Living In Yesterday's Skin

A long time back —

not as long back when science was still magic

and myth was religion —

two men with fucked up heads

decided to fuck with the heads of as many as they could.

Because that’s the thing about “fucked up,” isn’t it?

The more you are,

the funnier it gets to watch people crumble to it.

Years later, we call them

the father and the stepfather of human psychology as we know it.

Freud, the father.

Adler, the stepfather.

And while the father has been fondly remembered

decades after he’s nothing but bone and dust —

the stepfather has been conveniently forgotten into oblivion.

Stepfathers never matter half as much as fathers do.

Unless of course, in porn.

It takes sexual fetishes of borrowed incest

to make stepfathers relevant, doesn’t it?

Even if the father is an utter piece of shit

and the stepfather,

an embodiment of consistent resilience.

Because the father birthed life

from his two minutes of sweat and semen —

so what, if the stepfather chose to deal with the consequences

the father’s balls didn’t have the courage to.

Freud was what you get

when you let perversion and debauchery

fuck lack of accountability

in a heated threesome.

So he simplified the nuances of trauma,

bottled them as mommy and daddy issues,

and sold the idea of sex-as-refuge

to people too dumb to understand

the actual mechanics of human functioning.

His concepts had nothing to do with responsibility.

Nothing to do with owning up.

They were all in the past.

No present. No future.

Because he knew —

once you teach people to dwell in the past long enough,

they get too comfortably blind

to see the need to own their present or their future.

Adler wasn’t a people pleaser, you see.

He believed in objectivity.

In a world so soft

it could cut itself on a butter knife —

that is never a good sign, is it?

Adler told, while no one listened,

that your past is as important

as your present and your future.

And that your past, although can’t be erased,

can sure be written into a present

and a future rather contrasting.

And that’s the beauty of accountability.

It hurts

because it’s never comfortable.

But then —

no one’s evolved

without breaking a bone or two.

And guess why Freud is the father,

when every rational cell in your body

tells you it should be Adler?

Because in a world

where biology is considered a convenience,

and technology is abused

to eradicate the relevance of human existence —

Because in a world

where myth is religion,

and history is possibility with a deniability clause —

A long time back is now.

And accountability?

Just bad aesthetic

for hallucinated existences

who believe orgasming to self-love is evolution.

Revolution Ends At The Rectum

You swipe right and lean left,

while your spine —

at the centre —

lies forgotten.

You speak of geographies

like cardboard boxes —

folded, taped, and labeled

while scrubbing histories clean, 

like chalk from a blackboard

no one cared to read.

You rent your smoke-choked lungs

to scream for Palestine,

while your closeted bigotry

mocks your assumed pronouns in private —

the same pronouns that would get you hanged

in the land you now march for.

You sip imported wine

in crystal glasses

etched with capitalism’s breath,

while deepthroating Marx

in candle-lit conversations

you call liberalism.

You write poetry

for the dead in distant wars

but throw tantrums

when told that art is political —

as if your butt crack

is where the revolution ends.

You, my love,

are no intellectual.

You, my love,

are a whore.

As cheap as they come.

Because when validation

is your only currency,

you are just meat —

pimping out flesh and thought,

brains and bones,

at prices that shift

with cheers and claps.

You forget —

death is universally worthless.

No matter what price

you put on your existence.

Do You Believe In Life After Love?

You ask me —

“Do you believe in life after love?”

as if love was a fire exit

and heartbreak,

just the fire alarm 

we punch in the throat, on out way out.

But love doesn’t end like that.

It doesn’t slam the door.

It seeps into the walls,

crawls into your coffee mug,

and waits in the silence

between your name

and the one they call next.

You don't walk out of love.

You rot in it

like wet wood 

pretending it's still a home.

Life after love

isn’t life —

it’s performance art for an audience of regrets.

It’s waking up

next to someone else’s peace

and missing your own war.

They tell you

healing happens with time —

but time doesn't heal,

it just teaches you how to limp better.

You don’t stop bleeding.

You just learn to wear darker shirts to match the bandages.

And no,

I don’t believe in life after love —

because what they call “life”

is mostly just muscle memory management.

Deleting call logs,

burning old playlists,

pretending the ghost in your bed

isn’t whispering the same name you swore you forgot.

Love doesn’t die.

It gentrifies.

Moves into another part of your body,

starts charging rent,

and makes you think the ache is part of growing up.

You try loving again —

but all you’re really doing

is learning how to bleed cleaner.

The truth is,

love never leaves.

