Song of the Sky: Nonfiction inspired by Joyce

"Effulgent" is such a pretty word. The lower part of the front two teeth touch and push down the middle of the lower lips a bit. Then the mouth opens. Aaaaaa. Then the mouth closes, the tip of the tongue touches the palate, and after that, the tongue pushes the palate a little and releases it, only to touch it again the next moment. This is how "effulgent" forms in the mouth. The dance of the tongue is just as beautiful as the word itself. Effulgent wind, effulgent rain of twilight moon, effulgent sky.

A bird soaring high in the effulgent sky beneath the surface of the universe and over the shadow of its own, the bird sat on a wire. The wire shook a bit. A small ripple in the wind, a small bird on the string. Not on the string of a guitar but on the string that connected electric poles. If the sky was the body of a blue guitar and the nearest pole was the bridge and the furthest one the nut, then these strings would have been the strings of a guitar. And then the bird would be a singing guitar pick.

The bird sat, and awkwardly, blankly, steadily, observed in search of something–anything–that it will be able to devour and digest. It searched among the maze of lanes, birds flying above, two-three, more or less than one or infinity. Wind comes, wind goes, fluttering feathers, rustling silence of the sun, hovering fluffy clouds of effulgence. Peep, peep, peeeeep-ing of cars, clicking of bells, useandhourawwmorething of crowded eloquence, innocence of the rolling wheels of vehicles and the toktoktok of horses pace, the tired light of traffic and few small bugs dead or tantalised by the delighting spectra of red, yellow, green. People stepping on steps. Spitting, coughing, blowing puffs of smoke, breathing in the air, air beating the wall of the lungs, folding the sleeves, buttoning and unbuttoning the shirt. Nothing, everything, and anything in between travelling with the light's velocity toward the creation of existence, to the core of absurdity and segregation among entities.

Things that pull and push, lie and sit, lie and speak the truth. The honest, the frauds, the fake Freudian Marxist  spreading religious propaganda in the name of secularism. People under changed history not knowing what it really is, and between the two palms of a girl, three petals of some yellow flower lying with a relieved stance while her reflection is cracked in a broken mirror. And like a drying mirage of a broken mirror, your distant birds have eaten my soul. They have laughed when the strings of gold got torn in the hands of rusty gods.

On the peak of a lovely dawn, they turn bloody–drowned, like the dead heart of Billy Brown. And the shadow of statues are like double imitations of life–of life of a hungry prisoner, bald, wounded, and tormented, raped, torn like the papers of holy scriptures in the heart. Beating heart of a lost child, falling ashes of an expired cigarette, and the last throbbing muscle of a blind eye. The dying umbilical cord of Dali's brow, of Breton's slow hands, writing words on the parchment of human skull, inscription dull sequence of rhythmic turn within the urn of a vesseled space, thousand grace flowing away from the life of games and play and the vagina of your lover's soul opens to my uncircumcised lust. Just a moment of my ugly breath on thy putrid skin, burns and shivers the veins from within engulfing all my trust. Seeing and eating and drinking away the blue of sky from a fragmented beak of a depressed seagull who, in my stomach, squeaks the sound of curious mutes, loitering for fruits of my living kidney-stone, of my tumour flesh, fully embraced in my hairy dress, watching the rain drawing the lane of dancing cows with round fists, making lists in my bones, in infant tones, filled with loans of tons of words and rhymes, like a chime of a sacred brothel, of a polluted church, like the smell of Bibles page, with the heart-beat of two braves dancing on the top of the Kaba, holding a violet Rubaba. They are dancing-dancing with the claps, sounds like old and ancient slaps in our mourning eyes that never denies the life of my life, the sole of my shoe, the soul of my flu will never die, and it forever lie in the uttering, fluttering, smothering brightness of my darkening hope, slowly fading away into the intestine of a rotten Pope.

Abdullah Rayhan is studying English Literature at Jahangirnagar University.