When remembering the Light
28 October 2025
Whispers stir
throughout my blood streams
There were fears
in my dreams
A million cries repaved them
a road to murmur
Hollow eyes
they build in me walls
where I shield
my heart’s door
Raging seas bring me ashore
to the land of sighs
I am knight
of otherworldly
My mind spins
rules and whims
When remembering the Light
it is not a fight
Reading of the poem:
Kalandra - Borders
Desert winds whirl on
26 October 2025
Sullen skies
watch my every move
Deceit lies
in their sighs
There is nothing I will prove
I ignore their cries
Yesterday
I stored my future
under sands
Foreign lands
remembering osmosis
seep soul through crisis
The Negev
moved on silently
its body
wild man’s tool
its breath all still promises
unwinding through hiss
My seeds grown
diligently sown
through mind cast
made to last
A thousand years break under
the forced surrender
Cast me ten
Elements are five
Replicate
twice mission
The tribes that stand will survive
wayward attention
In truth lay
throne to sit upon
Mirrors don
gold inlay
They kill themselves as they slay
Desert winds whirl on
Reading of the poem:
Desert Meditations Gnawa Bass Meets Blues Guitar
Pencil drawings of women on blue and orange paper
25 October 2025
After lunch and while waiting for electricity to be set up in the reiki and pranic building I had installed in the garden, I decided to draw a couple of female faces to add to those I had already drawn beforehand. I had a portrait of a woman on blue paper and one on orange paper so decided to add one of each today. I plan on having these framed and hung just above the bed in the main bedroom. For the bedroom where my stepdaughter stays on weekends, I am waiting to have her put her own artwork so did not do anything else than furnishing it.
In the corridor I had some of the papyrus paintings I bought in Egypt last year put up and the third bedroom upstairs would house the paintings and other artwork of my daughter Léa. The fourth bedroom downstairs would have either some more of the papyrus paintings or some other artist’s work. In the living/dining room, I had already hung works of Shakeel he painted in 2013 and the paintings are quite big so six of them have covered the whole room which is around 7 m x 4 m
It had been a while since I had drawn with pencils so the drawings are not my best but I think they will do for the place I have destined them to go onto. Even though my hand was not up to the mark, I enjoyed drawing these sketches and look forward to using some of the acrylic painting I just bought from Amazon to paint as it has been years since I painted in acrylic. There is a big mirror above the desk in the main bedroom, and I plan on painting some boat scenes in pastel blues to go with the headboard of the bed which is dark blue. I hope I soon find time to start these paintings as it has been difficult to find time with my busy schedule between work, daily chores, healing of others and just me-time to relax and resource.
I leave you with some music that I was listening to before and after drawing these female portraits.
Shadow dance blues
Elixir part 7 – An equilibrium for Melancholy
18-19 October 2025
As she exits Melancholy, she stomps under the Earth and accelerates through its porous texture, only emerging when she has moved beyond the field of Melancholy. On emerging, she realises that there are men watching her carefully and speaking into their cuffs. They must be men of General Stein, she thinks and hurries her pace. Once she is really out of the field of Melancholy, the Earth is less porous and it is more difficult to stomp into it and travel through it. The Elders had once told her that they had made the Earth porous within Melancholy so that they could quickly move underground and replicate their system there in case the Earth started to overheat again or in case there were acid rains like it happened many decades ago.
She braces herself for the impact and stomps underground again while activating the propulsors alongside her arms and legs. The Earth isn’t as porous as within Melancholy but soft enough for these to help her sail through the underground outside of Melancholy. Again bracing herself for the impact, she emerges several meters away from where she first saw General Stein’s men. All of a sudden, someone attempts to cut her path and she realises it is General Stein. How did he get to know where she is she thinks but does not have the time to dwell on that thought. She quickly takes out the blades she had arranged right behind her shoulders and attaches them hurriedly to her feet before skating away, escaping General Stein’s clutch. She leaves him baffled behind her as he did not realise she had acquired that technology. These skates have nothing to do with the skates their ancestors used and are like thin knives that are activated by crystals creating a neat cut within any material that the user is gliding upon.
As she is sailing away far from General Stein and his men, she thinks back to how the adults of Melancholy felt so desolate and inadequate as they could not give the older Melancholists enough years to rejuvenate them or at least sustain them. Her formula was first conceived to use the teenage Melancholist years and while she did not plan on taking it all away, it was their sheer enthusiasm that caused too many of the years to be siphoned into her funnel. She wondered how she could obtain a mix of both the adults and the teenagers’ years without fully depleting either of them. She had arrived at her temporary residence and looked all around before entering to make sure that nobody had followed her.
