The Lies Of Truth

They say —

truth will set you free.

But no one remembers to mention —

freedom itself is a construct,

a shape-shifting hallucination

built on the ruins of another man’s imprisonment.

Truth is no monument—

it’s a ghost of smoke.

The more you try to hold it,

the more it stings your eyes

and slips like ash

through your trembling fingers.

You and I speak —

you call it conversation.

I call it confession.

The bystander?

They call it confrontation.

The historian?

He calls it a version.

Each of us certain,

each of us fractured.

Truth is no singularity.

It’s a war of worlds,

a fistfight of banal egos

arguing over who gets remembered.

Even the idea that this —

is a conversation —

is belief masquerading as fact.

You hear exchange.

I hear excavation.

They hear evidence.

And belief, my friend,

is bias in a designer dress,

trauma inherited as tradition from ancestral ghosts.

Truth lives inside the skull,

stuck like a fishbone, between memory and fear.

Memory?

Memory is a drunken god—

stumbling, rewriting the past

to numb a restless present.

So when they say —

“Speak your truth,”

ask:

Which one?

The one I endured?

The one I edited for peace?

Or the one you need

to protect your myth?

If no truth is absolute,

how do you define a lie?

Your lie

may be another’s miracle.

A lie to me

might be the only story

that made silence bearable.

Right and wrong —

don’t wear uniforms.

They wear context.

They wear culture.

They wear centuries

of stitched-up sermons

masquerading as commandments.

Justice?

Justice is not law.

Law is framework.

Justice is a wound—

throbbing when ignored,

bleeding when denied.

Law can be amended.

Justice only haunts.

We weren’t born into facts.

We were born into narratives —

inherited,

refined,

recycled.

And in those narratives,

truth isn’t spoken —

it’s staged.

Truth is theatre.

Scripts,

lighting,

applause.

And like every theatre,

it demands sacrifice.

So before you ask for truth,

ask yourself:

Can you bear the cost

of dismantling your version?

Because truth isn’t liberation —

it’s a knife.

Blunt. Uneven.

Pressed hard against your skin.

Never quite deep enough to kill —

but always enough to bleed.

And all of us —

we clutch our wounds,

bleeding in silence,

waiting for the hand

that will either pull the blade free —

or twist it deeper.

And sometimes,

we twist it ourselves,

just to feel

something real.

How To Get Away With Killing Poetry

Performance poetry

used to be poetry

that happened to perform.

Now it’s perform —

and we’ve misplaced the poetry.

A parade of over-enunciated existentialism,

three limp thoughts in a trench coat

masquerading as Shakespeare on acid —

folded hands, gasping mouths,

necks twitching like broken puppets

cracking syllables like eggs

only to scramble them

into a pan of theatrical vomit.

They call it art.

I call it amateur drama club

on open mic steroids.

See —

poetry died the day

we clapped louder for melodrama

than we did for memorability.

The circus came to town

and brought with it

a congregation of clowns —

self-diagnosed deep thinkers

trying to cram revelation

into advertised self-loathing

and convenient activism disguised as revolution.

You know the type.

The ones who say “hegemonic”

in a piece about class divide —

as if a four-syllable word

could buy bread

or break caste.

The kind who quote Sylvia Plath and Karl Marx in the same breath

between sips of overpriced coffee

without once spelling caste

with a capital C —

or conscience.

And now —

poetry’s more vanilla

than sex in a decade-old marriage.

No one names the rot.

No one names the rot.

They’d rather cry-baby

about their privileged boredom,

whine poetic

about the inefficiencies

of their rather dull,

rotting intelligences—

than dare to think.

Than dare to write.

They pile together

basic-ass lame words

into sentenced stanzas,

and call it verse.

Narcissism disguised as

self-love therapy

is now poetic practice.

Although,

an actual poet

would sledgehammer your face before calling this poetry.

And an actual therapist?

Would self-immolate

before prescribing your poems as healing.

Say “dark thoughts” enough times

in the prelude and in the poem,

and you think you’ve earned

your depression badge.

Without a hint of thought.

Without a drop of blood.

As if

actual poets didn’t already

bleed more birthing a verse

than you’ve ever lived

in your lucidity.

They package pain in punchlines,

wrap trauma in inexpensive ovations,

sell scars for affordable applauses.

And the audience?

Buffoons.

Sophisticated buffoons.

Praising slapstick as subtlety,

volume as truth,

gesture as genius.

This isn’t poetry.

It’s bad theatre at best.

A case study in how not to poetry.

And as I sit in this dim-lit dingy corner

of overbaked angst and misfired metaphors,

I light a cigarette —

hold it upright like an incense stick

to the altar of the poetry you've freshly killed.

A Lie Worth Dying For

They say history is written by the victors —

but they forget to mention:

it’s edited by cowards,

published by the powerful,

and consumed by idiots looking for comfort in curated blood.

Today’s facts are tomorrow’s folklore.

Stamped in textbooks,

smeared in headlines,

tattooed into timelines like gospel —

until no one remembers who started the fire,

only who got burned prettiest.

You think history is objective?

Darling, it’s a goddamn opinion piece

that survived genocide.

A cinema of horror, 

inspired by true stories, 

directed by whoever had the better camera

and a louder god

because inspiration is a great distraction for convenient truths. 

Truth?

Truth doesn't make it into museums.

It's buried six feet under whistleblowers

and philosophers who died broke,

while emperors got marble erections

in cities they never gave a fuck about.

