By Yas Bin-Shaibah
Ash, cigarette butts, and stained coffee mugs. Tears are my ink. With you on my mind the ink is abundant.
Surreal, this all feels.
What I type,
this mess of assorted stains,
I want to shout it,
scream it to you,
make you listen.
But instead I clench my fists at my side at the mere sight of you, and lock my jaw.
I’m crippled by pride.
By Seyed Mohammad Abaft
My life is stained with darkness,
Like a drop of thick ink on paper
Of all the things I witnessed
The Death, the Destruction
The things I never did
To stop this darkness
The questions I never asked
Would have ended this suffering I had
If only I had a hand to pull me up
I would reach my Utopia
My Perfection
My Wonderland
The place where I can feel free again
Free from this ink
For now I must start a new page
Remove the stains on my paper
The darkness of that ink
The pain I suffered
To reach my new haven.
By Dee
Ink stains on her fingers. One would think she was still a scribe whiling away her hours in the safety of a musty library, not an exile roaming the deserts with the guns at her hips as the only true constant in her life. But then, Anne wasn’t like your every day Sinner. In fact, she wasn’t really a Sinner at all. Anne was Unmarked, one of the few born to every generation who never got the Sign that marked them as Sinner or Saint. She was also the first Unmarked anyone had heard of who chose to forsake the safety and comfort of a Saint’s life to wander in exile with the Sinners.
Few from her old life as a scribe in the Priesthood would recognize her now, riding rough for days at a time, never settling at any of the ramshackle exile townships. The only thing that hadn’t changed about her was her thirst for knowledge. It probably never would.
That thirst was the reason she had joined the Priesthood and it was the reason she’d later abandoned it and chose exile. She struck out to search for the Forbidden Texts when her studies of the Priesthood’s books had proven fruitless. Not futile though, never futile. She knew that she had learned much those years she spent teasing out truths from between the crumbling pages. But in the end, everything she had learned there only made her want to know more. So she abandoned everything she knew to seek it out. It wasn’t a decision she had made lightly. Most days it weighed heavily on her, what she had done, but it helped her to know that her quest was not a selfish one. The knowledge she sought was not only for her own sake.
She knew that somewhere, locked in ink, there were truths that would set the entire world free. Truths that people, she suspected perhaps the Priesthood itself had kept hidden to suit their own purposes. Purposes she meant to discover. If that meant the destruction of the current order, so be it.
By Yasmeen Abulezz
Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.
He can hear the air go in and out of his lungs as if he was hearing it from another’s ears, the pounding of his heart matching his ragged breathing.
Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.
His eyes remain cast down, locked on the contract before him. Unsure whether he is brave enough to take the plunge, he continues to heave air into his lungs. Hoping the air will clear his mind and help him make his decision.
“Sign!” commands a seductively soft voice from within. “It’s the only thing that will save you…” continues the same voice. He shudders absorbing what his mind is saying to him.
Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.
He closes his eyes and drops his head, resigned to the betrayal he is about to inflict. He opens his eyes slowly and with an unsteady hand takes the pen lying in front of him and signs the contract with a shaky hand.
“Well done son! You made the right choice.” says the man opposite the man who hangs his head. But he doesn’t care. Shame courses through him, as the weight of what he has just done crushes him.
I just turned in my own brother. I might as well have signed that contract…. That CONFESSION in his own blood not ink.
He keeps his head low, knowing that whatever he does, it will never be held high again.
By Noragotcharisma
Drip. Drip. Drip. Thick black ink drips into your mind. As you watch television, your head slowly fills up with thick black ink. What was once pure is now coated with darkness. The old entity of what you were is no longer visible. It seeps down into your eyes, completely blinding you. You blink once, twice, once more to be sure, but all you’re faced with is black. You cannot see, your vision has faded. Your direction is fuzzy, unclear, and undeterminable. Your only sense of reality is what you hear. Everyone around you seems to be blinded as well, completely content—is blindness really all that bad?
A few moments pass and you start to accept it. You think to yourself, “I’m not alone, and everyone else seems to be fine with it. Suck it up.” A notion inside you tells you this isn’t right, you’re not meant to be impaired this way. But that notion is quickly burned out, you are not alone. As you try to come to terms with this loss, the sensitivity of your other senses heightens. Your hands stiffen, you shake uncontrollably. You gasp for air, the thick liquid clogs your respiration. Your throat tightens, you can feel the bitter ink seep into your throat, suffocating you. Loud black noise begins to eat away your survival instincts, you scream to make it stop.
All this fidgeting, this fighting for your last breaths leads to an object falling into your lap. You feel it out, there seems to be only one button. You click it hoping the noise stops. Indeed it does. The television turns off, and all goes back to normal.
