A Fevers of the Mind Poetry Showcase from Khadeja Ali

Sestina of the Crowd

To walk within a crowd,
footsteps muting the sound
of truth inside your voice.
Immutable, that pain.
Invisible, the self
and lost, to a dull hum.

Monotonous grey hum.
Reverberating crowd.
An intense loss of self
while you can make no sound
in a cloud of shared pain
walking with one sad voice.

Weaponizing the voice:
high cries pierce through the hum.
An attempt to speak pain
inside the moving crowd.
Though they all know the sound
that burns inside the self.

One must protect the self.
Don't let it show its voice:
such ugly, painful sound.
It means death of the hum,
or perhaps, of the crowd
and their crusted, old pain.

As for your tired pain,
quiet its sense of self
lest you obstruct the crowd
with its ear-splitting voice.
The safety of the hum
is broken by one sound.

Truthful, exhausting sound--
reverberating pain--
is trauma's secret hum
located in the self,
finding its own voice
within a sprawling crowd.

Are you, at all, the crowd?
Where, indeed, is your voice?
Or are we lost to self?

On Titian’s Venus for his parlour

Note: this poem is a reaction to the Renaissance artwork “Venus of Urbino” by the master Titian
https://www.visituffizi.org/artworks/venus-of-urbino-by-titian/

Venus’ true curve comes not from her lips. Titian looted the curve long ago, bestowing it instead upon her curved finger, rendering it mischievous for eternity. 

Soft velvet breasts, he painted for her. Each of them, along with her finger, desires you. Each mound bathes themselves in gold, glimmering from somewhere out of the world—

out of our world, but from Titian’s. He needed her body as gold. Any other power would be nothing but a curse.

A soft, bulging stomach was necessary, lest we forget her purpose. I guess we live in a world with a mind like a sieve—fertility, the beauty, the belly, the baby, and the woman are all that stays in the net. Her cruelty and power flows beyond the mesh and out of the private room.

The undulations of a man’s vision of femininity is dotted with coin and colour, reflected in  yellow wisps of hair and the notion of a touch the viewer gets to have. How can a Goddess have no say?

In control of Divinity? A mere artist?

We see her truth from the gaze of her empty eyes. Titian could not portray the spark of Divine, not remove his gaze from her.

Is it possible for any artist to remove the lenses from their eyes? They will ask, and you will sew your own mouth shut before giving the answer.

Forget defending the Goddess, you feeble mortal.

As it is, Goddess Venus’ reality is a mirror. Titian could never paint that which he didn’t know. A man is not a reflector, but a transporter to a private reality.

A reality where Venus is stripped for you, in every sense of the word. You can now proclaim her Your Goddess of Love.

Flesh Bag
I’m the waterbed containing all of my organs.
Difficult design, irrational and indecisive:
the promise of bursting with
the threat of withering, and
a constant anxiety filled with bubbles.
Eating is a dice roll with thorns on every face.
Puncture holes never healed on my fingertips,
toetips, footsoles, and handpalms.
I kee making my flesh bag walk on 
the equivalent of lego pieces every day
and then wonder why I need constant bandages. 
We suffer from viscera with a thin lining.
Utter reality is slimy and raw, I’m sorry.
Any beauty lies in the shine
that glimmers off a wound,
and if you think too hard about
which oily fluid releases its iridescence?
You will hate yourself, and your gases
will escape out of all holes with no warning. 

Ripples by Khadeja Ali inspired by Elliott Smith 
A Poetry Showcase by Khadeja Ali