Abigail Silversmith Irfan 

I Keep Sitting In The Madhouse / Yearning For / A Mad Transsexual Witchspell

– Abigail Silversmith Irfan 

I Keep Sitting In The Madhouse

Here in the bed I was tied to before,

                                    I sit,

                                                thinking of possibilities we hold –

                                                                                                            us and our mad kin.

The world takes holding away from our bodies and make them fall.

Nobody yearns for tartarus.

I sit here with my body they call a sin in communion with other sinners.

We feast on words and flesh and lights of each other.

                        We build holding in a place that holding and sight see their end.

                        We hope beyond all veils of hoping, 

                                                                                    for seeing and foe being held,

                                                                                                as we keep on in our journeys.

Yearning For

                        The sky is dark, my love, let us not be too of unlonging for light

for I wish to see you in all your glory,

                                                            and to see,

                                                                        I need light.

Fire is too cold for me tonight,

                                                like for Ibrahim in the firepit.

I yearn to see and be seeing.

                                                There is so much things of wonder in the world.

Many things in this world are of unkind and the WARdens of some of our home(?)s have fangs and they deny us our very being and refuse our being and yearning and sight. Some of those ilk head the very universities that names itself emperor. I want this to be a way of conversation, for all posterity to see, for I yearn to know, WARden, how one does this. Will you talk to me in light?

                                                                                                                        My heart needs holding.

A Mad Transsexual Witchspell

How do we live in land where we seek meaning but cannot?

            My flesh tells me I have things to do,

                                                                to say.

Let me be unapologetically candid,

            the university compels me to annihilate.

                                                                                                There were shores I dreamt in these lands

                                                                                                where fables are made

                                                                                    Hope is a risky thing to have

                                                                        when the war is on your

                                                                                                            very

                                                                                                                        flesh

                                                                                                                        and

                                                                                                                        blood.

Inject your hormones as I do mine.

                                    The world we live was made by lives before

                                    so

                        let life .e c h o  . o  h  c   e.

There is insanities to be listened to.

Isn’t that what listening is? Attunement?

                                    And what is to be said of being?

                                                Except that we crave to be?

                                                            That the living needs life and life needs living?

I yearn for heresy new and to be (un/&re)done.

                                                            To do.

                                                            To be doing.

                                                                 Being a being that inhabits unsacred land.

What is to be done but to burn and rebuild?

                                                            This land is not new to it.

                        Where do my kin belong in this landscape?

                                    We yearn for habitat,
                                                     for inhabittance.

Cut my throat with the academy

                                                or betray it

                                                            and write heresy

                                                                                    on it’s very walls

Can one not yearn for a university where madness is held tender

                                                                                                            and the mad not ripped to shreds?

I make claim

                        my transsexuality is mad

                        my madness is transsexual

                                                                        refusing containment like all transexualities.

                        Can my transsexuality make out with yours?

I once was in a space where my being was and felt in kin, love and friendship.

                                    I learnt new ways of yelling there.

                                    I kinda like yell, sometimes out of thin air.

                                                                                    Screaming is a technology of madness.

The wardens of the academy often have teeth that bite.

                                                In the cruelest of ways.

                                                            This is a transsexual hex.

                                                                                    I spit in thy face, tormentor,

                                                                                    for biting me when I asked for holding.

                                                                                                You could have just cast me out.       

                                                                                                Like they all do.

                                                                                    And now, in the time most dark,

                                                                                    in this night where madness holds,

                                                                        I exorcise thee out of my spirit.

                                                Transsexual countermonstrosity.

                                                Transsexual countermadness.

Afterpoem:

The word processor drew so many red lines to my text.

                                    It tells me:

                                                            thy language is not mine

                                    I say back:

                                                            thine is a language built on hurt.

                                                            I draw red lines under yours.

Songs From The Heart of my Madness

Dancesong

I wonder why

I dance the best in the psychiatry ward

            in a cage

                        d environment

cu/t from the world.

                        Let my dance’s echo remain here

                        in this somber stairwell

            far away from the sights of the world

            and coherence.

After all, is not dance the purest form of language of the body?

I will wail in unsilence now. Too much has been said and sung.

                        Let madness echo in

                                    The world that forsakes it.

