Poetry of Madness Preview
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This preview is raw, personal, and unfiltered, just like the madness that inspired it.
The First Heart
It started with a name.
Mine.
Yours
Scribbled in pencil.
I drew a heart
on the first page.
Pasted stickers.
I didn’t know
Love could start so quietly.
Didn’t know
it would echo for years.
Then silence.
Then absence.
Then noise.
As pages tore themselves out,
and I taped them back.
Whispering into margins,
I begged the paper
to hold me.
I wrote in loops,
“I am here.”
“I am not.”
“I was.”
Each line, a bruise.
Each pause, a scream.
Looked Like Me
I woke
to my own voice
and something colder than breath
in the room.
I turned
and someone was there,
standing behind me.
Not a dream.
Not sleep paralysis.
Just a shape
that wore my face
like borrowed skin.
Same hollows beneath the eyes.
Same mouth, sealed shut
like a secret buried deep.
She didn’t move.
She didn’t need to.
She looked like me.
I didn’t ask who she was.
I knew.
I have seen phantoms, Jinns before.
They wear faces to scare you.
This time, one was wearing mine.
I’d be scared,
but I was already haunted by Love,
I had no voice left in me to scream.
So, I turned my back to her,
pulled the sheet to my chin
and slept.
Specimen #5: The Floating Children
In the embryology lab,
they float
the unborn.
Encased in glass.
Labelled. Suspended.
Tiny fingers curled,
as if they were still reaching
for something they were never given.
The jars line the shelves
like trophies.
Like warnings.
No one cries for them.
No one asks their names.
They are specimens now.
We take notes.
We draw diagrams.
We study the curvature of their stillness.
But I saw them.
Not just tissue.
Not just failed gestation.
I saw the ache of almost-being.
The memory of a mother’s body
still clinging to their skin.
And I wondered
where does a soul go
when it never gets to scream?
Self-Portrait
(Beneath the Skin)
I painted myself again.
It’s not pretty.
It’s not supposed to be.
It is just a portrait of pain.
The face is cracked.
One eye burns,
rage spills into the room.
The other one is pitted,
a dead lens that captures all
yet reflects no warmth.
Colours grind against each other:
reds gnash at yellows,
oranges sear the edges of black.
A collapse of everything
swallowed by the black.
Hair twists in feral patterns,
each strand a howl,
each knot a weight I cannot undo.
My lips, parched, cracked wide,
remain silent.
----
I have no story to offer,
just the soot of my life
smeared into my face.
This canvas holds no warmth.
I cannot paint Love.
excerpt from “Self-Portrait” (full version in book)
Silent Lover
Death waits at my door,
a silent lover,
murmuring vows
only the faithful keep.
But Pain is no shadowed ghost.
It seizes the stage,
its rusted teeth sinking deep.
Chaos howls.
Time unspools in tangled threads.
Madness smiles at me…
soft, knowing,
twisting beneath my ribs.
----
Still, she lingers,
leaning against the threshold,
silent, constant, unyielding.
Her inky tendrils stir,
curling at my feet.
But life still clings:
desperate, gasping,
its chains coiling around my ankles.
I close my eyes
in surrender.
I feel her breath on my neck,
cool and steady.
“Soon,”
she promises,
a lover’s whisper;
intimate and inevitable.
The door wails ajar.
Darkness spills in,
velvet and void.
----
Shadows gather, grinning, waiting.
“You are not alone,” she murmurs,
her voice folding into the wind.
“Come.
Dance where the shadows flow.”
The veil shudders.
Thin, fragile.
Whispers tear through the night’s cold gale.
Death has friends
that life could not provide.
Her Love; cruel, constant, pure.
Her gaze; unwavering, familiar.
Her touch; cold, liberating.
No haste. No rush.
Only the thinning veil
an invitation murmured
from across the abyss.
To taste eternity.
----
Death waits at my door.
Her beauty hushes,
silent, absolute.
She runs her fingers along my frame,
tracing the ridges of my ribs,
cradling my heart in her palms
its rhythm faltering beneath her touch.
She leans in…
slow, knowing.
Her lips brush mine,
a final kiss.
In her arms,
I am weightless,
unmade, undone.
Drifting
beyond breath,
beyond name,
beyond time.
And she whispers, soft, knowing:
“You were always mine.”
