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.

The Bastard Gospel

I am not misunderstood.

I am perfectly understood —

just inconvenient to accept in behaved daylight.

A devil’s love child, carved from charm

and caffeinated arrogance.

Not the tortured artist —

just the one who got away

with calling manipulation “metaphor.”

I don’t pen words.

I write spells

disguised as sincerity.

And I cast them

with the same tongue

that’s talked lovers into beds,

friends into betrayals,

and strangers into applause.

You think I’m raw?

That’s curated chaos.

Every pause, every punchline —

engineered like a con

to make you feel seen,

while I rob you blind

of doubt, dissent, and disbelief.

I don’t bleed in verses.

I bottle blood

and sell it as vintage.

My humour? Weaponized.

My poetry? Preloaded.

I know exactly which word to drop

to make your heart twitch,

your thighs ache,

your trauma resurface,

your ideologies weep.

And I rarely miss.

Even devils have bad moments —

I know you thought I’d rather say

“even Gods have bad days.”

But God built the world in a week.

I call that more miss than miracle.

A stretched-overstretch

masquerading as omnipotence.

You see what I did there?

As I said — I rarely miss.

Because I don’t speak —

I aim.

And my silence?

It’s just me reloading.

I say I hate small talk —

what I mean is:

I refuse to pick breadcrumbs

off the floors of mediocre minds

just to appear polite.

I’ll come off as a cocky bastard —

intentionally.

Because arrogance is quicker

than explaining

why you bore me.

You think I’m arrogant?

You should see me on stage —

reading a room like scripture,

dissecting souls

with the precision of someone

who’s already calculated

who’s clapping sincerely

and who’s waiting to be wrecked.

I don’t blend in.

I glitch.

A neurodivergent ripple

in your predictable pond.

Where you see people,

I see reasons to be hopeless —

and a hundred thousand answers

to why murder seems misunderstood.

Where you see conversation,

I see hollow existences

clinging to faith

like infants to a breast

that’s already run dry.

This brain?

Dysfunctional apathy

masquerading as philosophy.

A freak of an existence

tuned into patterns

you won’t notice

until I’ve already rearranged the room

with one sentence.

I don’t believe in divinity.

But I’ve played god —

in conversations,

on stage,

in bedrooms,

in the minds of people

who called me “revolutionary”

while I quietly calculated

what they’d trade

for being understood.

I say I despise sellouts.

But between you and me —

if cults came with royalties

and apostasy had a subscription model,

I’d write a sermon

so seductive

you’d beg to sell your trauma to me.

I’m not a contradiction.

I’m a confession

delivered with a smirk.

I know I’m a bastard —

a conniving, persuasive,

neurospicy, literary bastard.

And I’ve turned guilt into gold

since the day I discovered

that people confuse

precision with poetry,

and manipulation

with meaning.

So no —

don’t romanticize me.

Don’t pity me.

And for god’s sake,

don’t fucking forgive me.

I already did —

years ago,

with a grin sharp enough

to slice regret open

and watch it bleed relevance.

I’m not writing to be loved.

I never have. I never will.

I’m writing to be inevitable.

To echo.

To haunt.

To carve myself into the throat of memory

like a song that offends

but never fades —

a stubborn, bitter aftertaste.

And if you feel seen —

if you feel ruined —

if you feel like clapping but can’t tell why?

Good.

I was aiming for the part of you

you thought no one could touch.

Now live with my fingerprint.

Because I own you.

I am your god.

And I am your devil.

Holy Is As Holy Does

Every religion preaches

a single, bleeding truth:

Treat others as you wish to be treated.

And then —

in the very next breath,

sharpened by centuries of repetition —

it demands you convert, correct, or kill

anyone who dares whisper that truth

in a different tongue.

Because devotion, apparently,

is only sacred

if it rhymes with your scripture.

Mercy, only valid

if it’s sung in your dialect.

Peace, only permitted

if it wears your god’s signature scent.

They say God is one.

But we have franchised Him

into elaborate packages,

each with their personalized discount codes to divinity,

holy copyrights,

and punishment plans

on signing up for the other one

as if God was fast food.

We light lamps.

They light candles.

Someone else kneels to stone,

and another folds their hands to air.

But the fire burns the same —

only the matches change.

You call it devotion.

But it walks like war.

Bleeds like empire.

And smells like history repeating itself

in the color of every flag

we wrap around our corpses.

Every prayer ends with “peace be upon you.”

And every battlefield begins

with someone deciding

whose peace matters more.

We preach kindness in the morning,

and by sunset,

we’ve burned a village

because its children mispronounced salvation.

We don’t build gods.

We build weapons

shaped like gods.

And call it faith.

And in that faith,

we draw borders —

not around land,

but around love.

So don’t tell me

all religions preach the same thing.

They do.

But never to the same people.

And never without "conditions apply" in small print so fine, 

you'd be myopic enough to miss them 

even with your glasses on

Because in this divine lottery,

truth wears uniforms.