History is a habit of convenience —

a smoke break for dictators,

a loophole for legacies,

a love letter to power dressed in the corpses of collateral damage.

Because humanity doesn't want truth —

it wants a mascot.

It wants the illusion of progress,

the comfort of clean names,

the forgiveness of forgetting.

So we cherry-pick the noble lies:

Glorify the wars,

sanitize the revolutions,

celebrate the speeches

that sounded good

after the bullets stopped flying.

We sell heroism in instalments,

whitewash suffering with subtitles,

teach children about freedom

while feeding them flags stitched from slavery.

Let’s call it what it is:

A script.

With act breaks of massacre,

intermissions of silence,

and encores of propaganda.

The audience claps

not because they believe it —

but because they’re too tired to question it.

And here’s the gut-punch:

You’re not outside the lie.

You are the lie.

Every book, every chapter, every page

that turns complex chaos

into digestible dogma

makes you the co-author.

So no —

history isn’t written.

It’s Photoshopped.

It’s ghostwritten by fear

and published in the language of the winners’ guilt.

And what does that make us?

Humanity?

A species addicted to storytelling,

too afraid of silence,

too ashamed of mirrors,

too eager to believe

that we're the good guys

in a war we don’t even understand.

History is not truth.

It's trauma with great advertising.

And humanity?

Humanity is the greatest lie ever told.

A well-rehearsed myth

about kindness and progress

while we dig our graves in high definition

and livestream the funeral

for money.

So yeah —

write your memoirs.

Build your statues.

Raise your flags.

But know this:

The dirt remembers better than the ink.

And the bones?

The bones don't lie.

Pre-cum Philosophy

They say life’s a journey —

like some off-the-shelf greeting card

for losers pretending life’s more than a slow-burn death.

Fuck that. You want the truth?

Life’s a cheap striptease —

slow, shitty, and full of false promises.

You’re just the sucker in the front row,

waiting for the real show that’ll gut you like a fish.

Life’s just foreplay —

an endless, desperate blowjob with no climax, no closure

a grimy sloppy handjob from a drunk you paid to make you feel important.

You waste your breath chasing orgasms,

but all you get is questionable circumstances for main course and regret for dessert.

We’re born screaming,

then spend decades choking on disappointment —

learning to fake pleasure

while the clock ticks down

to the only release that matters.

Death?

Death’s the only orgasm we’re guaranteed —

no warnings, no second chances,

a climax so final your body doesn't even shudder, 

a closure so real it doesn't allow for rebounds

just the cold, hard knife through your heart

when time finally gets bored of indulging in your narcissistic bullshit.

You’re not alive, you’re a carcass with delusions,

a cockroach atop an nuclear weapon,

pretending you matter,

when every breath is just stealing air

from the inevitable dirt that’ll eventually bury you.

And the irony?

You’re terrified of dying —

but you’re already dead in the head,

trapped in a rerun of misery

while the world fucks you sideways,

and you beg for more.

So drop the journey bullshit,

stop chasing fairy tales and rainbow-fart dreams.

Life is a festering wound,

and you’re just waiting for the scab to fall off.

Here’s the savage truth —

there’s freedom in the fuckery,

joy in the chaos,

because the only climax worth fearing

is the one that finally shuts you the fuck up.

So live loud, burn hard, spit fire —

because life’s just foreplay —

and death?

Death’s the only orgasm we’re guaranteed.

So when it comes, don’t moan — grin.

At least this one doesn’t fake it.

The Price Tag On Freedom

They say,

“Freedom is earned.”

But what they don’t say is —

it’s paid for in silence.

In tired spines.

In dreams bartered for daily bread.

They call it financial independence.

As if money was a liberation song

instead of the softest chain ever forged.

As if survival

was the same thing

as sovereignty.

Your wealth is not yours —

it is leased by the hour.

Approved by signatures

you’ll never see.

And it disappears

the moment you stop bleeding for it.

You climb ladders

not to reach the stars,

but to stay above the drowning.

You’re told to rise —

even if it means

standing on the backs

of those who broke before you.

They tell you to strive.

To compete.

To conquer.

To build your empire

from the dust of others' ruins.

And when you start to choke on the dust —

they’ll hand you a mirror

and tell you it’s progress.

They’ll call you independent

the moment you buy your first coffin

in monthly instalments.

They’ll tell you you’re free

when you can afford to die alone,

quietly,

with all your bills paid.

No one is free

when their worth is counted

in hours,

in profits,

in relevance.

Even the kings of capital

wear their crowns

like nooses disguised in gold.

You think your job saves you?

It rents you.

You think your business liberates you?

It devours you.

You think ownership is power?

Ownership is just the illusion

that you can’t be replaced.

We’ve built civilizations

on the backs of broken backs.

And called it success.

But success isn’t freedom.

It’s just the prettiest name

for servitude.

And the cruelest truth is —

we were born

into a marketplace of bodies,

and will die

having barely owned

our breath.

So the next time they ask you

what you do for a living,

ask them instead —

“What are you dying for?”

Autopsy Of Arrogance

Over the years,

I've often been advised

to calm the fuck down.

Take a deep breath.

Let things be —

be it gods, governments,

or the gods inside governments.

Let them be.

Keep my voice of dissent

low enough to sink

within the walls of my existence.

I’ve been told:

People need their faith to blind them —

so their detached retinas

can stay disconnected

from inconvenient facts.

I’ve been warned:

Questioning gods and governments

is a journey

with a painfully predictable end —

your breath uprooted

from your very insides

until even your lungs

give up on trying to exist.

