Believe me until you see a God.

I don't know what to tell the kids that think they can live until the morning is no longer red of blood and nights no longer kill / & I see them every day / still scared / still waiting / still looking for shelter before the teeth grow through all this twilight / & I wish I could tell about that one time I slept before morning and haven't seen my father since / And what a way to be both hopeful and scared at the same time / sometimes, even our legs know to carry us to a mosque when there aren't enough stars in the night / I am still fascinated how I can see each prayer fleeing from a hopeless man's lips in the shape of a cloud and vanish in thin air before any God could carry it / and everywhere we look is another anchored ghost crawling out of a window / & this is the season when I think I've moved on / & when I think I have slept peacefully one night / & I stay up talking to a girl who I tell that I care for her, which is a weird way to say that I think I can love you until even the sun grows tired of coming back / & I do not expect myself to move on again once I sleep alone until the boys tear their palms & burst fearless again into the wetness as they cup their hands into a prayer / & ryan gosling sings "city of stars" into my ears as I watch the passing vehicles carrying more feelings than people / I feel his voice unfolding long & slow in my chest & I belong to a lineage of men that have healed through the soft syrupy leak of music while sitting under the rain / & I'm not yet saying out loud that I wish for the sky to shake / I am not yet saying out loud whether or not I believe in God / & I am not yet saying out loud what the rain means, I am only saying that I need someone right now to sing Emma's part of the song / I am saying I don't want to cry on a sidewalk anymore / rather / to stumble into a living room thick with a family's grief / & I would clear the night's salt from their eyes and tell them that which once convinced me to not worry of what happens to a soul once it has left the body & that which made me soon forget the person I loved / I would tell them that there is a heaven//

Ammaar is a poet, essayist and columnist. Born in Lahore; the city with more heartache than love, he found closure in the arms of poetry and expanded his poems into personal essays about art, love and music. Ammaar is a film student and has been writing for the past 14 years. He has been published in seven global anthologies and has been featured in the riggwelters press, the winnow magazine and other literary online journals for his heart aching poetry.