Two poems of Ali Siddiqui

I Have Come to You

You had said, to lose oneself, to wander away,
You had said, on this earth, there are so many mountains,
Rocks, deep and dense forests, oceans
And great seas—somewhere, everywhere, you
Wander away, lose yourself.

You had said, around the world, there are so many
Deserts and swamps, and more,
So many haunted places and abandoned territories—any one of them
Wander away, lose yourself.

You had whispered, in the world, there are so many
Great cities, millions of people’s jungles
Of bricks, stones, and vast networks of iron,
So many alleys and corners—in any city
Lose yourself, disappear.

To lose oneself, I ventured into many forests and jungles,
I escaped the scorching sands, wandered in the desert,
I went to so many cities and necropolises,
Released myself into the endless, universal self—I’ve come
Back to you, remaining by your side.

[Translated by the poet]

An Erasing of Being

I stared,
the sky smudged its own palette,
clouds pixelated into phantom glitches,
their forms dissolving
like corrupted files in an endless loop.

Birds—
forgot the architecture of flight,
became holograms, flickering,
hovering above a ground that
no longer remembered
its purpose.

You,
a specter in a rusting frame,
erased me into a fossil of echoes,
a face reduced to data,
scrambled in the void
of an obsolete machine.

I watched,
the earth’s greens pixelated,
turned into a labyrinth
of static noise,
where wind,
once a hymn of continuity,
choked on its own algorithms.

Words,
like shattered glass
on a black and white screen,
morphed into labyrinthine codes,
devouring the syntax of dreams,
flattening landscapes
into monochrome whispers.

You—
a carnivorous algorithm,
ingesting my essence,
until I
became a ghost
in the machine,
an untraceable void
in a post-apocalyptic scroll.
[Translated by the poet]

Ali Siddiqui is a poet, fiction writer and literary magazine editor.
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