“Is living art worth dying for?”

I’ve been asked —

by ghosts dressed in capitalist couture,

waiting to die richer

than their souls ever deserved.

As if the afterlife gives a damn about inheritance.

“Is it worth the fight

when the odds are wired

for you to fail?”

I’ve been interrogated —

by ideas corrupted like cancer,

yet somehow still breathing

on the ventilator of hope.

Well —

If I have to die

for questioning the questionable,

for breathing art out loud,

for bruising the crippled egos

of inherited power

and generational filth...

If I have to die

for truths the intellectuals borrowed

for applause

but never believed in deep enough

to grow a spine,

put a foot down —

Then let me bleed.

Bleed until my blood stops hurting

from bleeding out.

And while I’m at it,

I’ll look up to posterity

and grin one last time — a wry one —

as the poetry in my wrinkled skin

breathes out one last piece:

the obituary of my being.

Now tell me —

how do you bleed out the poetry though?

An Ode To A Fatherhood Forgotten In Frowns

They say love makes life.

But they never tell you what love makes

after life has been denied its chance to begin.

A man. A woman.

Madly, passionately, recklessly in love —

the kind of love that laughs at menstrual calendars and ovulation cycles

and tells caution to go fuck itself.

She gets pregnant.

By mistake?

By miracle?

By whatever word you use

when protection fails but poetry doesn’t.

A love child —

not the kind born out of a guilty affair 

or an indulgent whorehouse

not the kind that smells of scandal

but the kind born out of a love so stupidly sincere,

you almost believe the world will forgive it.

Spoiler:

It doesn’t.

The families —

they do what families do best.

They turn funerals into courtrooms

and judge you for crimes

they wrote the commandments for.

They called him names:

pervert, predator, mistake.

Said he defiled her.

As if love was a weapon.

As if he wasn’t the one

clutching the hospital railing,

asking if he could just see her

before they wheeled her in

to kill the only proof they ever existed in each other.

They aborted the child.

Not out of choice,

but because her hemoglobin was too weak

to carry both blood and blame.

And he —

he wasn’t even allowed in the room.

Love might have made the child,

but shame signed the paperwork.

She bled.

He broke.

And no one talked about the part

where he waited outside,

holding on to a name

they never got to argue over.

No one mentions the part

where he left the hospital

less a man, more an orphaned father

with no gravestone to mark his grief.

It wasn’t the abortion that gutted him.

It was the excommunication.

Being shamed by the woman

he almost built a life inside of.

Not because she stopped loving him —

but because it was easier to call him a mistake

than to admit

that the world makes monsters

out of men who love women before marriage

and don’t apologise for it.

And now?

Now, some nights,

he pulls open a drawer

and stares at a pregnancy stick

like it’s a ticking clock —

not one that measures life,

but one that froze

the moment society hit pause

on his right to feel.

He holds it up against the light —

as if time could be reversed

by sheer ache alone.

As if love

could outlive

what the world is too cowardly to name.

In God, We Deflect

Why would humans need god

when they can ruin their own

with a signature,

a silence,

a sentence too heavy to outlive?

Why pray to the sky

when the monsters live among you

wearing your very skin,

smiling in courtrooms,

speaking a tongue

you thought was a shared legacy?

But when you are the one bleeding —

when the body remembers

what memory politely misplaces —

you don’t want to believe

it was your own species

pulling the strings.

So you reach.

Not upward for divinity,

but sideways for denial —

a brittle faith,

handed down like an heirloom

stitched in fear.

You convince yourself

someone, somewhere,

far above and beyond,

holds the blueprint

to this puppetry.

Because it’s easier

than facing the mirror

where the monster looks

a little too much like you —

both meaningless, mortal.

You need god —

not for grace,

but for grief.

Not for hope,

but for hiding.

Because if man spilled his guts and entrails,

man must clean it.

And man —

man can’t stand the stench

of his own flaws and failures.

So gods take the fall.

Because man-made disasters

demand consequence,

and humans are allergic

to consequence

unless it comes with

someone else to crucify.

And god —

god is the perfect suspect.

Omnipresent,

but never present

for questioning.

So the next time you wonder

why gods exist —

remember:

God isn’t the answer.

God is the exit plan.

The alibi.

The myth we whisper

to our conscience

when man needs

a scapegoat

to acquit his own reflection.

Ink-Stained Alibis

Truth is never not gutting.

That’s why we invented fiction —

to stitch our wounds with prettier lies,

to tell the story like it's beautiful

one that doesn’t scream when it comes crashing, face-first.

We don’t write novels because it makes us happy, fulfilled, or complete.

We write them because

the objective truth of life

is too adulterated to breathe through.

Because screeching and squealing “I’m broken”

never made anyone listen.

But say it in a metaphor —

and suddenly

it’s profound, philosophical, even poetic.

We write of betrayed bloodlines and broken betrothals in sonnets and odes, haikus and ballads

add rhythm and rhyme to the rage,

so no one notices the blood spilling over.

We invent protagonists

because no one gives a damn

about unwarranted  breakdowns.

We weave stories and screenplays and three-act plays,

because trauma without sequence and structure, aesthetic and ambience

is just noise.

Fiction became our comfort

bececause truth is too comfortable

in discomfort.

We turned grief into genre,

loss into literature,

pain into paperback.

We edited our parents into villains

and our loneliness into folklores of love for the ages.

We learned to ship and sell all of our fucked up and mess

by calling it "narrative arc."

Because who wants the filth?

