fiancée who kissed a seventeen-year-old girl; you hit the floor of a Florence bar, dancing. a father dead from an excess of choice; every stained glass window abandons you. this is how it is, now. one of us is silent; the other simply runs.

four poems about being tired by completeaccident, literature

Literature

four poems about being tired

for me I. Well, there's not much meaning to Life just now. She's very busy doing life things, doing dishes and laundry, keeping things in the pantry and finding the floor sometimes in everything else. The sun comes out, sometimes, so she recharges while she can, and then maybe she has a little less dusting to do. One less hobo freezing on the corner. She schedules coffee breaks, and misses them, of course, but she makes up on the weekends, drops a couple balls down the quarter slot and calls it good. She's oversexed and everyone loves her too much on Sundays when the moon isn't too full. She thinks sleeplessness tastes like

Anatomy by alyryianis, literature

Literature

Anatomy

eight I remember collapsing with the weight of comprehension on top of Suzuki volume three. curled on the beige sofa clutching a half-sized rental. suddenly realizing the power of pure harmony. ten I played for men in scrubs who had come to fix my grandfather to blinking machines. it was the only thing I knew how to do. my mother told me to stop. The noise was distracting the ambulance staff. I hid in my room until they left. twelve I remember thinking why can't I be first? they're all so much better. so I asked myself if I would be happy without being the best. fourteen I watched my reflection in a window. Bach A Min

Paper Raincoats by thestrand, literature

Literature

Paper Raincoats

I heard a song and a sip of tea too strong for me, But I took it anyway The way bells ring sometimes only in the West I'd like to think time would wait for me in the cloud pockets like bags collecting mail, slow this down slow me down So I can feel this My skin never dries under the paper raincoat, And she says, "Well at least when its wet it can't cut you" but she doesn't know She doesn't know that I would love to bleed Some colour in the grey, some ice cream sandwiches and peanut butter Some light caught in the leaves The green I need some in me But the paper just molds to me and tears and makes its way towar

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Strangest Fog by manchaliaina, literature

Literature

Strangest Fog

Strangest fog, this illness. Sylvia talked of tulips and white hospitals when I was seventeen, and I thought, "This is morose. This is what maudlin is meant to mean. What strange self-indulgence." And now, I see the inside, or I saw it, once. It's when the eyes recede into the caverns of the mind, like cupping your hands at your temples, except it's bone and skin, in walls around you and the bright at the end of the tunnel is really very white. Strangest fog. Walk like your body is not your all. Talk like a tin can kicked down the road to sandstone, soapstone lives you've lived, built from the matter of your mind, abrasive,

Strangest Fog

manchaliaina

About manchaliaina

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Artist

Pakistan
Deviant for 19 years
www.kylapasha.com/
She / Her

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My Bio

Current Residence: Lahore
Favourite genre of music: American folk, feminist kickass, good poetry put to music

Favourite Movies

Dogma, Wings of Desire

Favourite Bands / Musical Artists

Tori Amos, Ani DiFranco, Eminem, cat power

Favourite Writers

Audre Lorde, Sylvia Plath, Ursula LeGuin, Michelle Tea, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Joss Whedon

Tools of the Trade

you

Other Interests

Good TV, writing, religion, cooking

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manchaliaina

Jan 16, 2008

and still more

0 min read

new poems at http://kylapasha.com/main which is where i live now. DA is great and I'll post here off and on, but mostly off. so come on over if you feel like it. New poems are under "So Fresh!" Voice is under ".mp3s" thanks, kyla

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manchaliaina

Nov 13, 2007

New Poems

0 min read

Winter's here so I'm in a writey stage. Also the world is going to hell in wickerwork so it's now or never, y'know? So there's some new stuff up. I put two up together just now because I'd love feedback and I don't know when in my insanely and suicidally busy life I'll have time to do this sort of thing again. Anyway. MAL I miss you. Dasall folks. kyla

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manchaliaina

Jul 21, 2007

DD Love!

0 min read

I got another DD yesterday on To Go Far, which was completely unexpected - one, because I thought that you topped out at 2 DDs around here and two, because that poem has been such a pain in my bum that I still can't see it as a real poem and will probably have to bury it in a deep hole for twenty years and come upon it accidentally to have a proper critical view of it. But I am sore grateful to those involved. I haven't been on DA much lately because I don't have internet at home a lot of the time (long story). Also I haven't written much poetry this year, as compared to years past, and what I've written I've not been enthused by. But this

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Profile Comments 150

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zebrazebrazebra

May 1, 2011

Foof, I just saw your name in my recently visited, and I thought to myself, there's the name of someone I miss to death.

manchaliaina

Dec 27, 2012

Goodness, it's been ages since I've been here. I just read your newest. And I had the same thought, a year and a half later. I hope you're well and fat with poems.