Mom & Dad
By: Jehangir Saleh
Written: April 23, 2008

The way of love is not
a subtle argument.

The door there
is devastation.

Birds make great sky-circles
of their freedom.
How do they learn it?

They fall, and falling
They’re given wings.

– Rumi

Liar
By: Jehangir Saleh
Written: February 8, 2008

You promised me
Paradise
And gave me
A parade
You promised me
At the top of future
But my future sank below
My past
I wanted apple
Juice and got pee
You promised me

What Are These Words
By: Jehangir Saleh
Written: December 2, 2007

if not an attempt at fire
if not moments prior to rain
clouds still deliberating

what are these words
if not hesitation that precedes everything
language boiling
collecting, forming like sea foam
like colonizing bacteria
building heat
resistance

will I allow these to speak
or to invade our understanding
pushing forward
and forward still

if you are quiet enough
you can hear them crackle and burn
you can read into these words
mould them as you wish

I don’t know what these words mean
but accept full responsibility
until you receive them
and they belong to you

Mirror With A Stetchy Beginning And No End
By: Jehangir Saleh
Written: October 2, 2007

1.
Walking downtown
massive structures
resist the temptations of gravity
I decide to believe I am happy
even though
I’m developing various diseases
and ignored the outstretched hand
of some homeless
too caught up in whether
happiness was something
I want to associate myself with

2.
with all the TV sets tuned to the same show
the 8th ward was a damp cave where revelation
was replaced by day-time soap opera dialogue
The door to your room was heavy, displeased
Letting out a deep, creaky groan
Informing the nurses
Someone was entering or trying to escape
There were no windows
(They had taken away the ability to regret)
You sat on a chair beside your unmade bed
Happy to see me, as always
Didn’t matter that you’d forgotten who I was

the foundations of the nursing home
persisted against
the collective voice
urging it to fall from within

3.
Line for WAITING FOR GODOT

4.
I’m not trying to say ‘this is who we have become’
It’s much worse: there’s no clear reflection, everything is possible

here I am hanging my dying friend’s
genitals on the wall

but close your eyes
try to remember what you believed.

The Game Of Hide And Seek
For Shanda
By: Jehangir Saleh
Written: July 20, 2007

There are three floors to my world
You are located on the third
How is it that two people can practice;
The seem routine
In the same place
With the same people
And never see one another?
You and I must be special
For there is no other one I play this game with

By: Jehangir Saleh
Written: July 1, 2007

My dear friends

Some of you did not know me in the time of my youth when I worked the late shift at the Cafe’ on New Years eve, kept the company of old lonely men, listening to jazz and sipping espresso – feeling full of purpose, feeling sad but with a touch of infinity.

If you did know me then, I likely sent you my favourite Leonard Cohen poem. Leonard, in all his victimhood, decides to dance on New Year Eve, placing his hat on his concussion, despite the SS monsters, despite his STD, despite broken this or that, despite, despite, despite.

Despite is still one of my favourite words, along with perhaps and vaccum.

But on another such evening, I am writing to tell you that these words are shifting. At night I feel something changing: the language stuck to my body is being re-written, my flesh has decided to do otherwise .To tell a different story. A story more real.

If I ask you who you are, you will tell me a story. Some of it will be fiction. Some of it real.

What does real mean? Not only “correct” or “right”. Real means that you mean it. That it is important. That you would keep it that way. It is a feeling of infinity – something beyond you that you keep in your story. Just like Kant’s sublime, or Plato’s Form of the Good. Plato asks Socrates to describe something beyond the world. Socrates, lost for description, uses the metaphor of the sun: the sun being something from which everyone comes to be. This beyond knowledge or language, yet Plato takes what is beyond and weaves it into his narrative of metaphysics as the Form of the Good. He makes the infinite real. Impossible, of course, except in a story. I’m not sure how yet, but the research I was doing trying to understand the experiences of chronically ill patients , like myself, is tied into all of this. It too was about something beyond.