The part where the heroes fell.

The part where we stared

into kitchen sinks and bathroom floors

and questioned physics and philosophy

with a blade in hand.

Nobody wants that.

It's too real. It's too unsellable.

So we invented fiction —

not to lie for the sake of lying,

but to survive

without having to explain ourselves.

We wrapped —

trauma in timelines,

dialogue on our demons,

and

gave pain a three-act skeleton

so our blood and bones wouldn’t fall apart in public.

Because truth —

truth is a hand grenade with the pin missing.

It doesn't end well.

It doesn't resolve.

It doesn’t rhyme.

Fiction is what we write

when we still want to be invited to dinner.

So don’t tell me fiction isn’t truth.

It’s truth

wearing makeup,

sitting straight,

smiling for the camera

so you can keep reading without the trigger warnings.

And when you do —

if you feel something sharp twist in your chest,

something ugly,

too familiar,

and too close?

That’s not fiction.

That’s just truth

looking for a sacrifice.

The Language Of Almost

You loved me like a metaphor —

all meaning, no memory,

a ghost story you tell yourself to fall asleep,

a trauma podcast on repeat, sponsored by guilt

with a fine print disclaimer that somewhere in the blank spaces,

love might be hiding —

buried under your vintage damage,

wrapped in old cassette tape wounds.

I became your emotional epidermis —

you tattooed your chaos with fresh needles and ancient inks,

expecting me to erase centuries of hurt

with the patience of a saint

and the silence of a man who's been drowning since birth.

I’m tired.

Tired of playing your therapist-with-benefits,

a pit stop on your healing highway,

a skeleton closet with no door,

a man made of spine and silence,

holding the gravity of your storms

while my heart sinks in bile, begging for a lifeboat.

You said,

“You’re the most real thing I’ve ever known.”

But you held me like a fire exit —

comforting to know,

never meant to be opened.

You treated my care like a rental —

cheap when convenient,

expensive when broken.

You wanted the editor-approved, print-ready manuscript of me,

not the scratched, scarred drafts written in spilled whiskey and late-night regrets.

You wanted my depth,

so long as you didn’t have to drown in it.

You weren’t looking for a man —

you were looking for a voiceless echo

to applaud your survival

while bleeding unheard.

Because me —

I come with unfiltered pain,

a goddamn museum of abandonment —

family portraits carved in betrayal,

a life spent being useful,

but never enough.

You want me to “understand” your fears?

Darling, I’m married to mine.

They drink from my cup,

sleep in my bed,

laugh at my endless attempts at sanity.

I am the overthink,

the spiraling black hole,

the “what if,” the “why now,” the “fuck everything.”

You say I trigger you —

but you were the loaded gun,

and I was just trying to unload the bullets from the cartridge.

You said I bring out your wounds —

but I’ve bled through yours and mine

and still got blamed

for dripping like acid rain on cracked skin.

And now you ask if I’ll stay —

like I haven’t overstayed

in every life that ever mattered,

like a stain they never wash

but still blame for the stink.

You didn’t love me.

You loved the mirage of being understood

by someone who wouldn’t leave,

while rehearsing your exit lines in the mirror.

You loved the idea of me —

the poetry, the promise,

the possibility of being seen

without ever looking back.

But I’m done being a mirror

for someone else’s broken self-worth.

I want to be held,

not cautiously caressed like brittle ruins,

chosen,

not studied like a dysfunctional anomaly,

loved —

not pitied back into a pretentious existence.

So here’s my final act of love:

Not a plea. Not a poem.

Just a full stop.

Keep your metaphors.

I’ve outgrown the language of almost.

I won’t haunt you.

I won’t hate you.

I won’t hope for closure.

I’ve deleted the drafts,

burned the edits,

and left the stage mid-line.

No rage. No echo.

Just absence —

the kind that doesn’t knock twice.

And if you ever remember me,

make it brief.

I won’t stop to check.

Because, darling —

some exits aren’t meant for curtain calls.

21 Grams

They say —

you lose 21 grams

of your body weight

the moment you die.

Twenty-one grams.

That’s all it was.

The entirety of your existence,

reduced to less than a handful of bone dust.

Decades, centuries, and ages 

of deluded self-importance —

as individuals,

as a species,

as self-proclaimed gods in flesh.

And for what?

Twenty-one fucking grams.

It’s ironic —

how humans keep believing

they’re too big to fall,

too important to erase.

That the universe must pause

when they speak.

And yet,

all it boils down to

is 21 grams.

Centuries of killing each other

to scream superiority,

millions of lives sacrificed

to feed the bloodlust of genocidal men

playing God

with borders, bombs, and birthrights.

We divide lands and seas

in the name of geography,

then invade them

in the name of history.

We build bridges to fix

the cracks we created,

call it technology,

and pat our own backs, while at it,

for our imagined greatness.

We invent make-believe currencies,

measure meaning in validation begged for like alms,

benchmark worth in slavery roleplaying as ambition —

for 21 grams of gravity

when we’re gone;

the same weight as that of a paper clip.

Do you know what else weighs 21 grams?

A pen cap.

A quarter teaspoon of table salt. 

And

A fist,

half-full of dust.

That —

that is the weight of your legacy.

Of your breath,

your bruises,

your belief

that you ever mattered more

than a fleeting speck

on a dying planet

spinning silently through indifference.

The next time

you consider priding in your greatness,

the next time you tickle your narcissism

with fictional tales of an imagined greatness —

remember:

you matter

exactly as much

as 21 grams would.