It just turns into poetry

because that’s the only language

where hurt is allowed to stay beautiful.

And if you call this “life,”

then yes —

maybe I do believe in life after love.

Not because I survived it,

but because I wrote through it.

Because the pen remembers

what the heart can’t carry.

And maybe,

that’s the only resurrection we get —

not in flesh,

but in metaphor.

So ask me again: Do I believe in life after love?

No.

But I believe

in verses written

in the blood left behind.

And sometimes,

that’s more immortal

than love ever was.

The Algebra Of Aftermaths

Growing up we were told

A + B equals C.

They forgot to mention

Life isn’t that obedient.

It doesn’t follow algebra —

it follows aftermaths.

We grew up being told

every action has an equal and opposite reaction,

what no one ever tells you is

some reactions are delayed by decades,

or disguised in violent silences.

Or stone-cold grief.

Or your mother flinching at the sound of your voice

when you ask her if she's okay.

Life is not an equation.

It is in the in-betweens, the residue.

A chain reaction

of people fucking up other people

in the name of love,

in the name of camaraderie,

in the name of goddamn family.

People think life is an equation

they just haven’t solved yet.

But what if it was never solvable?

What if it’s a question paper

written in a dead dialect

on pages that catch fire when you read too close?

What if cause and effect

were never meant to rhyme?

What if they all they ever were,

was parallel parables?

What if trauma is a teacher

and memory is its chalkboard,

screeching names

you've spent a lifetime trying to erase?

You want answers.

Closure.

But closure is a lie

sold by therapists and fiction.

The world doesn’t end with a period.

It ends with an ellipsis 

spiralling inwards

until it has hit the bottom of the blackhole.

And most of us are still

trapped in mid-sentence —

mouths open,

hands trembling,

wondering what word comes next.

Some of us

never even got a verb.

We were raised by people

who swallowed their own names

and spat out manuals to existing.

We are not aftermaths.

We are afterthoughts.

We are the comma they forgot to erase —

the mistake in the margin

screaming for punctuation.

And we don’t end with a full stop.

We end mid-word,

mouth full of dust.

Godflesh

Religion makes gods of men.

For gods —

they were atheists themselves.

No ancient scripture tells you

a god ever prayed.

But belief?

It’s business.

And every business needs a selling proposition.

So they bottled divinity —

in the sweat of sinners

and the tears of the poor.

Because faith needs faces.

Smiling. Bleeding. Forgiving.

Calendar gods

for crumbling lives.

Hope became currency for the dying.

And in a world obsessed with not dying,

immortality —

became the most addictive drug.

But here’s the joke:

You can’t make gods of believers.

Believers don’t ask questions.

They chant them.

Wrap them in rituals

and call it peace.

They wear faith like a crutch —

not to heal,

but to hobble with dignity.

Their salvation is secondhand —

inherited like trauma,

sung like lullabies

to silence what still aches.

Temples. Churches. Mosques —

not homes of truth,

but fortresses of fear.

We crowned silence in thorns and halos.

We named our guilt: God.

Now ask yourself —

if gods became god-fearing,

would you still believe in gods?

Or would your faith collapse

without something to kneel to?

Zilch

Why long for a life of eighty summers?

When did existing become a synonym for immortality?

Why fear dying

when you haven’t even lived?

What’s the point of endless hospital beds,

stacked-up bills,

a catalogue of surgeries

stitched together

just to not die?

Do you really think death

will erase a relevance

that life never gifted you?

To think you matter —

that’s the delusion.

You’re, at best,

a singular comma

lost in translation —

wedged between a hundred thousand words

across hundreds of pages

that only found meaning

in the death of forests

and the silence of trees.

Your refusal to die

doesn’t make your half-lived life

any more complete.

Your legacy is a lie.

Your fear of vanishing —

the only truth.

You gave up on living

because you were too busy rehearsing

the opinions of people

who never approved of your existence.

Are you scared

they’ll care less once you’re gone?

What’s less than nothing?

Weekends Aren't Forever

Long before disgust and despair were all that remained,

long before love soured into a faceless, obnoxious actuality —

you told me you wanted something simple.

A regular love.

Like cappuccino.

Unnecessarily overpriced,

dressed up in froth and foreign names,

customized till it forgot its own bitterness.

You asked for it like you were owed it.

And I heard you.

Because a man learns to hear it all.

That's what good behaviour is.

And good behaviour matters most

right before she asks you to strip her bare

and make it mean something.

I heard you.