Please forgive me if I sound spiritual or campy. That is not where I wish to go. I am struggling with language.

This is what I have learned. What all of you, directly and indirectly, have taught me. These are some fragments that are becoming increasingly important to me.

I wanted to write to thank you; in my sloppy, hobbling manner, this is what I am pushing toward.

Goodnight.

Jehangir

Story
By: Jehangir Saleh
Written: January 2, 2007

Read! And thy Lord is Most Bountiful, –
He who taught (The use of) the pen
Taught man that
Which he knew not.
– The Quran, sura 96 (Al-Alaq), 3 – 5 translation A. Yusaf Ali

An illusion by which we can become / More real.
– Ben Okri, Mental Fight

When you’re new to dying, time becomes the ultimate commodity; much time is spent trying to preserve time. Activities are measured carefully against one another and are ranked in terms of the predicted amount of happiness they will produce. Then you begin to question your idea of what happiness really is. Inevitably all this questioning and calculation will only lead to the ultimate question: is this all there really is? Today I answered yes. Yesterday I answered no. I hope I live long enough to answer yes, and it’s all I could possibly need.
But the doctors make you wait. It’s waiting that often takes up all of your time.
“I’m sorry I’m late. Let’s get right to it.” I could describe my doctor but she isn’t terribly important. Just use your imagination. “Take a deep breath,” she says.
She listens to the two dying dogfish flopping about in my chest cavity. “I think we should change your meds and wait a couple of days, see how they respond”. She makes some notes.
“How long?” I ask.
“The nurses told me you’re writing a story. What’s it about?”
“Death.”
“Don’t think like that”, she warns, “it’s not going to help. Try and be positive”.
“I know. It’s just a story”, I say.

I look inside each patient’s room while walking down the hallway made narrow by garbage bags of dirty hospital gowns and bed sheets; each is in familiar tableaus. Doctors in white lab coats holding their clipboards look serious and reflective, while the nurses with their sympathy apply comfort like hand cream. Family members hiding behind hero masks to ask “the tough questions” while the patient, the protagonist, feels that these theatrics are silly. All plays have the same ending.
Consider Ms. Azim who is knitting light blue booties for her grandson while she waits for the TB that immigrated with her six years ago from India to make each breath feel and sound more and more like her lungs are full of rusty nails. She sits on her chair knitting while she considers how all of her actions, life experiences, people she’s met, have lead up to this very moment where she has become utterly unhappy and alone. I imagine her to be visualizing the history of her life backwards, reviewing the images as they are displayed, burning her mind, trying to figure out why she ended up here. But there’s nothing she can do. There never was.
We are all robotic; look closely, you can see the forces silently exerting their control. Just sit and endure. Most patients understand this; they have stopped pretending to be free.

