Disconnect | A Poetry Chapbook

4 | Noises

Sweetest of them are turning sour
Hoping they miss the working hour
Talking about noises, yours included
Leave me to sleep and dream deluded.

Leave me out of your favorite troubles
Don't bother to hook me, it only doubles.
Blackouts and lockdowns are all I need
My nerves to spark and pay me heed.

You are loud and sometimes burdening
Not at fault since I am the bird in it
Wholly made of cartilages- fragile
Brittle, weak- far from being agile.

I enjoy the darkness even at the wink
A disconnect from the world that is on brink
Of mayhem, malware and malice alike
In a mask of progress and richness in spike.

Silence is condensing from around the air
Noises get blocked- I consider to be fair-
Getting me lost in a vaccum of nothingness
Settling at peace with something, anything, even if so is less.

Don't wake me up if you don't want me to
Don't make me come if you'll stay the same and true
Acceptance is the key for both you and me
Open your eyes for once and let me help you see.

~ Ithmam Hami, 12th November, 2022, 2.20 am

Explication

This particular writing of mine has a special significance under the context of the chapbook in that it inspired the title of the book. This is where 'Disconnect' originates from.

And the pretext of my original intention of writing the poem also involves the same word although the poem was titled ''Noises''.

There was something going on in my house that night- a family feud or fight which I can never get enough tired of. But I was literally exhausted at that point which almost put me to sleep in my room that I had either deliberately dimmed out myself as I usually tend to or the power was out.

Soon, I went asleep- out like a light- and I visually sensed this total blankness in that it was literally dark, black and blank behind my eyes. And there was not a single decibel of sound coming from anywhere. That trance-like state lasted only a few split seconds. But the profound aspect of this totally detached and disconnected phasing was not the experience itself; rather the situations it was flanked by before and after.

I went from an ever-familiar territory of chaos and contraries to a completely hollowed out limbo where absolutely nothing was happening. So, when I switched back onto the freak show right after, the feeling of desolation from that short-spanned room of silence hurt like hell.

Hence the lines-

I enjoy the darkness even at the wink
A disconnect from the world that is on brink

which are, to this day, some of my favorite lines from all of my poems so far. Because, what I felt was real. Hypnagogia is real and the tranquillity it brought me that night is what I'll ever cherish.

The poem is quite personal for me to have written like that. In fact, the verses that precede my favorite lines are directed at people close to me- a call-out but not quite in a hostile manner, as can be gauged from the third verse, while the verses that follow them, are about a sincere plea to let me fix this while keeping me out of it.

Quite a hassle there!