Architecture Of Ruin

They say I’m not romantic —

like it’s a crime, a flaw,

like I’m missing the manual,

like I skipped the part where love’s supposed to be pretty

and easy

and blind.

So I dove headfirst into the textbooks —

hundred thousand love-sick plays,

lovelorn poems spilled like blood on pages,

the masters of love and words

telling me how it’s done.

But here’s the thing —

textbook love is a lot like blinding light,

like staring at the sun till your eyes bleed,

and no one calls that love.

Love isn’t the glossy lies

slapped on magazine pages,

not rehearsed pretences

served with make-belief smiles —

no unicorns or rainbows,

just blood, dirt, sweat, and rot.

My idea of romance —

is the architecture of ruin beneath fragile skin,

the invisible bruises carved by silence,

the bitter coffee mornings,

the apologies swallowed whole,

the regrets folded like secret maps

to nowhere.

It’s a war zone stitched in shadows —

where ghosts trade fire with memories,

victories drowned in the smoke of regrets,

a discordant symphony,

played on strings stretched thin by time and truth.

It’s not perfect.

Hell, it’s as far from perfect as an atheist from faith.

It’s flawed, fractured, bruised by time and truth,

but it’s real —

the kind that doesn’t close its eyes

to the cracks,

but leans in,

holds on tight,

and loves anyway.

In a world drowning in fairy tales —

where love’s a product to sell,

a story polished till it gleams,

so glossy even fools flinch before believing —

I choose the battered,

the bruised,

the love that stumbles through hellfires

and still wants to stay.

Because real love —

it’s the late-night fights that bleed into dawn,

the silence that screams louder than words,

the knowing glance that says,

“I’m still here.

I’m still angry.

I’m still yours.”

It’s the taste of tears on your skin,

the weight of history on your heart,

the promise made not in grand gestures,

but in staying —

when leaving is easier,

when the world outside is a thousand reasons to go.

Does that make me not romantic?

Or does it make every textbook

nothing but a virgin’s thesis on intercourse —

all theory, no grit,

no blood, no sweat, no goddamn reality?

Echoes Of A Broken Covenant

Morality isn't a realised actuality —

it’s a fictional agreement signed in spit and fear,

etched into wet clay heads of children,

molded by hands too rough to know better.

It hardens with time —

like skin cracked by drought,

becoming bone —

rigid, unyielding, unquestionable.

Faith, an unscrupulous stepmother,

breathes fire into those brittle rules,

turns maybes into bloody rights and wrongs,

etched on stone tablets no one dares touch

without burning their own fingers.

But once your tear down that altar —

rip faith away —

what’s left?

Chaos? Freedom?

Or just another set of lies

whispered softly to drown the noise?

Because ethic —

ethic is faith’s bastard cousin,

no prayer pronounces it,

no stained glass window holds its light.

It’s a house of cards built on shaky assumptions —

goodwill, empathy, and a deluded sense of human greatness —

fragile scaffolding in a storm of doubt.

We place our bets on reason —

our secular god with no temples —

but it’s a flickering candle in a hurricane,

a prayer whispered in the dark,

hoping the flame survives till dawn.

No gods? No commandments?

Just millions of messy humans

stitching meaning from dust and desperation.

Faith is the glue holding the cracks,

the bitter pill swallowed daily,

to keep the mirror whole —

knowing fully well, it’s shattered beyond repair.

Morality without faith?

A map drawn on shifting sands,

a dance without rhythm,

a silence waiting for sound.

Yet in that silence,

we reach.

We fight.

We try to be good —

not because some god demands it —

but because a fragile spark inside us

refuses the void.

We learn the rules not as chains,

but as compass through the chaos —

a language made of scars,

a promise we make to ourselves

to stand when the world folds.

Morality is survival.

Morality is rebellion.

Morality is the only faith we can afford

when gods fall silent.

So maybe faith and ethic —

they’re two sides of the same coin,

flipped in the air,

landing on different truths for every believer.

But here’s the ugly truth:

faith, morality, ethics —

they’re all human-made —

fractured, fragile, flawed.

And no, that’s not enough.

But, it’s all we have.

In this godless, cracked world,

there is no quiet promise,

no soft hands, no lasting voices.

Only the cracks beneath us,

splitting open, swallowing whole.

So tell me —

if faith is just a story we tell ourselves to survive,

when the gods are gone

and the silence devours everything

what story will you leave behind?

Inheritance: Blood, Bones & Blame

I have often wished to be reptile —

to shed skin from time to time.

No scars.

No scabs.

No nightmares dragging me awake at 3 AM.

No shadows of bygone pasts

crawling up my spine like a lust-sick leech.

Being human has never been convenient —

we grow skin back,

but never heal.

I’ve bled more in my head than I ever have through skin.

My scar tissues have bled into pages

of pungent, desperate poetry.

But they haven’t healed.

How do you heal

what has no skin?

How do you nurse

what’s bare and exposed,

with no sheath,

no shell,

no place to hide behind?

How much poetry must one bleed

before bleeding out completely —

leaving behind

nothing

but the skin?

They tell me letting go is important.

You can let go of things you own.

But how do you let go

of what owns you?

How do you unlive

what’s already interred

in your blood and bones?

How do you let go of twenty years

without losing a lifetime?

How do you hold fort against abuse

more permanent than your teeth?

They tell me I should learn to forgive.

You can forgive people.

Not breathing demi-gods

wearing the flesh of humans.

How do you forgive

when there is no one asking?