But I never quite understood what regular love meant.

I was told my “regular”

was fetishes for the freaks.

That my love

was too strange to be called love

without shame stitched to its middle name.

I was fucking someone

married to someone

who once called me a friend.

Or acquaintance.

Acquaintance fits your guilt better, doesn’t it?

And you —

you were married too,

just not to me.

To a man who wanted you like meat:

served warm,

no promises,

just blood on his canines and convenience in his breath.

And you —

you peeled yourself for him.

Hoping he'd find shelter

in the broken verses you called your body.

But men like that

never stay for breakfast.

And maybe that’s what we had in common —

we were weekends

for people who’d built lives out of weekdays.

So we promised each other

weekday warmth and weekend wildness.

But was it love?

Let alone “regular”?

It was a disaster

with matching bedsheets.

A crime scene disguised as compatibility.

A place where delusion passed for devotion.

So intrinsically fucked,

even poetry would look away politely.

Our faith in ifs, buts, and maybes

outran every proven dysfunction that was us.

Because delusion,

that beautifully misshaped puzzle piece,

fits almost anywhere.

Our families loved us —

but only the parts of us

that smiled on cue

and posed for photographs.

They were fluent in the idea of plurality.

But blind to how violently

our singularities scratched at each other’s sanity.

“Marriages are made in heaven”

was never philosophy —

just a poorly timed punchline.

And humanity?

Too humourless to get it.

You wake up beside the same person every day —

and eventually, truth becomes louder than love.

Even romantics become cynics

capable of ghostwriting nihilism.

We were barely friends.

And even worse lovers.

No poetry in our sex.

No faith in our silences.

Just two actors

pretending to be plot.

And when my life

nose-dived into the jagged bottom

of this ocean called hope,

you turned your face and breath away —

like I stank of consequences.

Like I was a roach crawling

on your spotless wallpaper of self-image.

Ignorance wasn’t your defence —

it was your décor.

You slept like a newborn

beside a man caving in on himself,

and woke up convinced

you had dreamt a healthy life.

But darling —

to fuck someone at 2AM

while ignoring the corpse beside you

takes a kind of delusion

only convenience can afford.

And I?

I hoped.

Stupidly.

Because hope is just heartbreak

with prettier packaging.

You overlooked me

like autocracies forget democracies.

I counted six months —

two quarters of a full-term pregnancy —

that’s how long heartbreak can gestate.

And not once

did you ask,

“How are you?”

But you asked for stories.

Demands, really —

tales dipped in your luxury,

seasoned with your boredom.

Our intimacy had collapsed.

Crumbled under the weight of truths

too heavy for your curated world.

I had made peace with the reality of a failed marriage.

You kept pretending we hadn’t failed.

So,

when I spilled myself

into the rented warmth

of another woman’s thighs,

you screamed

like a wife.

The wife

who had long left home

but kept the keys for the melodrama.

What I did?

Unpardonable.

What you didn’t?

Just “acceptable ambition.”

My betrayal had scent.

Yours —

a shade of lipstick you called loneliness.

You auctioned your emotional fidelity

to half a dozen stranger men 

who remembered you in their midnight boners,

and yet had the audacity

to hold my skin's shared nakedness

to a puritan’s pedestal.

Because your betrayal

came with quotes from Rumi.

And mine?

Came with condoms.

And so,

you turned surveillance into intimacy.

Every step I took,

every wink, every word —

a question in your silent inquisition.

You weren’t loving me.

You were collecting evidence.

You called it love.

I called it

paranoia on a honeymoon package.

Physical loyalty became currency.

Emotional fidelity?

Just some poetic theory

I was stupid enough to believe in.

You let my reputation bleed —

because yours was never on the line.

You whored your emotions,

but never spread your legs —

so that made you

the martyr.

And me?

I fucked.

Yes.

But at least I did it

honestly.

There was no story left between our breaths —

no poetry to exhume,

no intimacy to resurrect.

Just stale air

and the echo of everything

we refused to name.

I sank.

You watched.

Comfortably.

Because it’s easier

to play saint

than save the man you made drown.

So call me what you will —

a selfish, poetic man-whore,

pimping metaphors for moans,

trading pain for rented orgasms.

And you —

keep playing the helpless wife

in the marriage you abandoned

long before I found a way to betray it.

Tonight,

as we crease the same bedsheets

one last time —

I say nothing.

No justifications.

No apologies.

You win.

Because letting go

is the subtlest middle finger

this godforsaken species could never grow a habit of.