Gods come with disclaimers.

And heaven has a guest list.

The only commandment we all follow?

Kill the mirror

before it shows

you and the heretic

are the same dust

praying for different rains.

Unbothered, Only If It Bothers You

Isn’t it ironic?

How he, and she, and they, and them —

and every pronoun in between, 

above, beneath, and beyond —

proclaim from the hollowest chambers of their lungs

that they do not care.

About judgment.

About whispers.

About the world’s ever-turning gaze.

And yet,

they barter in currencies

etched off that very gaze.

Their worth weighed

in nods and frowns,

in silent approvals,

in measured applauses.

They preach detachment

from stages carved from craving —

their “I don’t give a damn”

engraved in ink blots on worn out pages

they still hope

someone reads.

Every rebellion

hand-stitched

to fit the fashions of the hour.

Every truth

practiced before a mirror

just to sound spontaneous.

We’ve made a theatre

of not caring.

We costume our indifference

and choreograph our silence,

each pause rehearsed

to sound profound.

Even heartbreak now

asks for timing.

Even solitude

demands an audience.

We cry only in places

that echo.

And still we say —

with tired tongues and bold bravado —

that we are untouched,

unbothered,

untamed.

While inside,

we tally our worth

by how many turned their heads.

Somewhere along the way,

we learned to wear our scars

like medals,

to shape our pain

into parables,

to name every wound

so it never goes unnoticed.

And I?

I too have knelt

at the altar of performance —

sold sorrow in stanzas,

packaged ache in metaphors,

hoping it would buy me

a place in someone’s memory.

But now,

I long for an honesty

too quiet to quote,

too deep to define.

A grief that doesn’t announce itself.

A love that doesn’t audition.

Because maybe,

just maybe,

the final revolution

is to feel

without translation,

to live

without proof,

and to leave

without applause.

And, now that I stand before you

Cutting through your hypocrisies

like a scalding knife,

cutting through refrigerated rock-solid butter

Even if your fingers twitch for a second

to come together as hands,

and clap the fuck out of my surgical incision

of your darling hypocrisy of a rebellion

Don't you dare fucking applaud.

For even if this piece was a goddamn masterpiece

Your applauses wouldn't be spontaneous, 

but an elaborately staged three-act play

Your praises would be the choice of currency 

I was looking to dirty 

my capitalist cunt of an existence with.

Your applauses would validate the rebel me 

while vilifying my rebellion 

of how your applauses mean nothing to me.

Because as much as you hoped 

me being any different 

would be your sole respite,

on an indecent, unworthy afternoon

I am but you, 

each and every one of you, 

a speckle of dust 

identical to every other.

Fair Enough, Said No One

They say —

everything is fair in love and war.

But they forget —

survival is war.

Breathing is war.

And love?

Love is more cruel than battlefields could ever get, 

in metaphors and in actuality

Wars, where both soldiers kiss as they kill.

We talk of fairness

like it’s a god-gifted privilege —

an inheritance of sorts

as if the universe handed us a receipt

at birth

with “justice” printed at the bottom in fine ink.

As if stars give a damn

about who bleeds louder.

It’s ironic, really.

Humanity, that fragile empire of bone and ego,

demands fairness

from a planet

that hurls asteroids at life

just for sport.

Life isn’t fair.

Not to the rabbit.

Not to the hawk.

Not to the child

born in a postcode

that spells famine in every syllable.

If fairness were a benchmark,

most of us wouldn’t be here.

We’re evolutionary clerical errors —

glitches that refused to die.

Stubborn accidents dressed in skin

pretending to have purpose.

And yet,

we cry when things aren’t fair.

We write poetry about it.

We pray about it.

We legislate it into constitutions

we’re too exhausted to read.

Why?

Because fairness

is the most comforting lie

ever sold.

And humans?

Humans are addicts.

Addicted to meaning.

Addicted to justice.

Addicted to the idea

that if they suffer long enough,

someone will notice.

Someone will care.

Someone will clap.

Truth be told:

The universe doesn’t clap.

It swallows whole.

We build myths around fairness —

dress it in divine robes,

call it karma,

call it destiny,

call it God.

But fairness doesn’t knock.

It doesn’t text you back.

It doesn’t save the good

or punish the evil.

Fairness isn’t real.

It’s a placebo

for people too scared

to admit that life is random

and pain is the default setting.

Still, we persist.

We cling to fairness

the way lovers cling to each other

before the final argument —

knowing it’s over,

but too afraid to be alone in the truth.

And that’s where love enters —

the greatest hoax

masquerading as salvation.

They say love heals.

They forget to mention

it first digs

right where the scar never closed.

Love teaches you

that someone else’s chaos

can become your home.

Until the walls burn.

And you realise —

home was just a hostage situation

with scented candles.

But we crave it.

Because in a world without fairness,

love feels like order.

It feels like gravity.

It feels like someone finally read your manual —

only to underline the warnings

and ignore the rest.