When their egos are thicker

than the blood you both share?

They say I shouldn’t be so hard on myself.

That I shouldn’t keep doing this to myself.

As if all this

were a choice.

Do you think I unwrapped

this trauma like a birthday gift?

Do you think I invited abuse,

abandonment,

and an ever-thickening worthlessness

into my life

for the poetry?

Do you think I bleed

day after day

night after night

because I’m allergic to band-aids?

I’ve grown up

to a religious woman’s prayers —

not for my health and prosperity,

but for my death.

To a man of science

who cut me open

with scalpels carved of legacies,

bruising me

like I was his latest

failed experiment.

I’ve grown up

to a mother’s regret

for birthing me.

To a father’s contempt

because I failed to be the life

he pre-conceived.

I’ve grown up

being told

I’d never measure up

to the family name.

That I’d only ever be

a filthy aftertaste, at best.

An existential glitch.

A psychological aberration.

An utter waste

of privileged parenting.

And yet —

I could never do it.

I could never fully shed skin.

But I shed

the family name.

And some nights 

I still wonder 

if skin ever belonged to me

or if it was just another name 

they had etched on my bones. 

Life, The Longest Death

Have you ever stared endlessly at the seas,

wondering where the beauty is —

the beauty poets wrote odes to?

Any of it?

All of it,

blurred into a lump of cosmic void —

pale skies and paler seas

fornicating into an ugly, hopeless, unalive blue.

So excruciatingly anaemic,

you start wondering

if you're losing sight —

or worse, losing it all.

And with the last remaining shallow breaths,

and quickly numbing limbs,

you decide to make a final run.

A decadent glimmer of hope

trying to outrun

the morbid skin of time —

a bleeding existential crisis' last cry for help,

possibly shipwrecked,

where the seas and skies

don’t seem eternal anymore,

just bone-deep.

You run,

like a helpless mother runs

with her dying child

clutched between bloodied arms

and hollow breasts.

But the sands —

they drift apart,

disintegrate grain by grain,

your feet sinking further

with every step planted

into the flesh of it.

You realise it’s quicksand —

an elaborate death trap

set up intricately

by your own reluctant existence,

designed not to kill you,

but to keep you failing at escape.

You'd hoped the end

would be quick and easy.

But life doesn’t believe in easy.

Easy

is mercy.

And mercy isn't a good enough cocktease for life.

Life doesn't do mercy.

What does life do instead?

A slow, loathing surrender

drawn out to the edge

of an atheist’s final prayer.

You bend your knees,

hands folded in submission,

waiting for life

to be sucked out

like air in a vacuum.

But just when you’re ready —

eyes clenched hard,

eyeballs drowning

into a peach-black oblivion —

Life throws you back

into your bed.

Eyes wide open.

Closure denied.

Heart ticking.

Existence waking

to the horror

of having to live

all of it

all over again.

Scapegoat Symphony

You think —

You think I’m broken?

Broken?

I swallowed silence whole,

choked on invisible chains

you never had the guts to see.

Mother—voice sharp, venom dripping:

You’re the black sheep!

Always were.

Always will be.

Blaming me?

Don’t make me fucking laugh!

I bled for you —

every damn sacrifice,

and you spit it back as hate,

twisting truth to suit your bitterness.

Son—voice cutting like shattered glass:

Hate?

I don’t hate — I see.

You sewed my wounds shut with lies,

painted me villain

in your scripted tragedy of “perfect” pain.

Father—slurring, torn:

I’m caught in the fucking crossfire —

torn between your screams

and their deafening silence —

it breaks me every goddamn day.

Mother—snapping, venomous:

Breaks you?

You’re weak!

Couldn’t hold us together,

so you ran to the bottle,

hid behind your fucking cowardice —

not a man, not a father,

just a shadow with excuses.

Son—spitting fire:

Excuses?

I starved for truth,

while you fed me half-truths,

broken promises wrapped

in your guilt like cheap wrapping paper.

Mother—shrill, gaslighting:

Promises?

I gave you everything —

love you didn’t deserve!

You chose to be lost,

not me!

You’re the failure,

the stain on our name.

Son—voice screaming through the cracks:

Stain?

I’m the scar your silence etched deep,

the black sheep you birthed

then wished would vanish.

Father—muttering, fractured:

I wanted peace...

but peace is a goddamn lie here.

Mother—snarling, merciless:

Peace?

You’re the weakest link,

the man who folds,

not me.

Son—steel in his spine:

I’m done being scapegoat,

done carrying your shame.

Your black sheep

has clawed free from the slaughterhouse.

Mother—cold, cruel:

Then get lost.

We don’t fucking need you—

not now, not ever.

Father—whisper, ghost of a man:

We’re all drowning...

and no one saves the other.

Son—steady, final:

I’m walking away,

burning this house down

to build something real —

from ashes you refused to see.

I'd Burn My Art To Feel Nothing

For years and years, through centuries and ages,

the ones who made the most unforgettable art

had the most forgettable lives.

Because trauma and abuse,

sadomasochism and self-sabotage

aren’t exactly on the grocery list

of a life worth remembering.

That’s how the tremors,

the ghosts of my ghastly past

and grim present,

have been justified —

by self-proclaimed intellectuals

with bone-dry empathy

and second-hand philosophies.

That’s an insanely poisonous species, you see —

they think they know all they need to

while their hollow bones clap

to the dance recital

of their singular brain cell,

as they wrap their crooked teeth

around borrowed perspectives

and stolen importances —

an elaborate fellatio

to their obese egos,

leaving cum stains on art

they didn’t even suffer for.