I am reading a myth that Terry gave me called The Legend and Destruction of Kash. It was about the city of Kash where priests watch the moon and stars to determine when God wants the king to be killed. The kings choose a companion and the priests choose a flame keeper that die with him. The story begins with the succession of a new king named Akif, who chooses Far-li-mas, a slave and storyteller, as his companion of death. The priests appoint Sali, youngest sister of the new king, to maintain his flames. One day God allows the king to realize that the constellations could soon dictate his death. He is scared and summons Far-li-mas to tell him a story. The stories are so powerful they cause Akif to enter a deep unconscious state. With stories more potent than hashish the slave storyteller becomes as popular as a king.
One night before telling the king and his company a story, Far-li-mas notices Sali and they fall in love. She doesn’t want to die and Far-li-mas agrees to help save her. Sali goes to see the priests and convinces them to hear one of Far-li-mas’s stories, arguing that these stories are greater than the writing of the constellations. When the priests hear Far-li-mas’s stories they forget to watch the stars and the moon and are no longer able to tell when the king is supposed to die. Akif, Sali and Far-li-mas do not have to die prematurely. Storytelling saves the day.
Terry believes in stories. We always seem to end up the hospital together. When I see him outside his room he has taken the oxygen prongs out of his nostrils and is resting his heavy body – full of steroids and retained water – against his IV pole. He has a round face, bald head and reminds me of a dying prophet who poorly attempts stand-up comedy.
Terry was breathing heavily, trying to squeeze the oxygen out of the air and into his lungs. Together we sounded like a lawnmower engine running out of gasoline.
“Good day to you sir,” he said smiling. “How is the poet laureate of ward six?”
“I’m ok. But I’m not sure this writing thing is going so well.”
“That’s what you said last week.”
“I feel like I’m pushing all the blood into my brain the words on the page are going nowhere”.
“Maybe you should stop thinking about living up to the entire canon of English literature and just write about what’s around you. What was the first word Gabrielle spoke to Mohammed?”
“God said ‘read’, not write.”
“To read is to write. Both acts search for and construct meaning in a system of reality made up of the words on a page. It is all that we can know to be real. Every man is born a scribe. It is already in you.”
“But Mohammed couldn’t read.”
“He did not need to know how. He ran home scared to Khadijah. Maybe he never read at all. But he told someone about the experience, and it was written down, turned into a story” I do not understand what Terry is trying to explain. He paused, took some quieter breaths, and smiled at me.
“Did you read that legend I gave you?”
“Yes I did.”
“Let’s talk about it tomorrow. Say around lunch time?” No one called it “lunch time” anymore except Terry. Confronted daily with processed, canned or preserved food, eating had become a necessity.
“I will bid you a good day sir”, said Terry. “I’m off to the library before it closes.”
“There’s a library in the hospital?”
“You didn’t know? It’s mostly full of romance novels and outdated medical books. But there are some comics and the occasional classic.”
Terry starts to wheel his IV pole and oxygen tank down the hall. He makes it a couple of doors down, lets out a rusty sigh, and puts his oxygen prongs back in his nostrils. Terry looks back at me and says, “If you don’t believe me, maybe you should think about where this so called urge to create comes from”. I nod, he smiles, turns around and carries on down the hall.
There is something about writing. Each time I end up in the hospital, I take an inventory of everything that I believe to be intrinsically valuable. Last time I took sex off the list. Before that family didn’t make the cut. This time, I was down to only human beings, until I decided to add writing. I’m not sure I can explain the logical process that allowed me to arrive at this conclusion. It seems impossible to argue for the intrinsic value of anything; there is nothing you can appeal to that proves writing is good in itself except writing itself. I keep writing this story but I’m not really sure why.

At night King Akif becomes scared. He remembers that any day, through the language of the cosmos, he will be summoned to die. He calls Far-li-mas to begin a story. The king listens; soon he is in the deepest sleep. Far-li-mas continues and king forgets to breath. Every night Far-li-mas tells the king a story. No longer is the king afraid to die.
At night I listen to the orchestrated breathing of the respiratory ward patients who are entering various stages of sleep. During sleep the body uses less oxygen, breathing becomes shallow, organs calm down and we move toward death. Most deaths occur at night when the ward is still and quiet.
In the room across from mine is an old man with his two daughters who are watching the hockey game on mute. Images of strong, dominant men are projected on their tired and frightened faces. Last night, without the hockey game, his daughters sat on chairs around their father’s bed in a strange, silent tableau. Tonight they are grateful that the Leafs are not yet out of the playoffs so they can watch the game they hated as young girls with their father who is soon going to die. I do not know their father’s name but I feel I should give him one. Terry is already taken so I’ll call him Alex. Alex is on a respirator and cannot leave his room. There is a part of me that wants to meet him.
I read over what I’ve written. It’s pretty terrible. “It’s getting late, you should go to sleep”, says the night nurse peaking in through the doorway. “I’ll bring you some sleeping pills”.
I sit upright in my bed while I wait for the little blue pills to absorb into my blood stream and carry the drowsiness to my brain. I wait, lay down, and close my eyes. The collective breath of my fellow patients is the struggle of a pile of overweight sparrows whose wings have been torn off unintentionally by a curious twelve year old boy. I open my eyes quickly and keep them open until the air burns my retinas. I imagine myself as a dying bird, no wings, twitching for air. And then I fall asleep.

