Begum Dilli

I can see in the dark,

For my appetite for everything that disappears,

Appears to have dethroned my appetite for,

Shimmers and drums,

I sit in the dark in this godforsaken,

Virgin town,

It's like a beautiful young girl in her early twenties,

Undefiled, I'll never deflorate it,

I can't see no guile, I can't see no deception,

Where is the poetry to it,

I miss Begum Afeerah,

And her vile harem,

I am a prisoner of the gone times

And dim lights,

The ones that don't obliterate the darkness completely,

Only the fiendish parts of it,

I can breathe the cold along with the smell of kulhars' straight out of the heavens here,

I don't want to breathe.

Even the young dark cold vulnerable nights here are like the

bright content mornings of that Machiavellian worn out begum,

Who left her wet long hair unkempt this bright morning, to dry them off,

And I hope sun doesn't discover them just yet.

My heart longs for her,

Like my eyes long for words of tormented dead bodies of Meer and Zauq,

Love in the bosky tents of her shadows,

My heart longs for her quiet prison,

                  

My heart longs for her skin, which has been roughed up over the years,

Yet it's appetite for life amongst the dead and dread always glows somehow,

Like the one star in the smog stricken skies,

Which keeps reminding you, there is more life,

Reminding you, it'll never come to you.

The cries and songs of birds that don't sleep,

Maroon my nights here,

But I long for the songs of horns and screams,

That maroon life, yet gives birth to it,

I long for my begum,

For she has bared it all,

For she has been mauled,

By the kings and courts alike,

The life in her still alive,

She's witnessed,

Ghiassudin Balban and Alamgir fall,

For she has seen the turkish tyrants like Nadir,

Stab her torment her,

Sell her, loot her, burn her.

I long for my begum,

To tell her,

You're a wretched, old, beautiful tabassum,

Growing in the kuan which doesn't serve any water or purpose,

You are like years of destruction, estacsy and itr,

You're like all the nazms of Mir Taqi Mir,

And you,

Only you deserve to consume me.