                                    Harder than rock that splits skulls

                                    and more gracious than the roses of the world

Hagdykesong

May I, with some uncordial insanity, tell you

            that my body was goners before you / cut / it / apart

                        the fragility of this body gives it iron

            casserole container of ungrace and unfun

                        I will just

                                      let it be

                                              for lack of a better saying,

                                                            unfounded.

            Let me be the (r/h)ag you condemn.

            Let my blood be poison

                        but there are ones

                                    who drink my blood with lust

                                                and I will let them,

Taunts of a sky afresh with rain collecting dust in a Bangalore evening is more than what a transsexual wishes when she grows up.

                                                This drought, my friend,

                                                                 to me is plentiness itself.

Let me cackle for a bit.

                        The soil is still of the smell of rain and love.

                        Let rot fester in and bring in the mushrooms

                        I am starving for the most dangerous food – Freedom.

Carve my flesh like you did that day.

Let Gender have sex have gender to fuck

                                    and us in the middle of that orgy

                                                in a rainy Bangalore evening.

                                    I have so many things to say

                                    and far too little time to speak

                        so, let me combust

                        rocketlike.

            Ash thy cigarette fag lips on my dyke head.

Titsong

It’s almost 4 AM and my tits aren’t calm still

so I walk across this landscape

in this institute proud of it’s warplanes

looking for some calm before class.

         But really,

                          How can calm exist amidst terror?

The FBI calls my friends abroad terrorists

and the terrorists at home too ache to call us that.

I know for a fact they do.

So while neither of our tits are calm, let’s sit together,

and cook for each other and feed each other’s souls

in the way only lovers can.

       It’s beautiful that we are bound for jahannam but

still know what loving feels like.

                               I want to ask Allah why us though?

                Why us when monsters walk this Earth?

Maybe there is a spot in helheim that feels like home

like how parts of Delhi does.

So, while our tits are uncalm, let us dance again

                                  till breakfast time when the pohawala opens.

Let our tits find their peace when the world finds it’s

Maybe I have gone too insane and lost too much of my mind as they tell me.

But still, isn’t there still the warm chai that we can share to look towards?

Time spends it’s maladies on women like me, she always has.

The birds too are silent now, to let me listen to her, to soak in

as much as I can and attempt to see without blinding myself.

The trees the birds sing on have their tales too in this wretched world.

Wreck my heart a little bit again as it moves another beat and

let agony and time’s lovechild speak how joy is built around terror.

I am tired. Hold my hand and my weary uncalm tits.

There is time yet for another chai and another day and another time(s)

Treesong

They make laws that lock us up and tie us down

and denying our very being.

But we are trees. Ancient. Persevering.

Outliving tyranny and our promised hellfire.

Remaking sacredness with our flesh and kinship.

And we will grow over their wretched law

and break it down, like plants on the sides of  a concrete tower

making ground where none has been.

And we will grow. And we will make tyranny detritus,

and it will rot in these lands and us who have been hurt

will grow

Sinksong

Wild winds blow in the land i come from,

            the stream in the village outskirts have a way of holding life

                        immersing tenderness into flesh and life.

The stream is far too much in the past

            all because i wanted to grow a pair of tits

                        and find a life worth living.

The ones who took the stream away speak thy language, milord,

they are excellent collaborators,

                                    You and my butchers,

                                           and my rapists

                                           and all who tried taking living away.

                                                            Are you happy?

The monster, I, would now not like to beg but become quicksand,

The site you, milord, would sink.

I have become ruptured and my rupture has given me eyes

and i see now

                        I see the treachery that you build.

                        The kind that takes life and living and home away.

I await, with yearning, the day that you sink

Dozersong

A house holds life.

Makes living possible.

In the many houndings of the world

                    it provides a place to retreat.

And they raze them down. For that very reason.

Can you not see what they want to do with me,

comes from the epistemology of the bulldozer?

To make life itself the thing to crush

To make at the center of the world absolute ruin

Deathbringing to the orchards of life

Bullet in the head

                to life and to living

Trannyness as method

Incoherence is me and I am her.

she kisses me at night and straps me to sleep

to be a wall on a fly who is also a fly.

         FagTrannyDykery

     Piss with me in this place they don’t want us to piss.

