Poetry

Decomposition Into Ghazal / Asim Khan

after Robinson Jeffers

i am trying not to write this lying in the meadow as the ants crawl over me the
sensation of their legs on my skin air tangled within their spiracles like
in my past life when i breathed through straws and expired trying to clear my mind of
carbon only to be undressed now by the earth inhuman susceptible
to periodic elements where i am transformed into an ark of opportunistic organisms
heavy rains that will disperse the burrowing insects with the thoughts
stapled to my forehead questioning whether i left the gas on whether i ever did
get round to setting myself on fire the eggs laid in my wounds gentrifying
like an ecosystem from a documentary such extinctions i did not visit how these
concerns instead discovered me seemingly i too am an abandoned metaphor
a mass extinction event god knows and is unhappy how i turned out
even the rocks will speak of this brief history i the nervous breakdown of
minerals i who was addicted to my own hypocrisies rotting into a ghazal
with endless refrain in which i have already chosen the radif of love
love with an unspecified half-life in its decay love in the time of annihilation
love commensurate with my grief lost on the edges of this severity
yet at some point these words will dissolve i believe in a beauty beyond my
destructions that if i can lose myself i can become part of the beauty
how the worms will play my notes like an organ fugue singing the soft interchange
of crisis and cosmos soon i will become the ghost of a wailing deer haunting
this house like moisture on skin open to negotiations with extinct and forgotten
animals spaces and species that distrust my humanity but accept my body that
a better life still exists within me within a deeper time despite all that has
happened always the possibility of love that i should die into this:

as a child digs the soil to bury memory displaces love
as a seed split prematurely erases love

like a garden severs wrists when cleared of thorns
unlocks a path that steers light and retraces love

to be tender in the fire that separates the night
as a corpse without name embraces love

to learn to live in creatures beyond ourselves
to befriend a loneliness that misplaces love

we who are wild in our vast wilderness
searching for a simple forgiveness where the grace is love