Fairness is a myth.

War is constant.

And love is just war

that asks you to undress first.

Nothing is fair.

Not the bombs.

Not the betrayals.

Not the goodbye

that came wearing your name

on a voice that used to whisper safety.

Fairness isn’t just dead —

it never lived.

And yet,

we keep breathing.

We keep loving.

We keep bleeding

like idiots rehearsing for a play

where no one remembers the script

and the curtains never fall.

Because maybe —

just maybe —

the only fair thing about life

is that no one survives it.

Burn The Patriarchy, But Keep The Ashes

Patriarchy is a strange conundrum

A dichotomy that's an absolute autocracy for most parts

But then every now and then, as per crooked conveniences

As and when it profits, 

or plays a leash you could hold to control another of your own skin

Patriarchy becomes a silent saviour; gets the job done, no questions asked, no pat on the back

When your lifelong activism is all about dismantling the very bones of a system

It is rather audacious of you to stand there and feed off it, 

whenever it suits your appetite

For starters, that's not activism, 

that's not a fight for a cause, 

that's not revolution, 

not a movement

That's selling personal interests disguised in the burqa of feminism

I know you're wondering why would I ever refer to feminism as a burqa

But then, when you reduce feminism to an unquestionable faith 

to further your agendas and your unresolved issues from bad decisions 

you in all your glory are guilty of

How's it any different from a religion

You tell me dowry is wrong, and hey I agree

You tell me dowry is about men looting a woman's mother's gold, 

and I wish I could agree, 

but then who do you think paid for the mother's gold

You'll tell me it's gold that's been passed on through generations, 

and my question still remains

Who do you think paid for the gold, 

or even looted it off another man, wasn't it a man

A man of your lineage but now you call it inheritance, 

isn't that funny

You in the very same breath, tell me, 

alimony is justified, because a woman cooked and washed and fucked and fed the man

And I wish I could be as oblivious to the reality of money-making

Just how a man doesn't own a woman, not in full, not even in halves

What a man makes, 

you cannot feel entitled to own even a portion of it 

because you feel he owes it to you

Imagine your parents asking you for paychecks

in the name of maintenance, 

because they chose to cook and wash, and feed and sponsor your education, growing up

You'll tell me them birthing you was their choice, 

you marrying him wasn't yours

But then, is that his problem or yours

Is he to suffer 

because your parents were convinced this is a marriage acceptable to their ideas of the world

How do you explain feeling entitled to the fruits he bear 

but never to the years and decades of being fucked over and peeled off his skin from every inch of his existence

If a relationship is a transaction, it ends the minute the relationship does

You will tell me how a man raping a woman or killing his wife over an affair, is all on patriarchy, and hey I agree

But then you'll never mention all the women who have used patriarchy as a leash to control other women, 

how mothers have leashed daughters because grandmothers leashed mothers, how this too has been passed on like family heirloom

And then, you'll tell me, in the same breath, that a woman murdering her husband in cold blood isn't really on her, 

but on patriarchy, 

because patriarchy didn't let her choose

And I'll wish, I could sledgehammer your brain cells into their sensibilities

Because then you'd see, 

if you couldn't fight your family, 

it's a battle between you and your blood, and spilling the blood of someone who was there in the search of a companion, 

who didn't hold you at gunpoint or emotionally manipulate you into marrying them, 

is not a problem of the system, 

it's a problem of your blood, 

for they are the fucking system

You'll tell me how gender roles are messed up 

and how a woman should be everything she wants to be

While expecting men to be everything she wants him to be 

like a man's existence had suddenly become limited to a woman's wet dream

It's autocratic to expect one gender to adhere to their gender roles 

because it benefits the other gender who's busy crying victim and screaming queenhood in the same breath

It's autocratic to blame an entire system a thousand years old on one gender, 

like the other gender was asleep all this while, and has suddenly woken off a coma

And yet, your lifelong activism was about dismantling an autocratic system

In the bargain to be a revolutionary, we often become what we despise the most.

The Chore Formerly Known As Love

Love doesn’t die.

It decays.

Quietly.

Like fruit in the fridge

you swore you’d eat,

but left to rot

because looking at it meant admitting

you've lost your appetite for it.

You say you’re in love.

Cute.

Is it the kind where you whisper I love you

to avoid saying I’m tired of conversations inevitably turning into fights

Is it passion, 

the raw, uninhibited bestiality crawling beneath the skin, 

or just the fear of being alone in your loneliness

dressed up as companionship?

Does your love still arrive

without needing to be invited?

Or is it punctual now —

like a chore,

like taxes,

like scheduled sex you both agreed to

out of habit, not hunger?

Be honest —

When was the last time you kissed them

without needing it to mean something, anything?

When was the last time

your silence wasn’t a negotiation?

When was the last time

you reached for their hand to lose yourself and watch time freeze

without first checking your phone?

They say love takes work.

Sure.

But this feels more like

an unpaid internship in emotional endurance.

This isn’t work.