Everyone is given a needle first thing in the morning; no one would wake up if they had a choice. The ambulatory nurse this morning is a Filipino woman whose breasts almost touch my head as she leans in to draw one of the four required vials of deep red blood. I watch my life flow into a little glass container. She doesn’t speak, alternating between smiling at me and looking out the window. “All done”, she says, and smiles at me again before she leaves.
Those vials will be taken to the lab downstairs where the blood will be spinned until it separates. Its composition will be analyzed to determine at what rate the body is losing the battle. Or, as Terry says, how fast the body is learning to stop its resistance and accept that soon it will be free.

Terry came to see me just before noon. His breathing was a series of long, wheezy whistles and, unlike before, he kept the oxygen prongs in his nostrils. We went to the patient lounge, which was always vacant. It harbored some out to date medical equipment, a fridge and two sofas, one light blue, one dark red, which must had been donated a long time ago. The room was occasionally used for patient birthday parties – although turn out was usually bad – and more often for large families who wanted to be with their family member as he or she died.
“This is as close to home as we get”, said Terry with a smirk as he arranged his oxygen tank and IV pole to get into a comfortable position on the red sofa.
“Still struggling with your writing?”
“Words are coming out like burnt toast. The ink bleeds though the page.”
“The legend I gave you originates in Sudan. Does it change how you feel about the story you’re writing?”
“Storytelling saves the day?”
Terry hesitates. His breathing had become a calm whistle now that he was sitting down. I can see him try to match my response to whatever he was planning to say.
“It is not until the priests are exposed to the stories of Far-li-mas that they stop looking to the heavens for rules to conduct their society. They are forced to give up determinism and start to make decisions themselves. Far-li-mas gives them free will. Through telling stories they learn to be free.”
“I always thought free will was just an illusion”. Terry laughed, his face turned red quickly and he started breathing more heavily to compensate for breaths air wasted by laughter.
“Are not stories just illusions? The moment we die our lives become stories. We cannot help but write stories – they write themselves like history as we live our lives,” says Terry.
“But I can prove that free will doesn’t exist.” I start to draw a timeline on the back of my notepad. He starts to laugh again.
“What’s your proof? Logic? You’re going to draw a linear regression? Ok, go ahead. I’ll watch. And when you’re finished, ask yourself, ‘in that what truth with there be’? Darwin and the Bible might be logically incompatible, but are they not variations on the same theme?” I wasn’t totally sure I understand what Terry is saying, although I nod like I do. “I doesn’t matter whether free will exists or not – it is a language of responsibility we use to conduct our lives.”
“Ok, but where does death fit in?”
“Once we believe in freedom, we have become immortal.” Terry paused; I waited for him to connect the dots. “No longer having God, or fate, or any other force, to control everything, we must use our imaginations to construct options and decide which is best. These decisions and their resulting events become recorded as history, a story that lives beyond those who participated in it. History becomes the story; it will remain and evolve even after we die. So at night when you sit down and write, you’re inserting yourself into a grand narrative of all the stories that came before you. In this way, you will live forever.” I felt I understand what Terry is saying, but I don’t think I could explain it to myself. Terry looks at me warmly, his pupils became smaller, his heavy breathes, long and rusty, were almost comforting to hear. “Our story like every story,” he says as if telling me a secret, “where something happens to somebody, again and again, until the end of time”.