It then struck her that all she had to do was put the teenagers in a state of peace or bliss so that their enthusiasm would not take over making them give all or almost all of their years instead of only a fraction of them. She still had two barrels of crystals of teenage years and one of adult years. She directed reiki towards the teenagers’ barrel and the crystals inside it started slowly transforming into liquid. She took two thirds of this liquid for one third of the liquid in the adults barrel and mixed these with her other ingredients. Sure enough, what she had thought of was indeed happening. She could see forming in front of her eyes a strong elixir, unique in its kind as it contained the joyous output of the teenagers heightened by the endurance and experience of the adults. She smiled to herself. The Elders were going to be very happy with what she had discovered…
The Elders | Mothers
Lasting touches of beauty
12 October 2025
Invented
Tales of the living
Lies they bring
flags flying
The discourses cemented
by guards demented
We live lies
White and black altars
stage for spies
Buzzing flies
find road to our inner skies
where the foot falters
Though tongue slips
I keep my head high
Smothered sigh
escapes lips
The word it aches for just quips
scorching my mouth dry
Hope duty
I reinvent sky
butterfly
Bright words fly
Lasting touches of beauty
embrace soft my eye
Reading of the poem:
Clann – Once again
The loss of humanity
12 October 2025
Withered lands
circling pools of blue
They breach through
humans’ hue
repeating blasts overheard
of acts untoward
We forsook
innocence repealed
Laughter pealed
Death revealed
the quaking knees they concealed
dire stances they took
Withered sigh
my bosom empty
as they die
smothered cry
The loss of humanity
burnt under their sky
Reading of the poem:
Hamza Namira - Ay Kalam | حمزة نمرة - أي كلام
Tales of the wretched: Ashok and his mother – Chapter four: Redemption flowing
7-8 October 2025
Ashok slowly disengaged from Annie’s embrace attempting to put some distance between them and have a calm chat with her. His arms were still limp by his sides as he eased himself out of her clutch. He realised from her vice-like grip that it had been a long time since anyone had been kind to her. He thought about his mother again and how she had been helpless with nobody showing her any kindness while she struggled. This is how people were pushed into desperate actions because they felt completely disregarded by everyone around them. He sighed internally thinking that he had been too young to find a solution to their predicament and his mother had literally worked herself to death while reserving most of the food she could get her hands on to him. There had been no shelter when he was young, just places for single young pregnant women to go to until birth of their child.
He looked at Annie whose face seemed crestfallen as she wondered what to make of him pushing her away. He was not sure how to handle this as he had kept his feelings under wraps for the longest time ever, even while he was married, even when he was happy when dating his wife before he married her. He had always felt that if he gave in to his emotions it would be like a dam that might obliterate everything around him. He had hated his relatives for such a long time and with such passion that he was afraid of expressing any other emotion lest he get carried away and start expressing those feelings of hatred as well, be submerged by them and act only in line with what they released within him. At times he had felt that the hate was such that it would turn into a fire that would physically consume his heart.
- Annie, I just want to help you and your son but I have been a lonely man for such a long time that I do not know how to speak normally with people.
- You did talk to me at the shelter
- Well you see, that is different. At the shelter I have a role that I embraced and that is to help people in the shelter with food and blankets. I know the drill. It is unemotional, safe and almost always the same. I did feel sympathy for you because you reminded me of someone I knew a very long time ago but I usually interact with those who come to the shelter in a very mechanical way. There are no other emotions than perhaps a slight touch of pity. When I saw you at the shelter, it made something stir in me, something that I had thought I had let go a long time ago
- So you don’t feel pity for me?
- Not really. I am just overwhelmed by the need to keep you and your son safe.
After a long pause, he decided to tell her everything about his childhood, the desperate times when his mother could not sell what she had made, the resulting famine-filled days, how his mother had become so gaunt that she looked like a corpse, the absence of his relatives, their presence when she had died, his hatred of them, the orphanage that had saved him from the hatred that was eating him – at least for a while.
- Did you ever marry, she asked
- I did, he answered
- Did you love her? Did you have children?
- I did love her but I guess the hatred inside did not allow me to love her properly. The love I had inside of me for her was like a shell, it was not bright and happy like she would have liked it to be. The hatred inside kept making a hole that neither my love for her, nor hers for me could ever fill and appease. Eventually she got tired of waiting for me to love her like she would have liked to be loved. Five years of a relationship that had the dull ache of unresolved hatred festering within it and she decided to move on. We never had children as she felt that I was broken and she thought that broken men should never become fathers. She had her own issues with her father who was never able to express love. It has been almost ten years since that day she decided to leave me. I guess it is best for broken men like me not to be in a relationship.
