Written by
Osman Khalid Butt

Osman Khalid Butt is a twenty-seven year old actor, director, choreographer, writer and video-blogger based in Islamabad, and is also a self-professed struggling-artist stereotype. A journalism graduate, he is the co-founder of Desi Writers’ Lounge, as well as poetry editor and creative consultant for Papercuts. He has also remained a freelance writer for Instep, The News, as well as the Editor of the web-zine Text Teen, and wrote his first screenplay for the indie-horror movie ‘Siyaah’, which released nationwide in 2013. Though he has dabbled in television, TVCs and film, theatre remains his first love; he has directed four productions under the banner of his company, ‘The Living Picture Productions’, one of which he wrote himself. He has also collaborated with the Lahore Grammar School, Islamabad, directing three plays with its student body, and regularly gives theatre workshops across the country. He says he juggles all of this by drinking too much Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster for his own good.

I Shall Sleep Now, Lest I Not Find My Incubus Tonight

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My dreams are often black
and white; of glazed
terra cotta or
even
the palest hint of blue
I remain deprived.
Whack!
But these muses of night, these
poets of chimera inspire

an enactment of my scripted

switchblade romance; joining ebony

and ivory by the hip.

Whack!

And now, as I
grasp this piece of wood –
savoring its every color and grain
in hope
that its steel might bring about
a reality in Technicolor,

autumn’s residue dances in the zephyr; withered

leaves whispering ruefully of the shade they can no

longer provide; a requiem

shed blood, shed blood, shed –

This sharp edge; my grip
and the sensation of everything finite
Whack!
shattering under the might of a
steel axe, and oh,
the sacred wine, and oh, how

dahlias bloom in this
desolate backcloth; a carmine palette
that matches the
flush
of my cheek. I am
absolved of the prosaic; must now
absolve myself of the cruor
that breathes its last
on my
palm.
Thank you, nighttime.
Whack.

Epilogue:

A Children’s Rhyme

“Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks;
And when she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty-one.”

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• A BIANNUAL LITERARY MAGAZINE BROUGHT TO YOU BY DESI WRITERS' LOUNGE •

Volume 5

Fall 2009

Verse

I Shall Sleep Now, Lest I Not Find My Incubus Tonight