Sali asks the priest: “How do you know when the king is supposed to die?”
“We watch the stars and the moon. If a night should pass when nothing can be seen, we would not be able to understand God’s message,” replies the head priest.
“God’s writing is great”, says Sali. “But the greatest writing is not in the sky, but the stories told by those on earth”.
“You are wrong”, says the priest.
“The stories of Far-li-mas are greater than the writing in the sky. When you hear them you will forget to watch the constellations. Come hear them and decide for yourself which are better.”

I try to do some writing before bed. Across the hall in Alex’s room one of his daughters is helping him sit upright in his bed while the other is flipping TV channels. Lindsey calls before I have a chance to re-read what I have written the night before. I am pleased to hear her soft voice and gentle breathing. She asks me the usual, mundane questions about how I was feeling and what the doctors said. Her questions were an incompatible narrative to the scene across the hall in Alex’s room. One daughter was clutching her father’s head as if it was about to roll away, and the other was furiously clicking the nurse’s call button and holding her chest like her lungs were about to explode. “You know I’m thinking about you”, Lindsey says, as I watch both daughters hold their father’s shaky body, faces slowly shifting from pretend heroicism to the stark pain of grief.
The nurses do not run, but walk briskly into Alex’s room. Lindsey keeps talking softly but I do not care for words; I want to hear her breathe.
I remember an explanation of Einstein’s relativity theory from high school where he claims that the speed of light is fixed for all observers; as you watch something approach the speed of light it will appear to be moving in slow motion as time relative to it slows down. The characters around Alex, two nurses, a resident doctor, crying daughters, are slowing down like a rapidly freezing river, as if time relative to them is moving much slower, not in sync with the pattern of the breathing coming through telephone receiver that I push hard against my ear.
“I am watching him die”.
“Who?”
“The man across the hall”.
“I’m sorry you have to see this dear. Close the door. Watching will only make you feel worse.”
Lindsey waits. I listen to her breathe. His youngest daughter starts to sob. As I look into the space of the room, I know there is something less where something more had been.
“Are you still watching?”
“He’s dead”.
“I’m sorry dear”, she says. “You shouldn’t have watched. How are you feeling?”
I don’t say anything for what seemed like a long time. It is selfish, my ear pressing hard against the phone until her breath resonates loudly through the air of the hospital walls that were inhaling, exhaling like massive lungs.
“Your breathing is very shallow,” she says. “I know you are there, but I can barely hear you. I am worried. Maybe you should call the nurse. How do you feel?”
“I don’t know if I can describe what that was like. I know he died, probably his lungs failed, but nothing actually happened. It’s like an event that can only be marked by a presence before and the lack of presence after.”
“Do you feel sad”, she asks.
“Maybe. I’m not sure.”
“It’s ok dear. Don’t be sad. I’m here for you.”
I tell Lindsey to hold while I close the door of my hospital room. I don’t want to see them bring the body out and watch his malfunctioning daughters, crying on and off, on and off. Those images are sad. But what I just saw wasn’t, and I am having a lot of trouble deciding whether it fits into the categories of good or bad. Maybe value judgments are useless. Maybe it was free.

