Dubai Days manuscript

Returning to Ones Core Values for an
Enlightened Way of Being

After a trip to the exact birthplace of the Buddha in
Lumbini, Nepal



1. Always tell the truth, even if is to your detriment.
2. Always see the best in others even if they see the
worst in you.
3. Be humble at all times.
4. Be gentle in your words.
5. Be noble in your actions.
6. Be compassionate in your thoughts.
7. Forgive the unforgivable.
8. Accept everyone and everything as they are.
Don't try to bend people and situations to your will.
9. Watch your ego at all times. Be wary of what it
makes you say, do and think.
10. Don't compete with others for accolades or
material things.
11. Let others win even if you had the power to
defeat them.
12. Find charitable things to do and people to help
every day, even in the smallest ways.
13. Always stay calm and peaceful.
14. Let go of as many material things as you can.
15. Try to give much more than you take from
others.

Wherever This Is




Jun 17




Mighty hunger

As the pangs devour your stomach.


Hard play and plenty of pep.

Everything feels good.


Everything feels dismal.

The days of comics and catapults are over.


Now the commuter train trundles in

And tax returns of economics professors sit on the
desk like nagging guilt and ancient debt.

The sober, frugal life of a widow.


Living in this rickety house by the mosque from
which you can see the church and synagogue and
the ladies of the night who loiter in pools of light
under lampposts amidst the stench of discarded
gnashed chicken bones and deep fat friers.

From the beginning, love was a struggle and a
liability.

My decisions are not my own.

The first crisp morning of a new year bought new
hope but it seldom lasted long.


Regrets about all that turned out wrong.

I miss my old problems.


There is a letter on the dressing table next to the
ebony letter opener.


I can't bring myself to open it as its contents are an
affront to my wilful vagueness and a threat to my
peace.


More trains pass by my window

Setting off another train of thoughts.


Maybe I'll take up bridge

And fake love and pretend to be perfectly happy.
Splendid. Wonderful . Getting on swimmingly.

Fruit are not decorations.


I should eat them and relieve that put-upon fruit
bowl.

Mothers. And the god who created women is not
unaware of their ways.

I tried to tell them how I felt but to no avail.

Talking things over can make matters worse.


Were Saturday afternoons ever blissful?

I don't recall any idylls.


The autumn leaves flew by almost as fast as the
summer swallows did.

Life is not all moon beams and twinkling stars and
sunshine and honeysuckles.

Sometimes it's a dreary dirge of disappointments
and disillusionments.

Wherever this is, it's not where I had hoped to be
nor wish to be for much longer.

















Wherewithal and Victuals

1st Oct 18

And skulls
Shall pop like grapes
Under the might
Of the steel wheels.
Sparks and steam fly
From the relentless fury
Of the clattering labour machine.
The conveyor belt
Gives birth to a multitude
Of litters,
A minion of initiatives,
A glut of projects
But sends the workers
Along the production line
To their visceral death.

White Velvet Gloves
7th Oct 18



You take your high tea and tai chi
On the beach.

You swat flies and peel off bloody mice from the
alarmingly efficient traps
And feed them to your snakes.

You say your please’s and thank you’s,
You make your apologies

Through crocodile teeth.

Your dominion was by stealth
Because your fixed smile belied opinions

That would have made those you found a threat

Aware
Of your contempt

For them.
Tortoise-shell glasses and Ankar-wool polo neck

And feet on the finest Rajasthan rug.

And behind virginal-white velvet gloves,
Black claws lie sharpened.

A witch’s brew
Of political legerdemain,

Low self esteem
And high self-regard.

This unholy alliance

Will one day
Poison and disperse

Your secret coven of cronies.

The tony facades and suits
Won’t always fool everyone

All of the time.











Yawning at Cobras



Jun 18


You cough and yawn

As the cobra hovers

Ready to strike

By the bottom

Of your naked feet.

A scant regard
For fear is a healthy thing.

The ultimate emotion

That paves the path of glory.

You Are of Your Father the Devil

25th Sep 18

Serpentine characters
Slithering about my ankles
Sibilating niceties
Through gritted fangs.
The drum that you bang
Is loud
Because it’s empty.
This game of snakes and ladders
You play with people’s lives,
Cloys any decent conscience.
Your ploys and plots
Are too obvious to dignify
With disdain.
What is this dull pain I feel?
Stupefying inertia or pent up rage?
Your venom burns through every page.
It seems no longer relevant.
I’ll go where you will not slither.
You wither
In the light of ethics, reason and kindness.
There you perish.
You flourish
In the menacing shadows of bristling malevolence.
You crawl away
And I walk further.
You are of your father;
the Devil.







You Sleep in a Bed Splattered with the Blood of
Others

th
6 Dec 18

2,137
Miles per hour
Was how fast the bullet from the barrel flew
Through the bone and tissue
Of the Iraqi boy
Who had no hope to outrun it.
The ceaseless conflict
And the daily
Relentless
Unbending
Violence
Renders humans
Into mere statistics.
Body counts and numbers
Are faceless
And nameless
On the rolling-ticker tape
Of a TV screen of talking heads.
And the language of war blurs its own barbarity.
Not bombing but strikes.
Not civilian deaths but collateral damage.
Not a people defending their land from invaders but
insurgents.
Not freedom fighters but terrorists.
Not war mongering but humanitarian intervention.

Man
Is the only animal
That conceives his own mortality
And contrives his own brutality
Into a necessary evil
And passes it off
As heroism.



Zero


Mar 18



There was a girl in pink pop socks
Waiting at the stop
In the rain
For the bus that never came.

As bitter winter days
Harden the autumn haze,
Summer smiles turn into clenched teeth
On stiff figures lurching in windy streets.

Zero is the most balanced number.
In your pursuit of heroes and happiness remember
To be a humble zero
For it needs nothing.





The Author



kaleeM rajA

British writer, editor
and educator






Author’s official website:
https://artsscape.webs.com/
Author’s poetry website:
www.kaleemrajapoetry.webs.com
Instagram: www.instagram.com/kaleemraja123
Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCCC2A6A45
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Soundcloud: http://soundcloud.com/kaleem-raja
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Watpad: http://www.wattpad.com/user/KaleemRaja
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Issuu: http://issuu.com/kaleemraja
Hubpages: http://kaleemraja.hubpages.com





Dubai Days




Former editor of Ink and The View from Here and
author of Medication Nation and The Artisan and Other
Stories, presents here a collection of his poems, essays,
short stories, pictures, cartoons and personal
photographs to chronicle his 3 year’s sojourn in Dubai,
UAE.

This collection touches upon common themes of his
work – despair, language, mortality, cultural and
individual identity, oppression, hope, speaking truth to
power, repressed resentment, semantics, the plight of
integrity in a corrupt world, triumph against the odds,
and pushing the written word to its most extreme forms
of expression to describe viscerally and intellectually his
social experiences.

These themes are here fed through the cultural prism of
the cosmopolitan, futuristic metropolis of Dubai in the
21 century, the resplendent climes of UAE at large, his
st
place in it as a middle class British Asian in a foreign
land which is predicated on fixed ideas of social status,
worth.
race identity and race politics, human rights and self-