This is maintenance.

This is repainting cracks

instead of admitting the foundation’s fucked.

You lie to each other in kindness now.

You feel the urge to call your fights, conversations.

Your sex is pretend-poetry: no art, all dramatics.

Your jokes come with disclaimers

because love makes your skin brittle

as if your beings have been failed by your feelings.

And yet —

you stay.

Not out of love.

Out of legacy.

Out of sunk cost.

Out of the fear that maybe, just maybe,

this is as good as it gets.

You wear each other like undies —

wrinkled, faded,

too familiar to discard,

too hollow to defend.

So I ask:

Is this love?

Or is it two people

too tired to start over,

too scared to be alone,

too conditioned to clap for the corpse

just because it’s dressed in wedding rings?

What if your idea of love

is just your fear of dying alone

wearing perfume and polite laughter?

What if the only reason you’re still here

is because leaving would mean

admitting you stayed too long?

You talk about growing together.

But what if you’ve just been

wilting in sync?

What if love stopped being oxygen

and became routine inhalation

out of guilt,

out of memory,

out of muscle?

Sometimes —

the bravest kind of love

is the one that ends

before it curdles into resentment,

before it turns your name

into a flavour they can no longer stomach.

And if this poem feels like a question

you don’t want to answer —

that’s not on me.

That’s on the part of you

that still calls it love

just because you’re scared

to call it what it’s become.

Coherence Is Currency, I’m Paying In Change

The voices in my head —

They don’t scream.

They echo.

Not loud enough for alarms —

just constant enough to keep me awake

even when the body begs for blackouts.

Sleep isn’t peace.

It’s postponement.

A reluctant truce

with thoughts that build guillotines

out of memories I never meant to keep.

And no —

this isn’t poetry.

This is exhaustion with better vocabulary.

This is insomnia without the obnoxious romanticism,

without the moonlit metaphors.

Just a clock,

a ceiling,

and a heart rehearsing its own shutdown.

I live in a mind

where stillness is suspicious,

where silence is an ambush,

where clarity is a mirage

sold in bottles labeled “productivity.”

I crash on caffeine like it’s cocaine,

Not because caffeine keeps me up

but because it negotiates with the madness on my behalf.

I write to-do lists on my wrists,

then forget them

as soon as my brain picks a new obsession

to chew and choke on.

The world says —

“Get help.”

But doesn’t give a handbook

for how to schedule therapy

between deadlines, disasters,

and pretending to be fine at brunch.

Neurodivergence isn’t quirky.

It’s not an aesthetic.

It’s being an outdated browser

with a hundred tabs open,

a dozen of them frozen,

and no clue

where the music is coming from.

I am fluent in masking.

In pretending to care about what I’m supposed to.

In smiling at the right decibel,

laughing on schedule,

and folding my chaos

into polite sentences.

My conscience

holds performance reviews every night.

Scoring and rating every pause,

every stutter,

every unspoken plea

that could’ve passed for conversation

if I had the right mask on.

Impostor syndrome?

That’s not a condition.

That’s the architecture.

Every apparent achievement comes with

an internal scream:

“You’ll be found out soon.”

I am haunted by hypotheticals.

By the ghosts of things I never said

to people who wouldn’t have listened anyway.

And yet, I apologize.

I apologize before I think,

for daring to occupy air

in a room where coherence is currency

and I only carry change.

The world crowns the linear.

The neat.

The coherent.

The well-branded misery

that can be sold as resilience.

But I was born

without the blueprint for belonging.

I’ve been filling out forms

with answers that don’t exist

in languages I was never taught.

I’ve been waiting

for someone to say:

“You don’t need to be fixed.

You just need to be heard

without being translated in captions and subtexts.”

This isn’t a cry for help.

It’s a refusal to whisper

just because my facts

don’t fit your timeline.

So if the next time I speak

it sounds jagged —

like broken glass reciting scripture —

understand:

this isn’t poetry.

This is a malfunction.

A glitch that’s learned how to rhyme

so you’ll pretend it’s beautiful.

Because not all of us want healing.

Some of us

just want to bleed in peace

without being asked

to colour within your damn outlines.

I don’t need comfort.

I need space.

Space to unravel

without being framed

as inspirational roadkill.

And if my voice

still makes you uncomfortable —

good.

It was never meant

to be your lullaby.

It was meant

to be your fucking wake-up call.

So listen closely.

Not to the words,

but to the silence

after they land.

That?

That’s not applause.

That’s the echo

of a mind cracking

just soft enough

for you to keep scrolling.

But loud enough

to remind you —

Not everyone who’s quiet

has made peace with the noise.

Some of us

are just waiting

for the right volume

to scream ourselves real.

Gluten-Free Truth For The Emotionally Constipated

Humans are hilarious.

They claim to want objective truths —

but only if the truth

comes dressed in soft pastels,

apologises twice before entering the room,

and doesn't ruin the goddamn brunch.

The truth is only fashionable if it's filtered.