- I don’t think you are broken. The man who left me with his child, that is a broken man. You don’t hurt someone you have loved unless you’re broken. Nobody who is whole would hurt another soul without reason. From what I have seen from you, you have only been kind to me and I did not see you hurt anyone else. You might have been badly hurt but you are not broken, not like what I would think of a broken man
- Thank you Annie but I think she might have been right. There is this hole inside of me that never goes away, or at least not until that evening when I saw you feed your boy and something stirred inside of me, not until now when I saw how happy you were to be here.
- Thank you for helping us. My boy had not had a good bath in so many months. They did not always allow us into the Bain des Paquis and I could not use them anyway during the winter months. I tried to stay under the radar so social services would not take him away
- You can stay here as much as you want. You do not need to go to the shelter anymore, I will bring the food here.
Annie rushed and hugged him again and he let her hold him fiercely this time. His arms were still limp by his side but he started feeling like a stirring in his shoulders and arms which slowly twitched and his arms then rose to hold her around the shoulders, softly pressing her onto his chest. Her tears fell freely again on his coat and he sighed as he felt a stirring in his heart while he could see behind his closed eyes a slow glow that seemed to fill his chest. All the sadness of not having been able to help his mother seemed to soar from his heart to his eyes which brimmed with tears. As his tears mingled with Annie’s tears, he felt like a wall had crumbled within his chest. All the years of self reproach on his lack of initiative to help his mother flowed with the mingled tears, washing both their hearts from sadness and pain. It was as if redemption flowed within his heart and he smiled with gratitude for being able to help Annie and her boy.
Damian Marley ft. Lady Gaga - Ashes and Roses
A terrorist to love – part 15
5 October 2025
She decided to clean things up more but in a different way as she could not bear the idea of sitting on the couch where the bulky dead man had sat. She took some Dettol wipes and went over the whole couch after stripping it from the covers she had put on it. She stripped the floor of all the carpets and set about cleaning the floor with the Dettol wipes which had a flowery smell to them. She scrubbed and scrubbed until her fingers ached. She realised she was letting her old OCD based behaviour come back because of this incident. She had never been able to stomach the smell of blood nor the sight of it oozing out of wounds. Her work at the unit was mainly intelligence based as well as catching criminals and she had fired her gun only a few times.
She washed her hands and decided that she would feel better after a good warm bath. She filled the tub with hot water, added some Epsom salts and a bit of cold water before she eased herself into it. The water and the salts started relaxing her aching muscles. All these hectic incidents were getting the better of her nerves. She wondered if she had done the right thing by leaving Dubai and getting to London where it was more difficult to hide from both her previous unit and from the ISWAP as well as Boko Haram. It seemed they were getting to her all too easily. She also wondered why Al Shabab would want to take down a head of a Boko Haram unit.
She was well aware that Boko Haram and Al Shabab were not exactly friends but she had never thought before that they would turn against one another rather than uniting against the Western world. Would it not make more sense for them to unite their strengths in order to have a stronger impact against the non-believers that they were looking to castigate? She heard a strange noise in her living room and froze. Who was this now? Boko Haram had already been there and her unit normally would not sneak into her apartment as they had their cameras everywhere and very likely already knew what had happened in the road outside as well as what had gone on in her flat. She had realised that they only wanted to monitor everything, especially Boko Haram movements and they did not seem keen on actually catching Manas.
She rose slowly from the bath, trying to make the least noise possible. She reached out to her gun which was on the chair next to the bath tub. Her gown was hanging on the wall opposite the bath tub and she doubted she would have the time to reach it. She wiped her feet on the rug to ensure she did not slip stupidly and make it easier for the intruder to overcome her. She held the gun at the level of her face, pointing it outward, determined to kill whoever it was in the living room. Her heart was racing as it had been a while since she had killed anyone directly. She burst into the living room gun cocked and ready to shoot and found herself face to face with a young black man who was pointing his gun at her...
Billie Eilish – Quiet Revenge
Soul Fillet
20 September 2025
(translation of a short story called “Filet de soul” written in French on 8th March 2011 – See the original here or copy and follow this link https://geethabalvannanathan.com/2011/03/15/filet-de-soul/)
She struggled, but it seemed useless, as the net enclosed her on all sides, fitting her body like a glove. The antimatter of its braiding was of the same ilk as her own immaterial body, and so she was unable to go through it. She watched helpless the ectoplasms of the ghost ship slowly hoist her towards them. She remembered the advice of her grandparents, who had been her guardians since her parents' death, and told herself she should have listened to them and not ventured so far from her sweet native soulitude.
