Under Pressure
Hibah Shabkhez
source: British Library
The little poem-seeds float in like driftwood, knocking upon my brain’s grey doors, and find them shut by a self-induced frenzy. Shakespeare wrote King Lear, Newton the Principia, and I’m bingeing on chips and fantasy series, or cleaning, or washing things, or pulling another ice-cream out of the fridge, because the dead don’t get ice-cream, so I might as well eat as much of it as I can. Inside my head an admonishing voice martels on: “If I might die, if you might die, if we might die, if anyone can die not of some vague anything at some vague anytime but of this, today or tomorrow or next week, is this really what you want to spend your last days on? You should be thinking profound thoughts and writing meaningful things, not mentally justifying eating more chocolate and imagining the broken shells of the eggs you’re omeletting, writing ‘alas, we failed …’ letters to the mother hen!”
The little poem-seeds blink up at me, hurt and puzzled to find no welcoming pen, and wondering greatly to watch me slash thus at my own sanity. But, little poem-seeds, all of my life has been spent under a pressure to do more, be more, to squeeze meaning into each minute. You I snatched up furtively, as a guilty pleasure squirrelled into stolen moments. Now there is an abyss of time before me, and one great dread to mire me in it: that I have nearly no time left at all. So I scurry about looking for familiar worries. If I open my heart to you, the fear will ride on the wings of your shoots or seep in under your roots. So lie dormant a little longer, little poem-seeds. For now I must isolate myself from you too.
Hibah Shabkhez is a writer of the half-yo literary tradition, an erratic language-learning enthusiast, and a happily eccentric blogger from Lahore, Pakistan. Her work has previously appeared in Bandit Fiction, Literati Magazine, Feral, Across The Margin, and a number of other literary magazines.
twitter: @hibahshabkhez / insta: @shabkhez_hibah