It is with a niggle in the stomach and a mobius knot in the mind that I offer these words. Himalayan Map House have announced that they will be publishing my next book (no title as yet), below you will find a sample.
The book will examine the bardo, the river as friend, solitude and jouissance.
Pre order available late summer 2012.
---
The dreams we had as children die, as we grow old. The
passing of friends our pathways arc off at tangents. Our peers, linked- knots
of friendship unravel at times, falling loosely at the feet of chance and
circumstance. It is all in the passing, the bitterness and solitude. In the
darkness of the pupil, the eye ball and the quiver of the voice…
Inshallah
London the city
of dreams. The crown encrusted with jewels failed to protect after the fall of
the empire, those that wanted the crown shocked the rest of civil action. The
rings of fire took the nation onto its back foot.
In the rush our commuters
were held hostage to the explosions and bombs. Suicide bombers, Islamic militants,
so we hear, killed many and the city ground to a halt. The heart of the
metropolis the veins, arteries and organs were damaged. Disabled as the blasts
ripped away at the occupants of train carriages. Screams of pain the visions of
death were encased in metal tombs, raided by the press, reported by the bias.
My father late for his train, as usual, never left the platform, it went
without him. He waited for the next one. He lived the 7/7 as synonymous as
9/11?
Later as the weeks pass, a
Daily Mail reporter calls me on my mobile, how he got my number I don’t know,
why he wanted to interview me that I do know. It turns out that someone linked
to the bombers in London went to my school, was one of my peers. And here I am
having returned from Pakistan only months earlier, did I know anything? Should
I? I hung up. It was too close to home, too close for comfort. I didn’t
remember his name he wasn’t one of my friends in the end.
Kayaking on my local river
became a relief but even that was dirtied by the Islamic bombers, as they had
rafted on the river and now the news teams were swarming around. It was so
unreal how my life had been drawn into this affair.
Sleepless nights would come,
this I knew, flash backs to my time in the land of Islam and the mindful visions
of the wrath, filled the faces of yester-year. Hindsight and the failing memory
of old could not hold back the pain if I let it.
