From my book "Not In My name" published 2011 - part 2, the new politics is being waged online where it is far more vicious and bloody...
"Blog:
17th May 2006 / 27th Rabia Awal 1427
Another-
the last- fitting for my nuptial dress. Has me more than a little nervous. Only
natural of course. My fingers are trembling and I can’t do up a single clasp. The
seamstress clicks her tongue in sharp disapproval and says such conduct would
be unbecoming on the big day itself. The girdle feels tight, even though I have
barely eaten this last week, despite cautioning from those around me to
maintain my strength. I have even surrendered up my beloved gelatis. But today
I feel I can treat myself to a bombe glacée. A last trifling indulgence, before
the most profound change occurs in my life. And if I spread a couple of inches
under its calorific assault, then I’ll just have to suck in my stomach, which
with the likely state of my breathing tomorrow, shouldn’t be too hard a task. I
force myself to think pure thoughts by envisioning my betrothed before me, as
the seamstress gingerly packs up my raiment. And in conjuring such happy
thoughts, a smile breaks out to envelop the worry lines around my pensive brow.
Now my lips quiver only with joy. Such a remedy never fails. Tomorrow we shall
be conjoined for ever. I leave the premises to search out my ice cream, once I
have safely stored the vestments. Now it is just a question of killing time.
*
With all
the trepidation, it’s been a very long and sleepless night. As the light faded,
my thoughts flared around me, projected into the formless shadows moving on the
wall. Car headlights seared their way through my shutters and churned and
roiled my ceiling, making me dizzy and disoriented. Shutting my eyes did
nothing, as they managed to prise through the membranes of my eyelids. How thin
and insubstantial all of my body feels at this time. My flesh a flimsy curtain,
partitioning the unknown chambers ahead.
I rose
from bed and am now carving this for the want of something to do. Of course
they left me no means of communicating with the outside world. But they did
leave me a knife for self-protection and when I had blunted that, I used the
flints sheared off from the stone walls of the room itself. Had other brides
and grooms to be, been put up here before me? Then the building will tell its
tale as well as my own.
My
overriding thought right now, would to please be permitted some sleep, so I am
not too befuddled for tomorr- or later today as it now is. I’m going back to
bed, doubtless to joust some more with my ceiling-borne demons overhead. Whence
death seemingly always comes, in our insignificant part of the world. Where the
sky is forever falling in.
*
A
pealing siren outside woke me, even though it was far away in the distance. A
presentiment of ill-fortune? But again I just marinade my mind with thoughts of
my beloved opening his arms in welcome and all such anxieties melt away and me
with it back into my furtive dreams. Wherein my Mother soon intercedes.
Bustling and barging the angelic bystanders as she cuts a direct path to me.
Standing now right in my face, eclipsing even the joy of my light, for she
would not approve of such an espousal. This is not exactly an elopement, yet
still she cannot know till after the event. I have recorded her a message to
explain the matter. But her forceful image has demanded an explanation of me before
she is even in the know. A lingering last vestige of guilt.
Mother,
the sole message is I love you. Even as I seemingly repudiate you by this act.
I am not propelling myself away from you. This you must understand. How I love
you more than anything else on this earth and I am beaming this message to you,
with greater force than all the generative force soon to adorn my belly, that
will pull us apart merely on this plane. In my absence, you will receive only
greater honour. Till we are ultimately reconciled in Paradise. My Mother and I
hug, seemingly unconditionally as she did when I was a baby. And finally I fall
into a dreamless sleep.
18th May
2006 / 28th Rabia Awal 1427
I
imagine hearing another siren, but as I groggily come round, I realise it is my
beeping alarm clock. An adhan summoning me to my calling. My salvation. I shut
it off. I’ll be present at my union soon enough. Lying here, I try and evoke an
image of the light of my life in the future, but nothing comes. It’s as if my
thoughts are like birds, flying in confusion and without navigation during an
eclipse, as my rapidly beating heart has blotted out the sun. So I do what I’ve
been steeled to do and I use it to my advantage. I am to enter the core of this
black sun, and ball it up in my hand. Driving the fingers till they seal my
palm. Thereby readmitting the light to embrace me once again. Ha, already the
quickened pulse recedes. Resumes its orderly place in the background. But do
not be fooled. That faint tick, tick, ticking, is the sound of my seething
heart, walled up behind the thorns and briars of my sin. How they dam up my
heart from God. Now is the time to purge them like an infernal machine, back
whence they came. Return my pure being back to the bosom of God. For He cannot
be contained. My heart is fit to irrupt, its furious palpitations cannot be
accommodated a moment longer.
I swing
my legs out of bed. My bare feet meet the cold stone of the flags. All the more
felicitous then, since a grave will be yet colder. I wash myself from a bowl of
water, letting the precious liquid trickle back down to its source. Our
adversaries would deny us even this most basic of elements. As I bathe them, I
devote each one of the two hundred bones in my body to you my Love. And by my
actions, I imagine we will share them in turn with five times that amount of
suitors, dispersed like passing out wedges of wedding cake. Spearing into their
trespassing hearts, as we entwine and are yoked together into death. Then there
is the added confetti of nails and ball bearings, only this time it will be the
bride showering the congregation. Even my virginal veil of modesty shall be
aflame and sail through the air combusting all it brushes against. My flying
blood will baste their foreheads with the indelible sign of their guilt. The
liquid in the bowl is still once again.
I hope
my laving is suitably thorough, but I am without any mirror for inspection. One
isn’t to wake on the morn of one’s self-appointed expiration and glimpse dread
in the eyes. No photos to kiss either, no earthly tugs at all to corrode the
will. To blunt my whetted mind. Instead I picture weaving my own carpet. I who
have nothing, can still donate this wedding gift. As they deny us the wool
because we have no land to breed sheep and we have no looms to spin it within
our flimsy, cramped houses, so then will I fashion mine from blood and bone. I
aim to weave the largest rug that is humanly possible from my frame, to drape
the entire tarmac between two bus stops. And my signature, will be my essence mingled
in with theirs. They who are so precious about collecting and burying every
last drop of their blood spilt, will not be able to determine if it is mine or
theirs. Blotting me up with their paper as they do with their own. How they
will waste such resources in taking precise, forensic care of my remains, it
will almost be like they are forced to yield me the same worth as their own
burnt offerings. But for all this, I will yield them no insights. Other than
reinforcing that which they choose to remain wilfully blind to.
I’m
ready. This time I rig myself with barely a faltering in my fingers. The clasps
all snap home. The girdle still feels tight, but now hangs heavy, arrayed with
the wedding gifts lavished last night by my escort. What a most generous gift
he has seen fit to bestow upon me. The needles to unstitch with. The pattern in
my mind. At last, for the first time in our despoiled land, my belly feels
fecund.
19th May
2006
20th May
2006
21st May
2006
Gone
The
requested resource
/
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