Life Is A Story Poem by Manahil Shafiq

I can viscerally relate to this portrait, as in the portrait of an artist as a young man by Joyce. It is parochial in form and yet maintains the ascetic distance from preaching. This summation is more pathos than cynical but you have somehow captured the fraility of existence and the existential notion of being only to be. That is all we are sparked for, (from your opening verse) like a grass fire we are ignited by one another and like vessels pour ourselves from one to the other and like the sea we drown one another in our miseries. But all the while we are islands unto ourselves.