You asked me why I write poetry? I ask you why you eat food or sleep or marry? It depends on the way you see the world. I am killing my neurosis. I speak the horror that I buried under the deep layers of my mind. The horrors that went to my unconscious thus allowing me to live longer and wait for the right time to speak them out even if in a veiled language that perhaps I myself understand. These are the whispers of a witness who himself saw people planting poisonous trees on the river bank expecting sweet fruits in future. How can you expect Soi (….) heal itching on a human body? What should be the metaphors of my writing? Obviously ,my land ,my people ,the weathers of my land ,the springs and rivers and lakes of my land ,the mountains of my place of birth ,its flowers ,apple trees ,apricots, zafran and almonds .All the wise and unwise acts and deeds of my people should form the metaphors of my writings. I cannot borrow metaphors when it comes to talk and speak about myself and my people. That is why I am collecting those whispers that I heard when my soul was bleeding and blood only would be used for drawings on the roads of my land. All red. Everywhere red. The Jhelim red. The Wullar Red. The Dal red. The sky red. The horizons red. Long before, they would smell death of somebody if the sky would be reddish anywhere. But now the times have changed. Even if hundreds die a day, people do not feel the sky getting red. Basically, got so used to red. Red, red, red and red. What would be the poetry of such times? The metaphors of such times? Red, of course. I wish I could write of the love between Gul and Bulbul, the way masters of Persian and Urdu poetry would do. The unconscious hasn’t stored that all. I rewound the memory store and found whispers only. And I share those whispers with the progeny because they would have an intelligence to dig deeper into the skin of words and metaphors given their expertise in forensics and psychoanalytic methods of unraveling the semantic transitions from mind to the word. I am sure we see the same stars every night in the sky or this is simply an illusion or they change their position or they are mere objects on our minds alone or they are there every time but sometimes we are not able to see them. Good fantasy. Everybody should do this. Until you wonder on a thing like star, how can you have questions on them? Wonder, wonder and wonderful! Could stars come down for a meeting with me and fill my mind with a new memory chip having all the photographic representation of all that is up above us? Nay, this is not possible. I would find my head actually crashing into pieces, if at all it happens like this. Yes, I was telling you why a man actually writes. For killing your neorosis. For the construction of a new thought. For writing back to the empire. For creating a beautiful world of your own. For pouring out the feelings that form an ocean within you. For money .For name and fame. For selling an idea to a people. For propaganda. I kill my neurosis. The neurosis that masters of land inflicted on people like me in their tender youths when the fragrance of intellect in our minds was about to form and develop. We forgot the flowers. We forgot the fragrance of flowers and allowed our nostrils to get used to foul smell, stench and filth all around. It came and it came in abundance. It was like the great Flood .Floods bring everything with it. Rocks, trees, houses, homes, human shit, bull shit, everything. When flood subsides it is the pure and pristine water only that river carry in them. Dirt and filth find their places of rest anywhere for anything. My naked eyes without glasses on them saw it happening and I am sure this must be the case everywhere where Floods hit human habitations and races of different colour and creeds. I have been waiting for long for the right words and diction for sharing these whispers with anybody who too might be having the same stuff lying heavy on his mind. This is why I have let my keyboard loose without any plan for it is the matter of whispers that I have made or somebody has in the times of war made here like a wayfarer or a Banjara who keeps roaming about the world without owning anything. Whispers are nobody’s property. You make them and somebody stealthily hears them. Most of the times they become a cause of concern and they also vanish in the air without leaving any impact behind. Lets keep talking. May be it heals the wounds. May be it airs the closed channels of the unconscious and allows the hidden whispers move out to mingle with the morning breeze that may carry them to some distant place where they are heard and interpreted for an understanding and comprehension of what was happening here. People have theories. I don’t have any. Even my writing is without any preconceived theory or a plan to work with. It is you that provokes this flow in my words. Your sweet presence in the times of absence that only Derwesh could understand. He too had a similar kind of trauma heavy on his mind. Shahid was the first witness to report from this place haunted by ghosts and marked with absences. Absences of higher order. People write for records and for records are acted upon. I don’t want any action. I just want that wounds should be healed. The wounds should done away with. Come on, we can stand by our words. We can fulfil our promises. The promises that we have long made. Unfulfilled promises cannot be forgotten. Wounds inflicted can be healed but words unfulfilled cannot be subjected to unlearning and forgetting because of the supreme world of unconscious and the collective memory. It is not the matter of one single memory that this Ameen has but others too have .May be my writing is just part of that collective memory. May I too belong to that universal family. May be I too have an existence of my own. You cannot deny that all. I am a witness that reports his case in the court of the Supreme Lord of this Universe whose decree is that Justice must prevail and Unjust must go as the harmony between the earth and the heavens is to be restored after that historic Fall.