By: Jehangir Saleh
Written: June 24, 2006

This story begins with an ending. An ending because it is only of what I can be sure. This is a story about me disguised as a story about you. The words came from somewhere in what I call myself, although I’m not sure were – it seems it always disappears once you examine it, like there is no self at all. They were then somehow formed in little pools of blood at the ends of my fingertips, which made me write them out. And now they are here. Until I decide they aren’t good enough, “that’s not something I would write”, and erase them.

Start again:

The seagulls looks suspicious and diseased. I am waiting for something bad to happen. It’s easier, I think. There is a woman staring the six lines of water rushing upward at College Park. Surronding massive building, running water, seems out of place. The foundation seems displaced in the scene, as if, in your mind, you edited in the six lines of water rushing upward to block out the what is real there.
The green wires that make up these chairs are hard, dividing the woman’s large, malleable ass into a 90/85 pattern of littles squares. If her husband wants to have children again tonight, he will feel ridges and be confused but won’t say anything.

As you walked next to the buildings, you can see a distortion of your face in the window. Funny how inside it always looked better. Inside is where you belong.

I am going to go for a walk now, hoping to meet someone along the way, if I don’t, however, I have told myself everything will remain, there is nothing to worry about.

POEM FOR WHAT YOU HAVEN’T LET ME HEAR

Poem In The Hospital
By: Jehangir Saleh
Written: April 14, 2006

If you tell me that I don’t exist
I’ll believe you
As long as you tell me gently

Patterns in night sky
Are visible only when I look away

I am cold

There is something more important
Than my illness

There words have been here before

Let’s go home

Illness
By: Jehangir Saleh
Written: January 28, 2006

Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.

Susan Sontag
–Illness as metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors

but i believe it can be read more 
than one way. you can see illness as something terrible: infecting 
us, taking us away, removing us from all that we that is dear. but i 
prefer to see illness another way: something that binds us, brings 
us together in a common de-humanity, that holds all of us close, 
and some a bit closer. it equals us. makes us the animals we are. 
makes us humble. and most of all, it brings great value to those 
things which we have neglect, and adds immense value to those 
things which we hold dear.
the woman who wrote this quote beat cancer 2 times, and on the 
third, she was terribly afraid of it; afraid of illness, but mostly 
afraid of death. 
and yet she wrote it. and i think that’s what counts.

Tea Time at the Cement Factory
By: Jehangir Saleh
Written: January 15, 2006

As he looked up, Benjamin noticed Tiffany was still scratching her head. Nicky was under the table looking for something. This was before the event occurred. After the event occurred, Anna brought everyone tea, a celebration of sorts. But exercise some patience, because we’re not there just yet.
Benjamin went back to writing his story. So far he had decided on a title and confirmed that the last line would be a question. Now came the job of cementing the space in between.

“I found it!” exclaimed Nicky.
“Found what?” asked Benjamin.
“Found what I was looking for, silly, weren’t you wondering what I was doing under the table?”
“Yes, but that isn’t…”
Benjamin cut himself off.

This is before the event, but just after the thing that occurred, which was erased and replaced with something else which did happen. Nothing happened for approximately an hour when Benjamin looked at Tiffany again. There was a big black hole in her head where she had been scratching. He wasn’t getting anywhere.
Benjamin decided to break for tea. That’s when it happened. “Ah ha!” he cried, “I’ve got it.”

Welcome to the end. If they’re dirty, please remove you shoes. The cement’s fresh and we’re trying to avoid tracks. Would you like some tea?

I wish
By: Jehangir Saleh
Written: January 14, 2006

Elvis never died
Indulging in deep fried
Peanut butter and bacon
Sandwiches
And
Prescription pills

I too
Wish to have
A false celebrity passing
A cholesterol confused death
comfortably wedge myself
Into the past
Wonderfully stoned
Oblivious to reality
And the world
I have corrupted?

I wish to expire an Elvis
Buried in a blanket of blondes
Fighting my cheeseburger addiction

Suicide Bomber
By: Jehangir Saleh
Written: November 13, 2005

Everyone on the bus is quite
Not doing anything, really
Everyone is so fail
And inside
They secretly wish for a giant hurricane
for a terrorist attack
so they become a part of something
greater than themselves
it’s religious dogma that needn’t be studied
but finds you

on the bus there is a man who coat looks much like mine
drinking a bottle of jack daniels
it’s 2:30 in the afternoon

and the Indian woman across from me looks
like she’s really lost
I could imagine what she’s thinking
Perhaps of her country
Perhaps of her family left behind
But I won’t
I have no right to

And yet
When I look at the man with the blistered nose
Concealing his bottle of booze
Why is it that I can imagine him a victim?

Maybe he’s got it figure out.
Maybe he is free

By: Jehangir Saleh
Written: November 10, 2005

I have trouble writing poetry about you as you are
It was easy when I could imagine who you are
And write poetry about your perfect ankles
But I don’t want to write about how you cheek bones force themselves
To smile when you see me
I don’t want to write about guilt and how I feel that I should
Forget about you
But how my words and heart cannot

How do I write about us?
The creepy silence between our words where you can also hear the mechanics of our minds making assumptions – all totally unfounded – about one another.

These poems I write are badly written and yet that forms seems appropiate in describing who we are together. We have never learned how to give each other a chance.

Hide
By: Jehangir Saleh
Written: November 9, 2005

My friend Marie in Sweden is dying
Tubes invading her veins, drugs numbing her body
Until it feels like that forgotten mound of clay
That the artist practiced on until it was so deformed
He used it as a paperweight

She has been waiting for a new pair of fish
Healthy ones
To replace the rotten grouper carcass through which she
Currently has to breath
Her lungs beat madly against her rib cage on inhale
And give up on exhale

I don’t blame them
They are tired
She is tired
Sometimes I believe she hopes that soon she will die

But this story isn’t about my friend Marie. It is about me.
Or so it was when thought about writing it.
That’s a very unpoetic line but right now I don’t care about poetics or trying to be literary.

I feel I even don’t deserve the ground; it should be reserved for things that grow, not things that decay.
I decay
I am decaying right now

When I was younger
I was obsessed with the notion of time
I loved how no matter how bad things got
Now matter how much weight that pressed upon my being
Time carried me into the future
It made me run to catch up with it
Time is linear – it persists, pushes on
And by this, it encourages us to move with it

2.this next part of the poem is at first going to appear totally unrelated to the first part of the poem. I am just writing now so I can’t promise it will relate, except to say that everything contains words, and all words essentially come from the same place.

Right now I imagine that I am poor – much poorer than I am now – somewhere in India. I am watching a young girl pour the drinking water that her mother has given her into the ocean.
“Don’t do that”, I tell her. “Your mother gave you that water. You don’t have very much. The ocean is already full of water, it doesn’t need anymore.”

The little girl looks at me. I see war in her eyes. She pauses, comfortable with silence in a way only the naïve or young could be. She continues, clasping the well water which sits in a rusty metal bucket, then lowering her hands to the giant ocean before her. How greedy the ocean looks. It is so full of the potential to give life while the population dehydrates and dies.

There is war in her eyes. She will be killed just like her father, fighting for a cause she never understood but was given no option to ever think about.
She will never get the chance to be something greater. She only has this time, where she feeds the only water she has back to the ocean. Back to something bigger, greater than herself.

3. That was poorly written but I like that image.

In the beginning of this evening
I was scared because the numbers