Kash Baloch — Poetry on Identity, Love, and Survival

Like waxen residue atop a windowsill,  or the smoky traces that outlive the candle, our love survives like hibernated winters, amidst the fuss of reanimated springs. Concealed beneath a single  chrysanthemum's caresses, far beyond the pale of hollowed, summer moons. Aubergine, the artifacts,  of our affections,  embrace me like another Autumn  come and gone  too soon.   Should you forget to cherish our chaotic, midnight memories, remember that I will neglect to honour you, the same, If you fail to fall apart  like the fragile frost of February snow,  I will become as brittle as the brassy bark of  every ancient birch. If a day arrives when your  calloused fingertips soften  from no longer piously sliding across the braille surface of my skin. The very next is when my antedeluvian ears are no longer flooded with the melody that is your song. But, if you should stay devoted to my melancholy, ...

The roaring twenties went out with a bang, and left deafening silence in their place, as idle minds and hands became devilish playgrounds at alarming rates, one black Tuesday darkened an entire decade. As a war widow, she had no choice but to return to the dance halls from her flapper past.  Determined to avoid separation from her children, she jived until her feet bled red, white, and blue. They only saw her bright-eyed encouragement as sunlight bounced off her teeth, and made them sparkle.  Her smile stole their attention from the tears that pooled in those same supportive eyes.   As the massive ship set sail for Emerald Isle, she raised a white-gloved hand and waved goodbye one last time.  She sighed defeatedly, then collapsed onto the mossy dock, for it was all that stopped her, in that moment, from sinking to the depths of her own great depression.

Reaching for a light switch as it  transforms into a ferocious beast,  words fly from my chaotic mind, at record speed, then slip out  from between artificial teeth. I boil water in egg yolk,  then eat a banana peel,  put my pants on backwards,  and fail to separate what's fake  from what I once knew to be real.  Elvis wails as Ella croons inside my head, the whole day through, and I sit, confused about the way  that Billie Holiday could somehow sing the colour blues. Horns outside my window transport me back to safari elephants, as I become convinced that they've returned to give me a taste of my own medicine. In my return to innocence, where everything old is new, I stop to smell the flour, for life is far too short to spend  each day retightening loose screws.

Anxiety's an infestation of the mind, it lays its eggs under my skin, securing a foundation for the home where it will rear its kin.  It is the black widow of doubt, and, simultaneously, its web; the venom in her sac, and yet, the prey within in her net.  When sleeping fears are struck awake, they grin whilst baring fangs, delighted to claim their stake now that it's witching hour.  The eerie thing about irrationality is that it isn't self-aware at all, as it stops to convince us that like a candlelit living room, we also have no power. Untherapeutic thoughts can seem like millipedes, whose rows of feet can be felt as they compete in the Olympic games that are being held inside our chests as we concede defeat.  There are schools of thought that somehow exist believing the past can't be relived.  If that's the case, then I'm ready to take the world by storm as the owner of its first and only time machine.  Unless, instead, I submit the termite...