for Felicity Plunkett
i
In this World – which is not a world – black

and white withhold truths. In a world
we’d have multiplicities, the purity

of unqualified impurities. In ours we possess
, are possessed by, the comprehension

of qualified organs: terminal vs. respiratory
bronchioles of the lung, left vs. right

hemispheres of the brain. Not a scientist
(thank god) I best understand airports

life’s made me travel: arrivals vs. departures
of good and bad, tourists and terrorists,

and our so-called democracy: the Left
(cunning Capitalists) vs. the Right

(coldblooded Capitalists). Is my being
too a binary composite, bichromatic

backdrop of gloom with streaks of hope?
ii
Maybe I’d like to evoke an irrelevant

memory to name the absent thing: my desk
when my parents bought me one after

years of penury, after pouring their money
into a loan for a flashy house in Tehran’s

highest-status suburb, temporarily resigned
to their son being anti-social, introvert

ruining his spine by bending over notebooks
on the floor, asked me what colour

writing-table I wanted. Thrilled to get to choose
anything, I rejected their suggestions

(blue, blue, blue), insisted, resisted, fought
for two planks of vertical chipboard

legs joined by the horizontal third, desktop
covered in thick, grey contact. Ashen

’s so boring I remember someone sneering
(probably a nosy cousin): in Farsi ash-like

(khaakestar-ee) is the word for grey.
iii
Ashy vastness overshadowed the whiteness

of the page, incisions of my pen’s black ink
as I worked (regurgitated what I’d read)

to forge a raison d’être; and I stayed loyal
to the anti-colour post-migration. If I’d been

dark, wog and olive-complexioned
before, dislocation brought me the paleness

of a zombie’s skin, of what remains after
so much hurt, rejection, anger, self-hatred

not the certainty of black negation,
not the whiteness of success, undecidable

thing beyond the great and the ghastly
made me, overlooked immigrant boy,

loyal to the lyrics of 90s ‘alternative’ music
after I heard in a morose song: “Grey

would be the colour / if I had a heart.” The singer
a ‘Gothic’ artiste (albeit a millionaire

rock star) had just termed the emptiness
of my situation, the void of absolute colours.
iv
Cinder’s interstitial, sutures matter

to interment in ether, always
impermanent. At the point of erasure

by water or air; a caesura, exceeds
fire and smoke, cremation

is the idea of keeping alive the nothing
-ness of life against the parsimony

of urn and plaque – a person may only be
existent as a thing above and outside

body vs. epitaph, black vs. light, being vs. death
to belong to a world finally worthy

of the name, a world that can only be shaded
in ineffable, incomprehensible grey.