If it's fuckable, and not fucking with your comfort.

Be too honest

and you’re cruel.

Be unapologetic about it

and you’re “problematic.”

Call a spade a spade —

and suddenly it’s a hate crime

against egos so inflated yet so fragile

it feels like a soap bubble delicately balanced at the edge of a safety pin.

Small talk is sexy now.

Ask someone about the weather,

their favourite colour,

what type of croissant they spiritually identify as —

and you’re a conversational god.

But dare to ask

what keeps them up at night?

What scares them about dying?

What they’d regret if tomorrow never made it?

Ah, now you’re “too intense.”

“Too overwhelming.”

“Too cynically depressing.”

Or worse:

“You must be going through something.”

Because existentialism isn’t soothing to the eye

unless it’s printed on a tote bag

sold at an overpriced boutique

sponsored by gluten-free neurosis.

Merit?

Talent?

Good fucking luck.

Those are liabilities in a culture

that rewards likability

over literacy.

Where wiping last night’s dinner

off a financially privileged asshole with confidence

is more employable and hence convenient

than someone who can dismantle

a corrupt system in five sentences.

Competence is offensive now.

Excellence is arrogance.

And ambition?

Well, ambition is just being needy and greedy

in dire need of unsolicited therapy.

We live in a world

where incompetence is charming,

mediocrity is a business model,

and the highest form of rebellion

is just…

doing your goddamn job

well.

Do it consistently enough

and you're an absolute outcast.

Be brilliant,

and you’ll be accused of trying too hard.

Be average,

and they’ll hand you a medal

just for showing up.

So don’t tell me

you want truth.

You want decoration.

You want digestible disillusionment

with a side of non-threatening laughter

and sugar-free trigger warnings.

So the next time you feel like asking for honesty —

just shut the fuck up.

Because bare-skinned honesty

doesn’t arrive with seatbelts or scented candles.

It arrives like a surgical blade

demanding your reflection,

not your agreement.

And the thing about truth is —

it doesn’t owe you a seat at the table

when you flinch at the knife

meant for your delusions.

Because honesty doesn’t cure.

It amputates.

It peels.

It pours salt into the parts you pretend don’t rot.

You think you want the truth?

Here it is —

You don’t matter.

Not enough to be wronged.

Not enough to be right.

Just another furniture

in an inexpensive exhibition of pre-owned collectibles. 

So the next time you feel like asking for honesty —

look in the mirror, and hope it doesn’t answer.

Because if it does —

you won’t survive what it screams.

Conscience On Clearance Sale

You’re not angry

because you can’t sell your conscience.

You’re angry

because no one’s willing to buy it.

Not the corporates,

not the cults,

not even the chaos mafia

who peddle morality in monthly subscriptions.

You tried naming your silence restraint.

Tried calling your compliance wisdom.

Tried polishing your mediocrity

until it looked like grace.

But truth doesn’t wear makeup.

And guilt doesn’t do well in billboards.

You weren’t ignored for being honest.

You were ignored

because your honesty didn’t matter enough 

to be a commodity.

You weren’t silenced.

You were skipped.

Because selling out is now

a talent category.

And your conscience?

Too dusty.

Too dull.

Not relevant enough to auction.

So now, you rage.

You point fingers

at louder liars with fatter paychecks.

You scream

because your whisper never made it

past your own reflection.

But here’s the thing —

the devil doesn’t buy every soul.

He buys the ones that can perform.

You?

You kept fumbling your lines

while waiting for the thunder of claps and lightning of collective sighs

from people scrolling past

your barely-edited outrage.

And now?

You tattoo your truth

in temporary ink,

hoping someone will mistake it

for bravery.

You spit verses about injustice

but won’t rebel pro-bono.

You cry for Gaza, Congo, Kashmir —

but won’t speak up

when your the corporate cunt of a boss calls you “replaceable.”

You think screaming into the void

is activism.

You think unfollowing genocidal governments

counts as resistance.

But the only thing you’ve resisted

is the responsibility

to be more

than a hollow echo.

You wanted applause, not accountability.

You wanted to sell your soul

without a receipt.

You wanted to bleed

without bruising your brand.

But this world?

It doesn’t pay in pity.

It pays in performance.

And your conscience?

Still hoping to be out of stock someday.

So the next time

you feel the need to scream —

ask yourself:

Is it truth you’re defending?

Or a reputation

you never earned?

Because if your revolution

requires documented evidence to inspire the ones willing to buy out inspiration,

and your principles

come with a return policy —

You’re not a poet.

You’re not a prophet.

You’re just another audacious pimp

for capitalism,

angry your sales pitch didn’t land.

Receipts Of A Rogue Patriot

They say —

if you love your country,

you don’t raise your voice.

You raise a toast.

You drape silence in saffron.

You clap when the guns march,

and cry only when the anthem permits you.

I say, that's bullshit.

I pay taxes.

Which means I don’t owe you reverence.

I own a stake.