You think I’m happy to be creating art?

You think anyone birthing real art

is happy to be creating it?

Art, for most of us,

is the therapy we couldn’t afford,

in a world obsessed with outlines,

box-ticking,

diagnoses dressed in denial.

You get a boner in the name of art —

because it looks good,

because it sells well,

because it tastes like sophistication

on your curated palate of aesthetic consumption.

But you won’t care

for the bleeding fingers,

for the broken ribs it was born out of.

You never do.

Because you think art is what matters —

who cares what it cost?

That’s the shallow pond you want me to swim in.

But I’m drowning in it.

And I swear to god,

I would trade every syllable,

every stanza,

every standing ovation,

to have a mediocre, meandering, meaningless existence

if that meant

I could undo all that defiles me,

and be happy.

But here I am —

still bleeding for strangers

who’ll hang my pain on their gallery walls,

frame my trauma in gold,

and forget to ask

if I’m still alive.

404: Identity Not Found

I am just surprised by the world today

a world where a person in his flesh and bones,

conversations and insecurities,

baring it all,

isn’t a true identity.

But the moment he says his name —

a name that can be fed

into the data-lusting capitalist belly

of a search engine —

he’s suddenly “real.”

Like the blood wasn’t real until Googled.

Like the pain didn’t count

without a hyperlink.

Like the art didn’t breathe

until metadata confirmed

you’re someone.

We are now creatures

of algorithms and indexed sins —

fragments of browser histories

more alive online

than we ever were in person.

You can bleed out on stage,

weep into microphones,

scream poetry so loud

it could crack silence into sonnets,

but until they can spell-check your name,

you’re just a placeholder —

“Anonymous” in italics.

And now,

we are all just usernames

pretending to be people —

QR-coded confessions,

barcoded beings

waiting to be verified

by the same algorithms

that wouldn’t survive five minutes

inside our unsaved drafts of grief.

Because in this world,

you don’t exist

until someone can CTRL+F your very existence

and hit enter

on a name

that doesn’t flinch when searched —

not the face, not the voice,

not the trembling truths you left on stage —

just a name.

A clickable name.

And if it doesn’t autocomplete,

neither do you.

The Obituary Of A Nobody

Death is a funny thing, isn't it? 

Years —

of breath measured in sighs and stutters,

of existence squeezed into calendars and conversations,

of building a self out of borrowed truths and morally flexible promises —

gone like a gust of wind

into the depths of an existential void you can't snap out of.

And what’s left?

Bones and bureaucracy.

Ashes bottled in inexpensive brass.

Your name spelled right on the death certificate

but it's grammar, wrong on people’s tongues.

You become a photo frame,

gathering dust beside a leaking wall.

You become stories told by liars who loved you,

each one polishing your ghost

until it gleams and shines enough to be missed so you find an excuse to remember.

But life —

life was chaos and creaking and compromise,

a script you improvised,

scene by scene: uncertain, unhinged, undone.

Death?

Death is too neat.

Too final.

Too smug in its certainty.

The great full stop.

The goddamn climax

in a play that never found its plot.

Who were you?

What were you?

Why were you?

Second-hand answers from third-hand grief.

A eulogy that turns flesh into metaphor.

As if a life can be stitched into syntax.

As if meaning survives in mourning.

As if how many show up at your funeral measures how well you lived.

Maybe you’re not afraid of dying.

Maybe you’re afraid of ceasing to exist, 

Of being diluted

in dried-up tears,

in healed heartbreaks,

in the silence that follows after the music forgets your name.

Maybe you’re not scared of death, 

just terrified of a life this easily forgettable.

Maybe death would be a lot easier

if life wasn't a grocery list of skin and flesh wasn't a commodity measured in paper currencies and plastic legacies.

Salted Wounds, Pickled Promises

Love is not a fossilized emotion

you bubble-wrap in benevolence

and bury beneath your trauma-tinted tenderness —

like it’s a rabid dog you leashed

because it let you pet it once

without bleeding.

But you —

you turned the relationship into border patrol.

Scanning tone like contraband,

treating pauses as proof of betrayal.

Love isn’t a security threat.

It doesn’t need surveillance,

just space to breathe.

You call it passion.

You call it care.

It’s a hostage crisis

where you’re both negotiator

and fucking terrorist.

Every fight?

Another remix of Paranoia Unplugged,

with Trust Issues on infinite loop.

You call suspicion “care,”

control “concern,”

and cloak your fear of abandonment

in the language of affection.

No wonder love’s gone silent.

You think you’re preserving it —

you’re not.

You’re pickling it

in the brine of your unprocessed grief

until even the salt files a restraining order.

We glorify love like scripture —

as if only the shattered

can pronounce devotion correctly.

But love isn’t here for your healing arc.

It won’t carry your father’s silence

or your ex’s ghost

without breaking its own spine.

Still, we worship it—

sculpting saints out of stalkers,

writing vows like fine print on prenups.

Poetry doesn’t make it love.

It just makes the lies scan better.

Real love?

It doesn’t need a stage or a spotlight.

It doesn’t script grand gestures

or make villains out of vulnerability.

It just shows up —

on quiet Tuesdays,

with unfiltered truth

and the courage to say:

“I care, but I’m still learning how.”

Love is salt.

Unpretty. Honest. Essential.

Too much kills.

Too little starves.

