Tag Archives: Conflict

GUEST POST // Within by Niharika Jaiswal

I see people scowling and screaming
Raging and waging war on others,
Angry at each other or something else
But most of all angry at themselves.
They need to win a fight, any fight.
With whom, for what, it doesn’t matter,
It’s not about wrong or right,
It’s about the fight,
A way to take the anger out,
The anger that’s burning them inside,
The anger at nothing and everything.
I have been there myself at times,
And after you win the fight,
For a moment it feels like you can breathe again
It’s a good moment, you feel light
But in a little while, the anger returns
Deeper and spreading like a fire.
And the thing about fire,
You can’t throw it out the window
And on to the streets and get rid of it,
That only increases its reach.
To extinguish a fire one must remove
One of the three things that create it,
Heat, fuel, and air. The way I see it,
Pain is the match that creates the heat,
Our insecurities are fuel it feeds on
And our ego is the air that fans it.
I see people burning themselves,
And those they love, those around them,
Burning their houses and their cities,
While fighting fire with fire
And looking at the skies for a rain
Never realizing that the fire that starts within
Can only be extinguished from within.

by NIHARIKA JAISWAL
© All rights reserved 2017

Authentica (Fragment #023)

“Here you are!”

Maybe I’d plopped my notebook down a little too cocksurely, but I was feeling pretty confident. Hell, I’d been sweating over this essay for two whole nights, rummaging through the dullest monographs and sneezing up billows of agelong library dust.

The professor picked up my notebook with two fingers, kind of like it was a filthy toad. Well… actually, I consider toads pretty cool. Take, for example, Hypnotoad or Kermit. Or, even, Jin Chan. I remember, once…

“… plague!”

His harsh voice made me jump. Damn! It looked like I’d lost the plot again. I needed to concentrate. What the hell was he saying? Yes, toads were  ‘The Second Plague’, but had I said something about toads out loud?

I raised my eyes and stole a look at his reflection in the dim windowpane. Then our eyes met. For a fleeting second it seemed as though his glance was flaring a bright orange, but when he turned to me, his eyes were yellow as always. This angry look was a storm warning.

“Too vague! Up in the air! It’s a mere dalliance with the topic, not an exploration!”

Why was he always on my case? But there was no sense in arguing… at least not now. This morning, I’d heard how Uranus had said something about the Moon being in Aries and that one should avoid open conflicts. (If someone had said to me some months ago that I would make decisions with an eye to this cosmographic crap, I’d have given them a ‘Screw Loose’ sign. But this University can make anyone superstitious like the last pea goose in existence.)

I took my unfortunate essay and went to the door. I had almost stepped into the corridor when his acrid voice struck my ears.

“And don’t forget that using translations in research is  ‘mauvais ton’. If you want to get a decent result, you must work with authentic texts only!”

Huh? Ball and Tzara? In the original? I fucking like it!

by TETIANA ALEKSINA
© All rights reserved 2017

darwinian (heads & tails)

make your dogmatic statements
fluff your tail
you, who prefer understatement
and always fail

your beautiful love clique
it twists the knife
so i’ve learned not to look
i wanted to be one of you
but you made me a heretic

leave this moebius food chain
fill the blanks
you, who’s accustomed to refrain
can’t break the bank!

you likeminded super beings in
your plush echo chamber of
gonging egos make me sick
you make me want to grub for
transcendence in dirt (and i have to)

stop your lazy genetic drift
cut a strip
don’t count on the allel shrift
evolve, crip!

there’s pluck and plesh inside me
and the horizon is within my reach
you’ve forced me to evolve or die
so in the end it doesn’t matter
i’ll be gone and you won’t find me

by TETIANA ALEKSINA & TONY SINGLE
© All rights reserved 2016