My money funds your patriotism.

My money oils the trigger fingers.

My money buys the medals

you pin on bloodstained uniforms

while the widows eat from pamphlets

of promises long expired.

Don’t you dare tell me to stay quiet.

Let’s get this straight.

The army is not God.

It’s payroll.

Brutal, bloody payroll.

Trained not to think, but to obey.

Trained not to protect,

but to execute.

They are not saints.

They are salaried sentinels

wearing the badge of nationalism

like camouflage for conscience.

The government?

A glorified accountant of borrowed dreams,

funded by the labor of a million

who’ll never afford a passport

to the country they’re dying for.

Democracy without dissent

is photogenic dictatorship sold as progress.

And governance without scrutiny

is a slow-poisoning autocracy

painted in election ink.

And the police?

Don’t even get me started.

Paid from my pockets,

yet they ask for more

to do their job, file a fucking report.

This is not protection.

This is extortion in uniform normalised into occupational tendency.

This is bureaucracy wearing a bulletproof vest

and asking for a bribe

to lift a goddamn phone.

But if I say this out loud,

you call me anti-national.

You say —

Don’t insult the patriots.

Don’t you dare

raise a voice.

Because in this nation,

obedience is patriotism,

and silence is pride.

Here’s the truth:

You can’t claim patriotism

if you treat accountability

like blasphemy.

You can’t love your country

by worshipping its weapons

and fearing its questions.

I question

because I pay.

I pay

because I believe.

And belief, real belief —

isn’t silence.

It’s scrutiny.

So the next time

someone calls you anti-national

for demanding answers,

don’t flinch.

Just ask them:

“Are you scared of questions—

or scared of what they’ll unearth?”

And if they still say

loyalty means keeping your mouth shut,

smile, lean in,

and whisper:

"I’m not the problem.

I’m the bill you forgot you had to answer to.

And your nationalism?

It’s on my fucking receipt."

Soft Porn For The Sophisticated Urban

Poetry once roared.

It had rust in its lungs and a blade for a tongue —

not for decorative royalty,

but dissection to the basics.

It sliced through dogma,

bled truth in uncomfortable shades,

and held a mirror no one wanted to look into.

It wasn’t pretty.

It wasn’t safe.

It wasn’t yours to digest with lukewarm green tea and assorted cookies.

Now?

It comes wrapped in fancy cellophane and pastel shades,

with trigger warnings and discount codes to overpriced shows —

a self-help manual for the easily bedazzled

masquerading as metaphor.

What used to be protest

is now performance.

Pain is curated,

grief is rehearsed,

and rage wears a badge that says:

“Be kind. I’m monetizing this.”

Poetry is no longer a scalpel.

It’s a soft sponge —

sanitized, sweetened,

and soaked in self-importance.

It flirts with hollow glamour of shallow verses.

It seduces applause.

It censors its teeth

just to get laid by the literary elite.

And we?

We clap our hands.

We snap our fingers.

We call it brave

when it’s barely breathing.

Between the velvet cushions of feel-good fiction

and the cosmetic grief of borrowed identities,

the spine is gone.

The blood’s been washed off.

Only the bones remain —

plastic, posed, polished.

Because somewhere along the way,

we stopped writing to understand,

and started writing to be understood.

To be liked.

To be safe.

To be sponsored.

We forgot:

Art was never meant to comfort the comfortable.

It was meant to disturb the dishonest.

Expose the inconvenient.

Shatter delusion.

Not sell out stadiums of the self-soothed.

But now?

We peddle wounds like artisanal crafts.

We frame suffering like home décor.

We whisper truth in validation-approved skeletons

and call it poetry —

as if echo chambers are pilgrimages,

and affirmation is salvation.

So if you're writing poetry

that doesn’t make someone flinch,

fume,

or feel slightly violated by the truth —

you're writing lullabies, not literature.

And the next time someone tells me

poetry must be palatable,

I’ll hand them a scalpel

and ask them to eat it.

Bon appétit, motherfuckers.

The Gospel Of Grievance

There was once upon a time when life used to be about survival.

About fire.

About famine.

About figuring out how not to die before sundown.

Now?

It’s about how a sentence made you feel.

It’s about your heartbreak

when someone didn’t use your preferred punctuation.

We’ve come a long way —

from outrunning predators

to calling ourselves oppressed

because someone disagreed with our thinkpiece.

Because the day death became negotiable,

life became a curated performance.

And suffering?

A guaranteed bestselling genre.

Everyone’s a victim now.

Not because they were hurt —

but because someone like them

once was.

Maybe.

Allegedly.

We don’t even wait to be wronged anymore.

We rehearse our wounds like it’s morning prayer —

recite, react, retaliate,

all before breakfast.

And now “trauma”

is just another accessory,

worn like a limited-edition wristband —

available in guilt, grief, and graphite grey.

Welcome to the age of

Empowered Victims.

What a phrase

What an audacity

Possibly the finest joke

the 21st century told with a straight face.

