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.
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