Poem | Ilhan Israr
we drink cheap vodka on the pavement all night listening to green day criticism america adding our own insights in the process but in the morning, we return keeping one foot in a hurricane
and the other reaching for the doorsteps to a home with a broken call bell
i could speak my mind too, you know to you, and to them
but gods and slaves await a prophet
that mumbles foreign tongues
yet no one talks
and men drop dead like fleas
before the sun comes out
don't say i'm my father's son or i'll hunt before i'm hunted and cry alone
holding rotting bodies and celebrating survival
by digging grave pits
in the backyard
but we write the epitaph together in silence you'll tell me why i needed to die
and i'll crack my nail
inscribing it on the tombstone
"a deserved death"
"here lies the body of an anomaly" "gone and forgotten"
but kill me
before the sun comes out
before i ring the call bell
and nobody answers
i'd stand at the doorsteps
for the symposium of lost gods (asking for answers)
and they'll take me to the backyard again