Issue 31: Kashif Sharma-Patel

Khayal I [an excerpt]

Illustrate my proclivity my forbearance my limitless conveyance that

which inheritance alludes and presence makes oh so sweet. That

inheritance which rejoinders the continual coming of assembly,

valent and municipal in tawdry scope.

               Languishing fervencies –

               artistry and tuscan red, claret tipple, Badakhshan reds,

               spindell galore, oh mountain of light, sea of light

lavish your riches, your exquisiteness on ice, the sublimity, the

splendour, in the dying light, the vengeful wrath of Being – Dasein –

towards death. I wait intransigent, attempting inscrutability with leering

eyes out at the world, the stage the scene.

               Seen.

               Sin.

Your laundering ambitions, voraciousness moorishness, the great

Mouravi at the helm, durbaz-bound, sun-dappled armaments,

ornate entablature, prastara, replete with the lyrical flourishes that

multiplicity furnished. Allotted materials, filigreed serrations.

               Narrate the comings and goings. The porous fissiparous

sagacities, the astylar, extoll courtly virtue to the slavish mass,

                             sanguine and demur. Palinode for a poorboy! The

littoral site protrudes out from the ash-driven steppe,

where the folk voice announces bardic flow and ყარიბი life.

Nothing is off the table,the microphone patter, whirring and

scuttling – pray tell, prayer hands – keep flowing the purple ashes

purple rains of princely affairs. Allude me this.

Tickle my fancy, return to the docks, the garden, the

enclosure bordered by copse and bush, shrubland and wetland

chalk stream and upriver challenges, thicketing splays,

a groove of cross-legged peace, yogic energy, orchards of way-

laden fruits, coppieces for daily fodder – the mind’s ablative

reconstruction – here and now

               a spinnery, clumping together

bereaved, the lowlanders ferried on

               the brocage endearing and awesome

oh this hillock adored and spurned.

Riddling Turkic origins – who we are – animal herding 

reprobates, urban adjacent, pass over the steppe

settling down unto the great romanic seat, sparring words

weaving summits, glisten ears and rest easy

effluent sufficement in the face of supplication

the everyday stubble, bituminous waste, spilling fervent

Diseased vine, grape heavy blossom sweet suckling scent

ferocious languishing, accept the oath, the regular alternation in

turn smooth and in turn pressing; – accompanying rhythm

idolous, undoubtedly fizzing pleasingly, a skating of imagination

over courtly ribaldry, the king of kings, suzerainty’s offer to

smooth the crack, invoke the wound and lick the poison, a cure

for all seasons, namely lost in the jadooghar of heart’s intent a

wanting of ripening virtue, prostrate in full view of sin, the fissure

at the breaking point that inception of calamity and entropy, the

demotic annunciation, a standard of temerity, of catalectic flight,

apocryphal sentiment looted from the memory-theatre of exalted

time, the age of empire, the age of discovery, silk, calico, looms of

great repute lay upon this sultry ground manipulate and tax

imposing misfortune, benevolence the unyielding stream of

suzerainty and the perennial ill of the civil.

We strip down, contagious in spirit

and lank to bone / strewn out flexing inordinacy –

a provinciality of force enacted upon the great

sophistry of silent gains, marginal and

irrevocable – tender and slight:

bear forth into the light, your awaiting

functionaries

Kashif Sharma-Patel is a poet and writer. Their debut collection furnish, entrap is forthcoming from Broken Sleep Books in 2024. Kashif runs a newsletter culture hawker https://kashifsp.substack.com/ 

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