Ilhem Issaoui
Poem 2:
Anxiety of a student
I lock myself in a room
I have to write and edit
I know what is to be done
But will I do it?
Less than a month I have
The pages before me, many, many
Did I write this?
Am I certain of what I wrote?
What do I have to edit?
Cannot I hand them this way
And disappear
Because I feel I can no longer bear it
An hour after an hour
Still nothing done
Do I have a life?
I want to have a life
How can people still have a life?
A friend once appeared, it was warm to converse with
Now how tristifical
The heart races at night
Now it even races in the morning, every hour
You are fine as long as you eat
But cannot they see
At times you do not eat
At others you have no idea that you ate much
Each time the thought of studying comes to the encephalon
Poor encephalon
Do you know what it feels like to have a racing heart?
As if a cold cold aching is twisting the heart
Do I breathe?
A lump in the throat is all what I feel
To them a scholar should have no social life
It is the norm
It means you are exceptional
Can one be exceptional when one suffers from anxiety?
What is quite exceptional in being locked in
And the crux of the matter is that no one comprehends
Such intellectual abyss
Restless
I go to the veranda
Birds are happy, aren’t they?
Before the woman comes to oust them
Poor restless, they
Poor restless, I
When I try to divert the thought and the fear related
But in vain,
For in every conversation
The same topic will appear
Amidst Cimmerian solipsism, I holler
O friend hear me
But no one to answer
We return to the blackened papers as if nothing was wrong
Let us wear a fake smile
To people you are nothing
To acquaintances, you are a mark,
And perhaps a fleeting vainglory of theirs
Ilhem Issaoui © 2019
Ilhem Issaoui
The Child that Was Me
no one to be seen
all along the cimmerian road
with a bottle, I broke my head
and all, all the dreams clinquant
were reddened
and suddenly eyes behind glasses
led me to think of vomiting and nausea
they wanted my soul and soil
I hated them
I fled
no sooner they entered
my most cherubic dreams
as if some Cerberean creature
and Oh! they crucified me
and left a cadaver with no head
Memories of a Silent Child
our hands
bare, bare hands
that long ago developed some hatred
toward the chalk dust
now regret the belonging to a self deleterious to the skin
was it to tame it
or to allow it to feel what had been fleeting and unfelt
that inspired the idea of cutting oneself
during the happiest ephemeral moments of inauthentic living
or a reminder
“this is not aeonian”
a dulcet moment among all the deceiving moments
how inauthentic to whelve the self in a nest with hays
we know its provenance
outside you
a mummery and a ceaseless cajoling
o dormant awareness of a pale child
and a banging of heads
against boards and floors
and a disfigured child
who moans in sotto voce
Pathetic Existence
such a conundrum is our existence
that in the winter rain does not fall
that our own voice is a deleterious whistle
no longer ours
that we cajole death
we cajole it
with our nakedness
and it refuses us
moribunds gossamery
unworthy of death
O Lethe I beg thee
nothing but a corroded memory
In Memory of Someone Who Died Alone In Paris
we work all days
and nights as well
for their hubris to glint
we work all days
we miss the opaque cloudland
the dandelions we once loved
we ostracise ourselves
inside a burrow
to bury the leftovers of ourselves
do they know
do they recall ourselves being human
do we recall being human
when love traversed our path then
hanged itself on a gibbet
yet we are not that weak
we seclude ourselves until we wither
and this is a formula for death by which they shall not consider
us nullifidians
according to all credences and faiths
one night, when alone, as ever
we shall bid the world farewell
unknown, with no identity, until the good hands of charitable men
find us, after weeks and weeks from our silent, insignificant departure
but the good thing is that we worked hard all days
hence, when the day comes for them to find our cadaver
they shall not bother about the expenses of a sepulcher
for we worked all days
and nights as well
Ilhem Issaoui © 2018
Ilhem Issaoui is a 25-year-old (30th December 1992) Tunisian translator and poetry and short stories writer. Some of her poems and short stories have appeared both online and in print in magazines including Three line poetry, Salis Online Magazine, Mind Magazine, Mad Swirl Magazine, Jaffatelaqlam, Danse Macabre, About Place Journal… She is also the author of a collection of poems entitled Fragments of a Wounded Soul. She is an Academic researcher in the field of Suicidology at The Faculty of Arts and Humanities of Sousse and a member of Psycho-Trauma Tunisie, the first North African Association in the field of Trauma.