It was all the fault of that cursed spring, of that nutty unicorn illusion, and of her tightrope-walker nature, which never resisted the urge to swing in the air between two equally deep chasms. The black holes of the fiery soular system she had entered by mistake or stubbornness—she no longer remembered—and which had finally disembodied her after a burn a thousand times more intense than unicorn fever had struck her down.
Yet all the signs had been there: the panicked looks of those who had just learned the rite of passage from the customs officer, the biting cold escaping through the only window to the other world—placed so high that it was impossible to look through the glass, the smell of sulfur that accompanied each explosion of the beings passing through the door, of which only a pyrography remained, each aligned alongside the others made before it. In short, a spectacle that would have dampened the fantasies of even the most ardent pioneer, but she had carried on, drawn by the idea of this stellar discovery.
The snub-nosed customs officer who sat counting his money at the edge of the two worlds had kept making her fill out so much paperwork that she almost ended up with the wrong papers. "What are all these delaying tactics?" she had exclaimed, exasperated, to which he replied that this was the price—yes, one always had to come back to the price in this world—of passage to the other world. They had to think carefully, and these weren't so much delaying tactics as preparatory tactics for a decision that would be final.
As a good intermediary for the overlord of this world who transmitted his orders to him through the hollow horn of a unicorn of other times, he took it upon himself to tire out those determined to pass into the other world so that only those who could no longer be malleable puppets would finally take the plunge. In any case thought the lord, looking at his navel, which needed a lot of vassal care to keep it from detaching itself from his body, this kind of people would be of no use to him because they would not be obedient vassals. For it took blindly obedient beings to caress the motionless body of the lord, which was becoming more and more flaccid and incapable of containing this quivering bit of flesh in the middle. The massage had to be done in concentric circles starting from the extremity of the body and in tighter circles to get closer to this purplish navel and the task became not only more exhausting but also more repugnant. Indeed, through immobility the lord became an enormous fatty mass whose deadly effluvia were exacerbated by the arrival of spring and reaching the extremities to attempt to execute at least one circle became an increasingly impossible task during the lifetime of each vassal. Suffice to say that the overlord was very difficult for any being to grasp, and she told herself that any other fate would be better than being condemned to grasp this monster, especially since spring was fast approaching.
The manoeuvres continued for quite some time, and the bitter retorts from both sides almost put her in the bad books of the customs officer with the snub-nosed face and the dead eyes, but in the end she managed to finalize her efforts. All that remained, the customs officer had told her at the end, was to get rid of the rest of the sinful confessions in order to complete the rite of passage. Turning to him to ask what that meant, she saw a sadistic glint finally rekindle the dead fish gaze of the customs officer who told her with a grim smile that she was going to be burned with a blowtorch so that the sinful and the flesh would detach from her and she would return ethereal to the other world leaving her remains as an ornament on the wall of the "lament asians". She had a moment of panic but it was too late, it was the price to pay she told herself, resigned, and moved forward towards the door made of blowtorches.
She remembered an unbearable burning sensation accompanied by a deafening explosion, and the next moment she was floating weightlessly in a hushed space whose silence and thick darkness were broken only here and there by gentle lapping and rays of intense luminosity that strangely illuminated nothing but themselves, leaving the rest of the space in darkness. She barely had time to feel, or even see, other immaterial beings floating near her before a mass of ropes had been thrown over her and she was being pulled inexorably toward the ghost ship. Once hoisted aboard, she was roughly lifted, and what was her surprise to come face to face with a now-familiar face—a rhinopithecus, she thought, before losing consciousness.
When she came to, an ectoplasmic version of the overlord stood limp before her and beside her the ectoplasm of the customs officer was slowly and deliberately rubbing a huge blade against a black hole. As she stared at him, dumbfounded, he turned to the overlord and asked him.
"How would you like your soul fillet?"
"Blue," was the reply.
Nina Blaze – Ain’t Your Fool No More
Dragon’s life in synthesis
7 September 2025
Follow sage
remedy to rage
subtle stage
blooming age
Just a fluttering ribcage
there to assuage
Results blown
from strategy sown
Child slow grown
life to own
notoriety to hone
to master alone
Serpents’ hiss
growing from abyss
dawning bliss
scale to kiss
Dragon’s life in synthesis
a blade to dismiss
Reading of the poem:
Caela Raye - Crown of Snakes
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