I wake up the next morning before the ambulatory nurse comes. Across the hall a new patient has already arrived during the night. She is sitting in a wheel chair that holds a two gallon oxygen tank at the back, which she was wheeling back and forth slightly as she watches a twenty-four hour news channel on TV. She smiles when she notices me standing in my doorway across the hall. She slowly wheels herself across the hall, as she comes closer I can clearly see the outline of her skull shaping her small face.
“What are you doing up so early?” she asks. Her breaths are so shallow I can barely hear them.
“I didn’t sleep well last night.”
“Not even with those little blue pills?”
“Sometimes they don’t work”.
“How long have you been here?”
“Almost a month I think. It’s easy to lose track.”
“I’m going to be here for a long time,” she pauses, I listen I can’t hear her breathing at all, “I feel like I’m going to die”, she says without expression. My brain scans all the possible replies: remorse, regret, comfort, apology, but none seem appropriate. “It’s ok. I think I’m ready”. Her bony hands clasp the wheels and she turns herself around, moving slowly back to her room, returning to the scene as before as if our conversation never happened. I was hoping she might look back at me so I can wave or smile, but I wait and she doesn’t.
I went to Terry’s room three times today. Once the nurse said he was meeting with the doctors. The other two times the door was closed so I assumed that he was sleeping.
At night I let the story write itself. The ward is especially calm tonight. I imagine that some greater being is listening to the collective breathing of all humankind like we listen to crickets. I start to read what I have written but before I get too far to make any judgment about it, Cathleen wheels into my room, “Something’s happened”, she says, there was a robustness in her usually thin voice.
“I’m sorry?”
“Something’s happened to somebody. Come and see,” she points down the hallway.
I get up from my desk quickly and move toward the door, but the IV line inserted into the viens of my left arm jerks me back and I felt a strange sensation of internal pain. I grab my IV pole and wheel it with me quickly down the hall. Cathleen stops outside Terry’s room and peers inside. A nurse pushes her chair, telling her to go back to her room. I see the resident doctor step out of Terry’s room with his clipboard.
At that moment I know it. I am about halfway to the room but I can’t go any further. I try to take deep breaths, the two slimy fish in my chest shake madly against my rib cage, but I can’t seem to suck in enough air to feed them. Cathleen is a skeleton staring at me in her wheelchair. I can feel someone coming from behind but I refuse to look. A warm, sweaty palm touched my shoulder, “Its ok”, the female voice says. “Go back in your room. I’ll come to check on your later”. When they wheeled Terry’s body away he looked like a rotting pile of pumpkins underneath a thin white sheet.
When King Akif dies, he is succeeded by Far-li-mas. The land is prosperous and its citizen’s joyful. But when the storyteller dies, neighboring regions break their treaties and declare war on the kingdom of Kash, which is destroyed. All that remains is the illusion, a story of a storyteller, which moved on to the East, and beyond the sea.

A Life, Objectively
By: Jehangir Saleh
Written: December 1, 2006

it began with dethroned roses
soft pink petals that removed themselves over three days
on the fourth, the stem stood naked
limping crudely towards the left
his object no longer carried affection
it was wilt and vulnerable
but complimented her ignorance

in order to propose marriage
he found an object of permanence –
the pear diamond covered the flesh bulge
on her left middle finger –
he frequently thought about it being lodged
in the digestive track of an alligator, or possibly
poisoning a rat
and decided not to be bitter
after being flushed out of her life

during the war
employed at the Boeing Aircraft Company
the talent in his worn hands
would tame harsh metal
into perfect square sheets
six of which joined a B-29 Bomber
that dropped an object
filled with evil and atomic energy

his supervisor was impressed
six flawless, brilliant objects
that dented the future

in the fifties
he lived in his shop
sculpting wooden objects that were shaped
like choo-choo trains, rodeo horses, frowning clowns
he was once commissioned a metallic piece
but refused

and
53 trains, 47 horses, 94 clowns later
they buried him
without mourners
remembered
only by his most treasured object:
a bull pin hammer
that marked the dirt where
he remained

unfortunately
we have misplaced his name
he’s just an object
(as are you)
so there is nothing
to feel sorry for

Story 2 Hannah
By: Jehangir Saleh
Written: October 28, 2006

i’m not sure what my story is today. i knew what it was yesterday. yesterday it was about fear. and since there really wasn’t anyone there who understood the fear, it was about being alone.
but today it isn’t that people don’t understood – rather, it is that they don’t understand enough. but this leaves room from improvement.
strangely, today, it isn’t about whom i am that is in question, as I’ve started to see how fluid we all can be, rather, what do i want to be? it feels like a choice to me (even though my good friend alex tries to convince me otherwise – that we are all ultimately determined). during the time in the story where the protagonistic doubts where the time goes, his illness, where his friends are, the narrative line is curved downward. during the times he goes to sleep, silent, is not fully aware and yet is fully aware, it pushes foward, fiercely.