Where disagreement

is labelled violence,

and opinion

is the new oppression.

Because actual empathy requires effort.

And effort doesn’t sell well as a commodity.

So we weaponize our wounds,

real or imagined,

and turn them into aesthetic war-cries 

disguised as deep thought.

Into careers

rented out as lifestyle.

Into curated identities

that make us feel special

while doing absolutely nothing

to fix the world we critique.

Today, to be disagreed with

is reason enough

to cancel someone’s very existence.

Today, feelings are facts

if enough fragile egos

feel them at the same time.

And I wish I could say

this was just a phase —

a cultural puberty

we’d all grow out of, eventually.

But no.

We’re raising generations

on the gospel of grievance.

On the liturgy of labels.

On the catechism of cancel culture.

So here’s your altar.

Here’s your soapbox.

Cry louder.

Because attention is currency

and nuance is bankruptcy.

And if someone disagrees with your sadness?

They must be anti-you.

Anti-kindness.

Anti-humanity.

Because in a world

where critical thinking is crime

and critique is cruelty,

victimhood is the new royalty.

But here’s the thing:

Individual feelings

are just that —

individual.

Subjective.

Born in echo chambers,

fed on curated grief,

and dressed up in borrowed validation

that scream louder

than blisters, bruises, and blood.

Your feelings aren't facts.

Your offense isn't law.

And your trauma cosplay

doesn’t come with a license

to steal the mic

from those who actually bled.

Crying victim

while hoarding privileges

isn’t a revolution —

it’s a performance

with payouts in kind because activism doesn't come with cheques that can be cashed out

So the next time you scream,

“I am the oppressed,” —

take a breath,

and ask yourself:

Who’s paying the cost

for your spotlight?

And if you ever feel

like the world owes you

a candlelight vigil

for how hard it is

to be you…

Splash water on your fuckface

and remind yourself —

You’re not a martyr.

You’re a mildly inconvenient opinion

in a world far too brutal

to take your delusion seriously.

Cults, Cunts & Convenient Conscience

There once lived a man-child,

dreadlocks of blonde beneath hollow headgear —

a fashion of borrowed rebellion

wrapped around an empty skull.

He’d once served in the armed forces —

learned to politicise headgears and flags,

faith and skin,

like it was scripture written in bullet points.

He said he was different.

But then again,

every man-child says that

before they spill sponsored patriotism

into someone else’s soil.

He killed —

not in defence,

but in defiance.

Claimed it was for country,

a country neither mother nor land,

inherited through the displacement

of those who bled before borders were drawn.

He switched gods

like soiled undies —

from rifle-born righteousness

to recreational redemption.

Because atheism is for grown-ups.

And guilt, when uniformed,

needs softer names to sleep.

When the grenades stopped singing

and the rust settled on his plastic spine,

he rewrote himself.

Adapted blood as backstory,

sold trauma like postcards from hell.

Said he was always a poet.

Long before war made him a prophet.

Because poetry's the cheapest buy-in to urban Renaissance,

what lands is a punchline, what crashes, is a misunderstood metaphor.

So he sparked a fire.

Foreign land, local wounds.

Fair skin always finds an audience.

And what was once arson,

now smelled like incense —

thanks to cultured sophistication.

He found followers and friends.

Other ghosts with glamour.

Veterans of war and verse,

bonded over battle scars and bad metaphors.

Trauma bonding is porn for the privileged.

But prophets are parasites

when poetry’s just performance

and grief is rented for applause.

He sold revolutions like tickets to forbidden fetishes.

Roasted marshmallows on the bonfire he lit.

And the revolution?

It became a picnic.

A tea party of the privileged,

reciting vanilla verses

about things they’ve never survived.

Because when fair skin bleeds,

the ink sells faster.

When brown skin bleeds,

it stains quietly in archives

that no publisher prints.

He changed skins,

faiths, philosophies —

played prophet to pilgrims

who wanted gods with approved aesthetics.

And while he danced,

headgear swaying,

balls sagging under the weight of truth

he refused to carry —

The real poets,

the ones chosen by poetry,

didn’t clap.

They didn’t chant.

They didn’t write counter-poems

or open letters.

They just disappeared.

Dot by dot.

Line by line.

Erased themselves

from a world too easily impressed

by spectacle in sepia.

Because when poetry

is burnt alive

in bonfires built from borrowed grief,

when revolution

is filtered for acceptable aesthetics,

when white guilt

learns to rhyme,

and brown truth

gets told to behave —

what survives

isn’t verse.

Isn’t voice.

Isn’t vision.

What survives

is ash.

Packaged.

Published.

Pulitzer-ed.

So here's your prophet —

butt naked,

canonised in curated mediocrity,

masturbating to applause

he never earned.

Let history have him.

Pretend-poetry begs for legacy.

Poetry walks away

before the fire reaches

its throat.

Elegy For The Unwritten

They say,

you’ll never be the hero in someone else’s story

unless you’re the hero in yours.

