Creative Voices

By Sufiyan Salman | Edited by Lisa Duncan

I sit here, staring blankly at the canopy of this blank page

Fingers infantilized, pragmatism pacified, nirvanas nullified in this rustic rage

I sit here with nothing to say; conundrums calling out from this calcified cage

My words are faltering, they die on bylines for all the wars they fail to wage

My sanity is delirium, my empathy is episodic, my sadness is a contagion

I can get torpedoed, right here, and die in the pool of tears that leak from my pen

This room is rent asunder; runed ruminations from residual relics burn on the floor

My notebooks; inked solace that now runs in rivers into crevices by devious doors

These lunar lunacies that illuminate my lunacy etch the loss of the Leviticus I swore

And I have become a whore to my sadness and for my sadness I have become a whore

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The pillow carrying the scent of my midnight musings wears the shape of my face

It is singed with my cynicism, it is Salem for my corpse from all the gallows I grace

The formaldehyde of the sheets feels exotic, and I sink and drown within their daze

I stopped breathing a long time ago and the air hangs like a crucified christening

Blessing my deadly beguilement with infernal baptism that leers all lethargic listening

My friends are dying on phone calls a thousand miles away, a thousand lives away

My morality is now immoral, my mortality is now immortal, my belied beliefs I now betray

There is nothing else. There is no one else. There is no reason, no evidence, no decree to astray

These livid lives that kill me, this dying that deceives me, this hypnotic hysteria that inveighs

This room is a death sentence; a conviction I gladly entertain, now there is nothing left to decay

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The ceiling is painted with murals and maps for all the ways I can begin to carnage and kill

Myself and my hallowed hate and my Machiavellian meanderings and my conniving thrill

The windows in this room let in no light, and the darkness prays to be freed from my ill

And the wood of the floors has given away and all the furniture has sickened into septic stills

I can’t see in this room, neither can I hear, speak, feel or vilify the villainous wicker of my will

But I am not alive, neither am I dead in this abysmal abyss of absolution that I ingest in my pills

Is this existence a Celtic ritual for the criminally insane? Is this living a limbic vertigo for my hell?

My religion is already deviant, Lord, is this castration a celebration? Is this damnation my eternal dwell?

And these words, they are Archaic and perverted, Lord, this psychology is cystic and oblivious, Lord,

My intelligence is an impersonation, my literature is languid deliberation, my poetry is perverse, Lord,

I do not believe it! I do not believe it! I refuse to perceive it! These hoarse rhythms are just juvenile hordes

I am bald, I am barren, I am unknowing, I am fake, I am Judas to my justice, I am Jezebel to your apostasy, Lord!

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I can spew my putrid sadness within this room but Mammon would find my greed wanting

I can conjure villanelles vowing to my wisdom but Samael would declare my divinity daunting

I can bejewel my inaptitude as a labyrinthine façade owing acumen to my biblical conning

But this room will be my ruin, this room will witness my bawling once the sun comes taunting

Because this room is an incarnation of my inbred self-pedigree that fornicates Socratic taunting

Because this room is my melodramatic madness, my irreverent reckless that wails haunting

Because this room is my insipid inspiration, my volitional exile that commands all my calling

And I will write into the caverns of this grave, I will despise my despair and weave it into whimsy

I will die a thousand deaths and decorate each epitaph with astounding alliteration and fanatical flimsy

I will observe the dissolution of my dramedies, pen suicide notes addressed to my creativities

I will prostrate to the necrophilia of my remedies, ordain my masochism as daily proclivities

And that will be my alchemy, and that will be the psychosis of my selfish mythology

And I will die imprisoned in this room; the ungodly ordination of my own pseudology

But this is my divine alchemy, and this is the decreed ode to my vicious vanity

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