By Ripley Hyde
Every blink of my eyes inks just another line in my memory journal I’ll write in until the day that I die
The ink from reality
Sinks into the diary
My Quill fills the pages
Turning life into memories
It feels like centuries
Since the book was first inked
I look back through the paragraphs
Remember the laughs and faces I’ve met
So many precious scenes I’ve seen
I never want them to go missing
Re-reading the writing written at the beginning…
Tearing at the sight of my ink disappearing
Memoirs lost, left in noir after the colors turned to dust
I try to will my Quill to fill the gaps
And map my way through livid verses
Nurse the curse of reversing the vivid
Fragments of my remnants, though not permanent, are still clear
I feared losing them before, but now I’m tearing no more
Locked in a state of shock, my fear has overrun
From the beginning until now I’ve been writing Chapter One
By Rahaf AlMubarak
Seconds of celestial subsequence,
I inhale the seasons and the skies
I imbibe a surreptitious waltz by some blind, starry-eyed fireflies
I launch my mind’s arrows at a companionless galaxy
From the constellation to my lips,
My heart’s words melt in my mouth from the heat of a star that has slaughtered gravity
My thoughts metamorphose into ink and I whisper the lunacy I would write in a million letters
I weave what I breathe in, soak up, and send out into a web of unspoken sentiments as melodious enigmas steadily unfetter.
By Abrar AlShammari
Had it not been for ink, the romanticism elicited by hand-written letters flown overseas would not have instilled the false hopes that kept the two lovers’ spirits alive.
Had it not been for ink, men and women would live and die in vain, their once-glorious names never to be uttered again.
Had it not been for ink, our chests and shoulders would have to carry heavy burdens for the rest of our lives, never given the opportunity to exhale our worries and spill them onto a pure surface, staining our own pains elsewhere.
Had it not been for ink, books would not grant us the escape from reality we so desperately need on a nightly basis, and we would be trapped in the closing walls of our frustration.
Had it not been for ink, bodies would be plain and dull, smooth with purity and unreflective of the truths underneath it; the losses, the lessons, the loves carried within its core, the philosophies adapted by its mind, the life pulsing through its veins.
Had it not been for ink, two people living in different centuries would not be able to connect; Edgar Allan Poe would not have been able to save a suicidal young man living in 2013, had it not been for ink.
By Shahd Al Shammari
There’s only one way to reach you
I attach syllables and letters,
Yet I stutter through my words
I tell you that I am articulate on paper
You ask me if people like that still exist,
In a time of sexual inflation,
When the spoken word beats the written word,
When sex forgets about foreplay,
When kisses become an inconvenience –
Yes, I still blush when you speak to me
I am flustered and dry-mouthed. I desperately need my ink.
I compose long messages and carefully penned paragraphs
I ask you a million and one Questions.
And I use that same ink to record your answers.
I keep a journal, so that I may carry you around in it, the folded pages embrace all you’ve told me, and the blank ones anticipate all you’ve yet to tell.
You’re wary, and afraid.
And I know we’ve both read more than we should, because there is such a thing as too ideal, as too delved in the world of words.
We lose track of the realm of possibility, of today.
So I pencil in our meeting date.
I wait to painstakingly inscribe my notes on your lips, on your hands, leave you stained with my ink.
And everyone knows how maddening it is to remove ink stains.
But I suspect you’ll want to keep me.
By Buddha Qais
They celebrated my birth,
They kissed the earth,
Whispered in my ear of my worth,
The sky’s the limit,
As I grew,
The limits did too,
Who knew?
Kept further away from a sky blue,
Commands of what to do,
Leaving no Instructions or a clue,
Friend’s promises of no judgment,
All you hear are never ending comments,
My persistence grew,
Seeking a life anew,
Claims of an open ear,
Although when I spoke, none were near,
I found a friend,
On whom I can depend,
An ear is what he’d lend,
What he did best, was mend,
Thank you Friend,
An inanimate object,
More soulful than what walked the lands,
Paper & blood,
Ink on a page….
By Hawra’a Khalfan
“Guard your heart”
“Guard your heart”
With fists and spikes
Tell myself to guard, guard, guard.
Yet,
I melt into pieces,
Small and priceless,
From your simplest glance.
In your case my spikes are blunt,
And fists are tender as a feather’s touch.
Using all my effort to
Push and shove you
Stay away from my,
Stay away from this
Cardiac muscle.
Leave it be, to pump
But love, not.
Never, love.
I rinse and repeat,
Try to shove you,
To break you,
To just yell “Stay away!”
And build walls all around my heart.
Despite my ongoing failure,
Quit, I will not.
Even more though, I try to erase you,
But you’re an ink stain on the blank white page that is my life.
Eventually I know that the ink will sink in and I will end up
Welcoming you to these bloodstained walls,
Welcoming you inside this restless muscle,
Your new home—
It will remain.
I will not quit rebuilding these walls though,
So give me no reason to mistrust you.
And I’ll welcome you today and tomorrow,
My love.
Kuwait Writing Club 