Sounds poetic, doesn’t it?

But life’s not poetry.

It’s not cinema either.

Life is art —

and like most art,

you only get valued posthumous.

What matters isn’t whether you’re the hero

in someone else’s fairytale.

What matters isn’t even

whether you’re the hero in your own.

What matters is the story.

The goddamn story.

The one you live

like a protagonist too flawed for redemption arcs.

The one where your choices

don’t come with violins or lighting,

but with consequences

no script ever warned you about.

You don’t get monologues —

you get breakdowns in public toilets,

you get laughter that sounds like surrender,

you get mornings where breathing

is a negotiation.

You aren’t born into your story.

You bleed into it.

You write it with silence and screaming,

with mistakes you wear like tattoos

no one asked to see

but everyone feels entitled to judge.

You live it —

not because you want to be a hero,

but because you can’t afford to be an extra

in your own fucking life.

They sold us the idea of being someone’s person,

someone’s saviour,

someone’s dream.

But they forgot to mention:

you’ll be edited out the moment you stop fitting

the aesthetic.

So here’s the truth:

You’ll never be the hero in someone else’s story

unless you’re the villain in someone else’s tragedy.

And you’ll never be the hero in your own —

until you stop narrating your life

like it was written by someone

waiting for applause.

This isn’t cinema.

There’s no climax.

There’s no arc.

Just frames.

And flashbacks.

And the regret of having lived for the curious voyeurism of nonchalant camera lenses

in a world allergic to raw footage.

So fuck the hero.

Be the scene.

Be the plot hole.

Be the monologue they had to mute

because it made the ending

too uncomfortable for taste buds suited to happy endings.

Because when you’re gone —

they won’t remember what you fixed.

They’ll only remember

what you dared to break.

And if you want a legacy worth reading,

write the kind of story

that refuses to be buried

with the body.

And if it isn't your hand holding the pen

Burn the fucking hand.

The Loud Art Of Giving Too Many Fucks

I used to hate mediocrity.

Because I was taught it meant “settling.”

Settling for less. Settling for average.

Settling for the seat at the back of the class

when you could’ve set the syllabus on fire.

But guess what?

The ones who told me that?

They never turned out legends.

They turned out lecturers.

Not bestsellers, just better spellers.

Turns out, “never settle”

was a tacky slogan, a gimmicky tagline, disguised as advice.

Turns out, “potential”

was a polite way of saying “not enough yet.”

And turns out, mediocrity

isn’t failure.

It apparently identifies as influence, these days.

And if it identifies as something

You dare not question the pronouns. Or the adjectives.

Mediocrity is the best foot forward, because

the creme de la creme barely matters —

especially when the majority doesn't have a fucking clue

what creme de la creme means.

Either literally or metaphorically.

But mediocrity?

Mediocrity is beautiful.

Mediocrity is mass-produced myth-making.

It’s relatability with a rhythm.

It’s “been there, felt that, said worse.”

Talk the same tired heartbreak

Seven hundred poets before you have published

and somehow still go viral.

Cry about adulting,

say “capitalism is bad” with enough eyeliner and fluctuating vocals —

boom, a million views

and now you’re the next literary saviour.

I want that.

I want to be a manchild in a thrifted kurta

writing verses about nail art because bleeding poetry like a fistula up your asshole is the only acceptable way to bleed.

I want to romanticize my inability to cook rice and my questionable life choices, thanks to my allergy to long-term sobriety

as performance art.

I want to bleed metaphors about how my glaring loneliness despite desperate attempts to sell my intellect for some predictably lame quick sex like a quick bite at the fast food joint

is not a red flag, but a shade of passion.

Because let’s be honest —

Genius is overrated.

It’s lonely. Tortured. Underrated until posthumous.

But delusion?

Delusion is dopamine.

Delusion is sustainable.

Delusion is guaranteed orgasm without penetration or masturbation, just a lot of conviction in your deranged imagination.

I want that recycled epiphany.

That one-size-fits-all enlightenment

where I can sob into my own echo

and call it therapy.

Where every failure is content because questions ask for self-awareness.

Where every half-baked feeling

is a five-minute monologue

with two standing ovations.

Because that’s the economy now.

The art of self-deception

sold as soft porn for the artistic cravings

of people too tired to ask for better.

I want to be mediocre.

Loudly. Shamelessly. Profitably.

I want to reduce my breakdowns

to bullet points

and my truth

to captions and taglines sponsored by artificial intelligence and natural stupidity.

Because in a world

where absolute agreement is the only acceptable currency and difference in perspectives is equivalent of hate,

where nonsense sells faster than nicotine,

and 

art is a privilege when it should have been a necessity

genius bleeds in silence.

Genius dies broke.

But mediocrity?

Mediocrity makes headlines.

So remind me again —

why the fuck would anyone choose brilliance

when bullshit is better for both your economy and your ego?

I know what you're thinking; that's some elitist bullshit right there

Guess who won?