But we —

we keep plating it like a goddamn tasting menu,

calling it fate,

and when the rot sets in,

we blame love —

not the fact

that we cooked every dish

with trauma-soaked hands.

This Is Not A Love Poem, Thankfully

I don't want to love you

like a dog loves a bone —

desperate, drooling, territorial,

snarling at the idea

that someone else might touch what was never theirs to begin with.

I don’t want to be

that drunk poet,

spilling syllables like cheap whiskey

over his dead damsel

and calling it catharsis.

I don’t want to write you

into metaphors

like broken women folded into verses

for the sake of a poet’s redemption arc.

I want to love you

like silence loves ruins —

without saving,

without salvaging,

without the pretense of purpose.

Like thunder loves distance —

felt,

but never held.

I want to love you in a way

that doesn’t ask for belonging,

that doesn’t collect pieces of you

to build altars out of abandonment.

I want to leave you untouched —

not unloved,

just not conquered.

Not turned into another symptom

of my fragile genius.

Because love, the way we write it —

is often just colonisation

dressed up in metaphors

and bleeding journals.

So no,

I don’t want to love you

like poets love their pain,

or men love their mothers,

or gods love obedience.

I want to love you

the way endings love honesty —

with no flowers,

no crescendo,

just the truth

that not all stories deserve

a second draft.

Rot Beneath The Rhyme

You want to write about buzzing bees and blossoming blooms?

Write all you want.

You want to glorify the first-world experiences

of your third-world existence?

Suit yourself.

But don’t you dare call it poetry.

It’s genital boils and gentle farts at best.

Perfumed deception.

Filtered thought.

Main course of delusion with privilege for garnishing.

You think life’s beautiful —

No, you don’t.

You just want people to believe

that your life

is a curated gallery of minimalist heartbreak and aesthetic orgasms.

Because what would the picture-perfect idea of you say

when those nicotine-stained fangs

finally cut through the illusion you've woven —

for the world, and, for yourself?

You don’t talk about the dirty.

The filthy.

The real.

Because that would mean acceptance.

And you, my pretend-intellectual acquaintance,

are denial on drugs at best.

And addicts?

They don’t heal.

They hallucinate.

They monologue in mirrors and call it poetry.

You write in languages

too archaic to even be nostalgic —

as if dead tongues

can resuscitate your relevance.

You do it so you can sleep

feeling superior

about a petty existence

with the exact importance of a shriveled ball sack

in winter.

You take pride in writing obituaries in a language buried for hundreds of years.

Well, be my guest.

Join the fucking dinosaurs.

Carved.

Catalogued.

Caged in museums.

Sold for cheap exhibitionism.

Because while you drown in scented denial,

some of us are busy living —

ugly, honest,

filthy,

feral,

free.

Parallel Lines, Parallel Lies

You and I are parallel lines 

going around in circles —

not elegant abstractions on chalkboards,

but bloody proofs scrawled across generations

that proximity doesn’t guarantee closures

dopamine and cerebral spillages don't agree to the obvious truths of math

We move side by side,

like grief and memory,

like privilege and denial,

like god and silence.

We are the mathematical equivalent

of almost.

The geometry of ache —

two straight lines pretending

they’re not running from the same center.

Go ahead, calculate the distance.

Try finding solace in symmetry.

Tell me if it soothes

when the bed is warm

but never whole.

You — always just fucking there

but never here.

Me — measuring your absence

in broken promises

and phone calls that end

before the dial tone dies.

We scribbled futures

like ignorant men drew maps —

with rulers and delusion.

Never mind the bodies buried beneath.

Never mind the borders burned

into the flesh and the skin

with chalk made from colonial bones.

We didn’t fall apart.

We were designed

to never touch.

Don’t romanticize it.

This isn’t tragedy.

It’s engineering.

It’s god playing cruel games

with straight lines

and crooked intentions.

And still —

we orbit each other

like survivors of the same explosion

too traumatized to collide again.

We make art of our angles,

confuse motion for meaning,

pretend infinity is profound

instead of pathetic.

Fuck Euclid.

Fuck symmetry.

Fuck every poem that dressed our dysfunction

in silk metaphors.

We were not star-crossed.

We were formulated mutations.

Parallel, not equal.

Not meant to intersect.

Not meant to matter.

Just two pointless existences

floating like dead fishes in the depths of a folklore

told in dead languages.

And when I die,

burn this geometry with me.

Let the ashes scatter

in between the spaces you never filled.

Let the wind draw curves

we were too rigid to imagine.

Let our story end, finally,

without angles.

Just ashes.

And absence.

And one last unspoken line.

The Anatomy Of Absence

I carry the scent of your being

laced in my entrails,

like cyanide on apple seeds —

helpless on the skin, poison within

You are rot,

painted in nostalgia,

a ghost with lipstick smudged

on the rim of every thought I sip from

I can’t scrub you out —

you live under my fingernails,

in skin folds

where memories ferment quietly

into grief

You are the silence

I mistook for safety —

a stillness so precise

it carved absence into habit,

until I could no longer tell

if I was loving you

or learning how to disappear

Some nights,

I dream of plucking you out

organ by organ,

but wake up

choking on the scent again —

sweet, sour, rusted, ruined

like bruised fruit

left out too long

You were never poison in a vial —

you were the kiss

before the drink,

the breath before drowning,

the lull between pulse and flatline

And I,

I am still

sipping silence,

wearing your absence

like vows

tailored in grief's shadow —

learning to rot

gracefully on the outside,

while maggots of memory

feast on the inside

where love once lived