mattarah

[mattarah]

I dare to dream this tonight: a solid purple sky so full of drunken ambitions that when it rains later every broken seventeen-year old student finds a purpose in life. Maybe there is no light at the end of the tunnel, only the tunnel just dissolves when you decide to wake up. I don’t quite know which way is up but I do know we’re so happy to be alive tonight.

haider m, Epiphany

[mattarah]

Dependability; the air I breathe, the way the ceiling fan clicks when it spins, this earth on its tilt and time slipping out the door. Hair turning grey and numbers churning in my stomach. Dependability; the space between your two front teeth; the only thing between right and wrong is the way you ask the question. Ask away then. Do you think, in a burning house, in the affair of flames eating up your carpet, your books, your pictures, your everything, I won’t swoop in to save you? Ask me when. Ask me how. Ashes to ashes, wasn’t it? You walk into rooms and suddenly all the oxygen in the air catches fire.

haider m, Dependability

[mattarah]

I. This rose is a rose and my hands are yours. I’m a work of art seen in your eyes; behold the lover: his hair caked with snow, his lips cracked with stillness, his heart beating too loudly for his chest, his hands warm with a bouquet of flowers. II.A rose is a rose be it dead or alive. You can’t shut your eyes and call them tulips. Same as me. You can’t just shut your eyes and call me a stranger. I smell of roses because I’m always standing in the middle of a garden for you, I’m holding out my arms like I’m giving myself to nature, she is reclaiming me for herself. III.The dead man is a dead man. And his old house creaks with emptiness, and silence and soon the garden in his backyard drops it’s last petal, and is lost forever. I can’t promise you forever but I’ll always tend to the garden. I’ll keep your red roses and your tulips and every little flower that blooms in your name alive for as long as I can.

haider m, Roses

[mattarah]

Weave sunflowers into my hair, I’ll sing to you songs of being free. We can hold our hands out in the sun, and maybe tomorrow it will hurt lesser than today; my inkpot spills dark blood into the paper and I write about you like some old heartache. Maybe I’m sleepless, maybe I’m in love again, who is to say who I am but me, and I say I’m in love. I’m in love with you.

haider m, Lovesong: Light vs Dark

[mattarah]

I’ve lost the ability to love you because you’re built of ice and melting, and sadly, my hands have gone numb.

haider m, What We’ve Lost

[mattarah]

In the wintertime, you create ghosts out of my name when you say it. And now I’m trapped between this world and the next like I’m searching for something to let go of, but I don’t know yet, my hands stuck somewhere between the spaces of your fingers and the pull of God asking me to let go already.

haider m, About The Ghosts That Haunt You

[mattarah]

I. We didn’t drift apart,  we separated into lone stairs- you at top and I at the bottom. We didn’t fall apart, we dissolved into the fabric of every day slowing coming apart, tearing across the seams. II. I fell quicker to the ground than you did almost as if I could cushion the blow. I’m looking into mirrors, and they’ve always warned that objects in the mirror are closer than they appear, but I waft through this haze and you’re but a dream reflected. III. This cigarette won’t burn long enough for you to disappear into smoke or walking through doorways- forgetting the rest of the story. IV. We’re caught looking at each other like we’re about to fall apart, but my hands are tied to wanting to let go. V. All my I love you’s sound like mirrors shattering and I’m holding them all, I don’t even care, I’m bleeding language, and I’m ignoring the fact that in this reality, we’re probably already broken. I fell in love with you in every language. Even in silence.

haider m, Ignorance; Bliss

[mattarah]

I wonder what sugarplum gave you its fruit that you're like this: dripping honey in words, dazzling everyone in sweetness.

haider m, Four and Twenty: You Are What You Eat

[mattarah]

You drew a cloud around yourself when you were born. Carrying rain wherever you went, hands like thunderbolts, eyes like the dark of the moon: a mystery, something only to be guessed at, unknown. You became a myth in the hands of a flawed God who lived inside your head; a Zeus of broken clockwork, grinding its gears, and tirelessly feeding you lies. Outside the tyranny of your head, people wondered what it must be like to know someone so quiet, silence must roll off her tongue like a lovesong. You thought you had a face only a mother could love, a collage of imperfections stitched together, like a quilt of disbelief. And I pulled at the loose thread till the curtain came apart. Almond eyes, deep brown like caramel left a luscious moment too long on the stove. A nose so shapely, even Nefertiti would blush. Behind your smoke and your mirrors, was the oldest twenty year old girl I’d ever known, who shied away from the Sun. And now the moon spins slower, just to bounce its light off you a little longer.

haider m, The Girl

[mattarah]

Some days I just close my eyes and try to remember what you looked like, but when I do, I’ll change something every time. Some little detail that I’ll forge out of the instability of memory. Like an outlaw of descriptors, taboo should I begin to realise. A subtle change here, a swap of hands there, and I’m creating alternate realities. Like a wisp of your hair falling on your face like a waterfall of red, or the cookie crumb resting its last days on the banks of your chin. The vermilion of your lips quivering in the cold, chapped like a land in drought. The danger of catching your gaze, the safety in your holding it. I’m mad about the idea that we both share the same sun. And that somehow I’ve touched your skin on a winter day, and made you feel warm. It should be illegal to be that beautiful.

haider m, The Outlaw Descriptor

[mattarah]

I. You’re one in a million pieces of red confetti bursting out of my paper-box chest. Every time you kiss me, I explode like an unpinned grenade hitting the ground, but I’m full of love, instead of gunpowder. This feels like a dream. II. I’m in love with the snow falling slowly over our bed; the shape of you against the light like some art I don’t understand, the silhouette of your hourglass breaking against my hands and time slips away from me. This is not a dream, III. you said. This is real. This hungry feeling of being. This incomplete theory that in the end, we’re going to be together. It doesn’t matter how you look at it: the beginning, the middle or the end of it. A still life painting of a relationship. IV. In a million stars, you broke the brightest, and fell.

haider m, One In A Million/ Shape of You

[mattarah]

You needed help. Hands too tired to work, dirt resting on your brow, sweat, blood dry on your skin. The chimneys of love gone cold, the soot in your throat coughing up names of people who broke your heart. My love, let your eyes rest. You’ve teared your way home, and now it’s my turn to blow at the coals, and keep you warm.

haider m, Needing Help