Creative Voices

By Sufiyan Salman | Edited by Paula Fernandez

Watercolors weeping out of eyes that bleed their merciful misery 

Peeling cuticles until I am a skinned mausoleum of divine trickery 

Nails that yearn to annihilate my narcissistic nihilism away 

Caterwaul of callous vows cascading down calamitous causeways 

Greyish tombs of kids who recede to ashen embers on my screen 

New cities and new lives haunted by ghosts of godly fiends 

“Tell me then,” I turn my head and scream into drowning rains, deadening skies, and deafening lies, “Are you not entertained?” 

Wading grass that cuts my ankles and I bleed with every step 

Polaroids singed into technicolor soot that scald my every map 

Ears don’t hear the blindness of eyes that lips fail to say 

Rue the sight that ignites from the infernal sun of a dying day 

Ridges of withered spine christening a carcass of carnations galore 

A mind of deviant devilish necropolis for a delinquent devilish whore 

“Tell me then,” I bow down before praying mats and cry into the cemented oblivion of the floor, “Are you not entertained?” 

I can crawl on my hands and knees over marble tiles that eulogize me 

I can use forks, blunt knives, razors stripped from casings to dig into my skin and be 

A fanatic phantom fervent for a vacant void of whimsical vilified peace 

A hallowed hell of simple syncopathic ceremonious silence where everything else would cease 

Nothingness that will sink me into paradoxical paradigms and I would exist no more 

The tale of my languished liberation will be etched into the bylines of cowardice’s folklore 

But I would give my life for this cowardice, just to escape from this existence forevermore 

“Tell me then,” I will ask once my bones melt away into pus and seep from the infernal caverns of hell, “Are you not entertained?” 

Can I close my eyes? 

Can the ailing syncopating serendipity shrivel away in sighs? 

Can my dreams dream of depths that delude death to decay? 

Can my blindness aid my astronomy to ashen and ache astray? 

The endings that will end all the futures in the forevers of this infinity. 

Solipsism that is cinders in my palm that sweetens cystic salinity. 

Announcement of the day when all confusion of choice dissipates 

Commencement of the eve when all illusions of resilience escalate 

I could have done more. I should have done more. This didn’t have to be the way. 

I didn’t try hard enough. I didn’t want it bad enough. Now, who would be the one to pray? 

As they stand, side by side, like forsaken angels forsaking the forsaken on funeral day 

Clothed in white shrines, faces swept with millennia of masqueraded dismay 

Tears that’d tear torrents into the ground below just for naked eyes to bear witness 

To the snakes and scorpions that would kiss my deadness until the mud is mad with sickness 

And the screams that will be entombed within that darkness of the pain that I know I will deserve 

And the faithlessness that will forge my damnation to ridicule the peace I preserved 

I will burn and I will die and I will recede and I will cry 

I will outnumber the lives I will die and the ungodly lies will be my highs  

“Tell me then,” I will scream once my blood boils and my face melts into carcasses that beguile the hellish delight, “Are you not entertained?”