The Electric Keyboard Dreams

 

I take the notes out, I take the sounds away.

This is how I unravel the piano player.

When I let her fingers travel me, 

The treble clef trembles.

The bass weeps for the silence

Descending between

One scale and the next —

 

And this is how I’ll play,

This is how I play.

 

Heavy ghosts pour down,

The swimming pool’s full.

Gelatinous grubs wriggling myopic war dance.

The drum behind the keys

Throbbing against the head of a child.

Piano player with a guillotine

for a voice. Squelching arteries. Shine the jugular,

Upside down the garments

Of the Sun. Right-side up now,
Watching her light spill out.

 

And this is how I’ll play,

This is how I play.

 

She knows more than she can handle,

She knows more than me,

A girl-child child-self holding a program for the apocalypse.

She dreams of heaven every night she runs away.

She dreams of heaven every night she can’t run away.

 

And this is how I play,

And this is what we play —

 

A symphony the susurrus of ancient leaves,

Worn down by a million solar winds.

Spines lying bare at the mother’s feet, 

the poetry slipping out her teeth.

Us lying awake — him reaching, she running, we becoming 

little nothings, all over again. Smash the keys. 

The stars shine, all over again.

The seas rumble, the F Sharp screaming

against D Minor’s weeping –

all overwhelming again.

Emptied bellies growing fangs, together

The kids gang up on the weather.

Heal the ice caps by melting their knees into hot tarmac.

No ancestral fevers now to wipe the ash of the world with,

Just these songs. Just these songs,

 

Sang into the hollowed-out trunk

Of a dead tree. A prophecy

constellated in the stars. Brightly now

the fingers of children

dreaming themselves alive

between arpeggios and wet bed sheets.

The planet’s heart strings

 

asleep 

in every child’s unheard

shriek.

 

 

°•○●□°•○●□¤°

 

 

A Strange Joke

 

Sometimes you bruise a fruit

To make sure it’s real.

 

The songs of plastic

Have nowhere to go

 

But back into the

The hollowed-out hearts of their

 

Price tags. A scratch on this orchid

Won’t release the same 

 

Geometry into the air

The form of bliss, the shape of scent.

 

The sugars in these melons

Won’t attract ants, not even in decay

 

Will they be squashed. If not for the

Fire the winds wouldn’t sing

 

Through them. She told me, “Here,

This flower, token of our

 

Love, look. It won’t ever die.” She placed it

in a vase full of water, a strange joke. Alone, I said,

 

“But it smells like nothing. Can we really

Call it love without ever having breathed life

 

Into it, without having gardened

Through debris and detriment, building from nothing

 

The roots needed to feed

The stories we shape – or is this enough,

 

A slide across the screen, the slippery

Borders between attraction and rejection,

 

Handing our love over to the anxiety

That nothing here was built to last past

 

The twenty-first century, so why should we ever

Get real flowers for each other? Why should

 

Anything living be kissed

into the lonely water of the flower vase,

 

To grow old, to wrinkle up and dry,

To die. Why risk it,

 

When all our foods have turned

More lifeless than stone?”

 

I want to be fed by the heat

That comes from fears overridden not

 

By staying somewhere in the middle,

Draining the feelings out of every sentence. I want

 

To be a vessel for the kind of dreams

That grow through even the worst decay —

 

But she never heard a word I said

As she sunk her head back into a pixelated wall

 

Further away than I could see. And that

Was the last I heard of her, for my phone never

 

Rang again. The apps stopped their pulsing for my attention

After I drowned the old thing in sugar and spice

 

And everything nice. The ants cling desperately

To the floor, the vacuum cleaner we bought

 

Isn’t strong enough to clear out

All this rot.

 

 

 

 

Dhiyanah Hassan is an artist, writer, and energy worker whose practice explores the relationships between art, storytelling, and healing. Her work seeks to connect the soul and soil of the internal worlds orbiting within us, finding transformative expressions of the wild, the mystical, and miraculous through artistic and multidisciplinary mediums, facilitating spaces and conversations where creativity is utilized as a catalyst for healing and trauma recovery. Dhiyanah’s poetry has appeared in sister-hood, OCCULUM, and Rambutan Literary. Website: http://www.bydhiyanah.com