Kareem is an EFL teacher and music journalist born and raised in London. He writes fiction on a wide range of subjects, and poetry that explores mystical and spiritual themes. He’s currently working on a novel centred on the perilous fishing industry of early twentieth century Hull and the inspirational matriarchal society that it produced.
https://twitter.com/Kareem_Ghezawi
The Desert
Alone in a plateau of scorched and scoured sand
burnt like bleached bone from the dreams of a sun
yet to be forged from null’s furnace
shattered maroon and cerulean
serene figments of pigments
kaleidoscopic in their memory
waltzed as they waited to be born.
Buried deep in that Arcane Generator
is the electricity that charged the current of thought
and interlocking vice grip of the lovers
that refused to be separated
in their demand
for unending
ecstasy.
Desert of emptiness.
How it always was, and how it seemed it would always be.
Flickers of worlds yet to be created and worlds already destroyed flashed and flickered in the blink of an eye among prickly winds and sloping dunes
where time looks the same
forward
or
backward.
The sand is the civilizations and grounded bones of giants and geniuses
of murderers and monsters their molten sludge fossilized into splinters of static horror.
A lone charred bark carries memory of the plague that swept children into comatose
and extinguished the fires of industry that chained their father’s spirits.
The lone scorpion that scuttles carries secrets
that snowball into myth
whose myth
turns to legend
and whose legend
turns to dream
through this alchemy of these
Unseen Hands.
Tears of Venus
The star is a flickering synapse
a diamond lodged between worlds
propping up exits and entrances
slivers of foreign light leak in.
Folds of iridescent tripe line the skin
then there is the brains and lungs
stripes, spots, suction cups
the split veins spewing vitamins
the billowing water grasses
the carcass residue falling like a light snow
the calcified tongues of curling flame
the wounded knotted lumps.
Bulbous forms scatter vistas on swollen mantles
Sunken belly bedrock, back against sky.
Within, is the unimaginable generator
where threads of light are spun with delicacy
and dark waves ripple the firmament
cultivating Venus’s single milky tear.
Porous sunlight flecked in the warbling.
On a Rooftop
Face down in a shallow stream
flowing with fluids of all four humors
awoken by twin propellers
low altitude circling wing tips lit.
Jammed in a rooftop gully
strewn inside that city wound
sleeping people unaware
he had spewed the world out.
He lay frozen in that muck for an hour.
That stream of several centuries sin
where rainwater was futile
and the outside smelt of the inside
Himself unaware. Himself
not quite there.
A shard of certainty splintered
revolting in twilight’s
fever dream
wails of women lay beside him
Wake up!
Wake up! They scream.
(A helicopter circles but does not throw a rope ladder.)
Still in his cosmic coma
nothing can stir those heavy lids.
Shut sedated IV plugged
Coursing some virulent astral sedative.
He tries to break through, but there is a wall.
A partition of
Solid Silent Stone.
Each brick lain by himself in embryonic past.
In halcyon days eaten by amnesia.
Another day on a rooftop again.
Wrapped in gypsy blankets as airliners trim his hair.
The Eyeless Foal
I awoke from a dream of an eyeless foal
weeping wet with mother’s water
half-painted in vulture shadow
weakly buckling on the meadow.
Joints unable to bear the bulk
bear the bulk of heavy history
bear the bulk of life and death
so it shivered in all the places
weakened and crunched by warring cells
the body a nest of secret violence
blindly it trembled in the mud
blindly it sunk deeper down.
Mother licked foal with heavy tongue
lifted its hind right off the ground
bristles catching all the loose skin
folded and creased like an ancient face
mother’s skull nudged foal along
but the knees folded on the grass
a final scent of barley and burdock
before mother snatched it by the neck
her teeth pressed in a tight vice grip
violently swished from left to right
and the rose bush caught the body limp.
The thorny silence darkly sung
A golden light leaked from the rose
the light reflects in mother’s eyes
flooding those murky orbs with gold
drawing tears like angels’ whispers
she stared at this furnace of sun and soul.
The foal stepped sturdy out the light
It’s empty sockets now filled with diamond
that refracts the colours of new-born night
and an endless meadow stretched out ahead
no lakes no streams no seas no rivers
one field one land one world to graze in
it gallops along the equator’s edge.
A Perfect Mirror
Minarets of baked clay
dank temple of sodden earth
stalagmites
melting
toward
Elysium
a blizzard of blades
poised to wound cloud
a landmine frozen
in skyward explosion
waveform in stasis
oscillating to a pulse.
In the bowels
of living sculpture
a hygienic society scuttles
blind and loyal
workers
builders
soldiers
feeders
farmers
breeders
follow miasma perforating walls
labyrinths leading to alveoli in the earthy lung.
In the grand gallery
lay the sovereign
imprisoned in her
subterranean chamber
bloated with life creating machinery
into the jaws of workers
writhing pupae are brought to nurseries to become
breeders
farmers
feeders
soldiers
builders
workers.
Shadow swamps the colony
red rake blue boots
muffs and mittens
the cathedral roof collapses.
Coptotermes formosanus
earless
eyeless
lack capacity to believe what they can’t sense.
A perfect mirror.
A perfect mirror.