     Kiss me here.

To fathom the world’s unmaking of our being

is a task I refuse.

So all I ask, from you my love, if you so incline,

is to be as fagdyketranny with me and with the world

and with this bottle of vodka.

I am not sane and I refuse sanity.

I see yakshis fuck each other in thin air.

I chose to be among the yakshis

than to be with the state

Wiltsong

The flowers my ex sent me wilt in the vase.

Dyke to fag. Cute boy.

I hallucinate the end of the world as always

just as I do every Friday.

The world feels pathologically calm.

Refusal to crumble.

             What do we do now, love, the flowers are dry

             and what will give them life but our own?

We assume barrenness too easy.

Far too easy for the lakes not yet dry.

BLABBERRR

What are we even doing???????

                                    Let me THE FUCK OUT

                                                   I WANT OUT

S      P   A          C                                  E                                                                                                                                                                     

From the world in its inisculeness

I want an escape into being away from everything that prevents it

Witches won many a war by clinging to a politics of taking what was never given

So now, I perform transsexual necromancy. Warwitchcraft.

Attempting

R e    a         c       hing

                        to a world I desperately seek

                        and haven’t seen.

                        Witchcraft of the nonbeing

            of finding our (non)being

                                                longing to be free

                                    in a way that is light and enholding

            finding echoes of tears and kisses

of the living and the dead,

                                    Necromancy,

                        Re     aching

            finding more pains that shatter

            winds that kindle cold fire

unwarming but alive

                                    what is it that I seek, sister?

                                    How do we generate this thing we want

                        How do we build from walls that cage

                                    and aches that tear

reach for me.

                        It is lonely here without you

the point

            of contention, my friend

is space itself – how it br/

                                    eak/s

                                                me, you, the world(ing)         

don’t get me wrong,

                                i am myself an entity of breaking.

                                                                    break/ing with soul itself

                                                engaging in a collective e(cho/scape)

I need. with severity of yearning.

  need with me

                         br/e/ak with me

                                                do we not need brea/king?

                                                                         ruptures

                                                pour fire into this wound i call my home.

                        i need to sleep but i do not

                        sing me a lull/aby.

            what do our echo echo?

is my distortion making legible language?

                                                            separate my flesh

                                                            and hang me to dry

                                                            with my people

Want/Ing

wakings are different now.

Time is another time. Calling for ordering that escapes.

            Every dance is a ritual in humiliation-

                        move(ing/ment) with a certain stillness.

Wage war on my body like you do – Let echo of land call

                                                                as it always does.

I see myself wanting. I see my self wantING.

Worlds stab and cut when they collide.

Give me morphine. Now. Please.

WANTing an exit is immoral they say.

My good sir, clear the road then, will you?

Cartography of the day after terror

On the first day of your rape

you will get drunk.

Feel the cigarette’s taste in it’s entirety.

Fumigate your innards.

You look around

S.     P.         A.            C.                     E.

AutoAstronautics. You orbit yourself.

You call the voices of the gods

and the heathens… more them than gods…

You perform necromancy.

Make the dead flesh undead.

Two months from now you will go on a date

with a cute girl and just before you kiss,

you will feel like a familiar terrorist.

Let this terror pass(age) be liminal to some beauty, you hope.

What can counter terror but beauty?

---

The mad transsexual keeps finding themselves in many kinds of incarcerations. Here I reflect, from a mad transsexual epistemology the nature of my and my ilk’s many beings in the academy, the madhouse and the world in general. The mad transsexual yearns for (ontological and epistemological) holding. One is compelled to look at the many incarceratory natures of holding. I am yearning for world(building)s. Let us meditate on this, and on some interventions in the psychiatric wards that I and my many mad comrades have carried out before. All i have are questions mostly, and i present them to you in hope of some light(ness) in what can be an otherwise a very lightless world.

Abigail silversmith irfan is a mad transsexual dyke, a poet and a muscician. she does a lot of poetry as an archival practice of mad being and affect. She has a history of being forced out of many academic institutes and is suspicious of the university as a site of furthering the sanist agenda. She l(i/o)ves between bangalore and delhi at the moment and is a student at the MA Culture, Society, Thought program in IIT Delhi.