Math Of The Many

Do you remember LCM

from when mathematics was just another subject at school,

and not a currency of your existence?

LCM.

Lowest Common Multiple.

We grew up.

Our mathematics didn't.

We still flock together,

call ourselves community, society, cult, religion, civilization;

names for the same old arithmetic.

An assembly of LCMs,

each pretending the whole

must mean something more than the parts.

With HCF

as their selling proposition.

HCF.

Highest Common Factor.

Or, as the LCMs call it,

ambition.

They spend their lives

calling themselves prime numbers,

waiting for someone else to agree.

Not because they believe they are, 

but because lies need lamination.

Gloss and glitter

are the oldest misdirection

truth has ever had.

Every now and then,

a prime number turns up.

And the LCMs feel it.

The HCFs tremble.

Because if a prime number

is recognised for what it is,

who would bother

mistaking an LCM for one?

So much for faith.

So much for creed.

So much for civilization.

Nothing

but basic mathematics.

Negotiating The Rent Of Revolution

You sell your carefully curated sensuality

just to make your words worth hearing.

And yet, here you are,

screaming revolution.

Even the words

are embarrassed.

Thank God

the freedom fighters

had nothing to sell

but their lives

at the sacrificial altar of revolution.

Who knows —

otherwise,

they might have had to

rent out their skin

for independence.

Guest List

The stranger came to the wedding

with the bride’s face.

Nobody noticed.

Her mother was busy

counting blessings.

Her father was busy

counting chairs.

The groom was busy

becoming a husband

in front of witnesses.

The stranger sat through the rituals,

accepted the food, the beverages,

clapped when everyone else did.

Then she climbed the staircase.

The bride followed.

Upstairs:

a bedroom,

a mirror,

a wardrobe

full of things the bride

hadn't worn in years.

The stranger took out

a red dress;

“too revealing,”

her mother had said.

A photograph;

her father had torn it

after finding her kissing

someone he didn't approve of.

A notebook;

her poems, 

before people began asking

what they were about.

She put everything back.

“Who invited you?” 

the bride asked, curious.

The stranger looked

toward the staircase,

“Everyone.”

She walked downstairs

wearing the bride’s face.

The bride stayed behind.

She looked into the mirror.

For the first time that day,

she didn't recognise herself.

Downstairs,

her new husband

was kissing a stranger, 

as the room erupted into rehearsed applause.

Familiarity Bias

If acquaintances were everything

they were supposed to be,

we wouldn't be handing out

loves and lives

to strangers.

If family were everything

we were told it is,

we wouldn't be learning from books

how to love ourselves.

And yet,

every time we desire,

every time we love or lust,

we rush to build familiarity, 

brick by brick.

Perhaps that's the irony:

we distrust the people

we know by inheritance,

then spend our lives

trying to make intimates

of those we don't.

Human intelligence

is an evolutionary joke;

if only

we were self-aware.

Inscriptions Of The Insignificant

Every time you ask me

why is it that I write,

I wish I could tell you

I write because words found me.

But a lie that heavy

needs the earth for a shoulder,

and all I have ever grown

were morsels of soil.

I wish I could tell you

I write because I love the way it feels

when what it feels

finds a way through my skin

to the skin of felled trees.

But then you'd never know

how badly I have hated writing,

how often I've wished it away

like a fever

I could sweat out by morning.

I wish I could tell you

I write because I've always wanted to,

because some things are born

already facing the sky.

But then how would you know

that I write

not because I want to,

but because I cannot not?

I write because it is the curse of my blood,

and the harder I try to wash it from my hands,

the more stubbornly the words return.

I write because my father didn't want me to.

I write because my mother didn't want me to.

I write because they burned my poems

and still could not ashen my poetry.

Some things survive fire

by becoming something fire cannot name.

I write because there were times

people walked away smiling,

leaving their little instruments of ruin

lodged somewhere between my ribs,

and I found more reasons to disappear

than to remain;

and when friends and family failed to bury me, 

words were my scalpel and spade,

my prescription and prayer.

I write because words are all that lie

between truth and lie,

and someone has to stand there

when the distance starts closing.

I write because if I didn't,

you would sell the world

every fiction of yours

and call them memories.

I write because someone has to

in a world busy

renting words for convenience,

where truth is expensive

and lies come home delivered free of cost.

Every time you ask

why is it that I write,

ask yourself:

if I didn't,

would you?

You can tell me

I'm a speck in the sand.

You wouldn't be wrong.

The sea has swallowed

better men than me.

But if I had to write

to become a bestseller,

I would become you,

and between the two of us

there would be

no tongues left unstained.

So no,

I don't write because I love writing.

I don't write because

I think the world needs another poet.

I don't even write

because I think I have something to say.

I write because silence

has always been too willing

to let the wrong people speak.

I write because somebody

has to clean the language

after the respectable have shit in it.

And if that makes me

nothing more than a speck in the sand,

so be it.

The sea can have the sand.

It can have the poets.

It can have the bestseller.

It can have every beautiful lie

ever written about why we write.

I'll take the shit.

I'll take the words

that won't wash clean.

I'll take the sentences

that leave blood under the fingernails.

I'll take the truth

that nobody wants to touch.

I write for the same reason

a sewer man cleans a commode.

Not because he loves the shit.

Because someone has to.

In Remembrance (Abridged)

My mother remembers

a child who lied.

My sister remembers

one who cried.

An old friend remembers

someone who stayed

long after he should have left.

Someone remembers

the night I left.

Someone else,

on that same night,

swears I never did.

I have stopped correcting them.

There are photographs

I cannot remember taking,

conversations I remember

that nobody else does,

and apologies

I am certain I received

from people who swear

they never said sorry.

For years,

I thought memory

was the only place

I was still myself.

Then I noticed

something terrible:

the older I get,

the more of my past

belongs to other people.

Their words

have entered my childhood.

Their anger

has edited my innocence.

Their forgiveness

has given me

things I may never

have earned.

Even the person

I call myself

is beginning to sound

like someone

I was told I was.

Sometimes I look

at an old photograph

and recognize the face

before I recognize the life.

How many times

can a person be remembered

before the memory

becomes the person?

In Remembrance

My mother remembers

a child who lied.

My sister remembers

one who cried.

An old friend remembers

someone who stayed

long after he should have left.

Someone remembers

the night I left.

Someone else,

on that same night,

swears I never did.

I have stopped correcting them.

There are photographs

I cannot remember taking,

a birthday I remember

ending in tears

though everyone remembers

the cake.

There is a house

I remember being afraid of

that everyone else remembers

as the happiest place

we ever lived.

There are conversations

I remember word for word

that nobody remembers having.

There are apologies

I am certain I received

from people who swear

they never said sorry.

For years,

I thought memory

was the one thing

no one could take from me.

I was wrong.

The older I get,

the more of my childhood

belongs to other people.

Their words

have entered my childhood.

Their anger

has edited my innocence.

Their forgiveness

has given me

things I may never

have earned.

Sometimes I remember

being happy

and cannot tell

if I was.

Sometimes I remember

being cruel

and cannot tell

if guilt is proof

or inheritance.

Even the person

I call myself

is beginning to sound

like someone

I was told I was.

Last December,

I found an old photograph

of myself at seven.

I knew the shirt.

I knew the room.

I knew the face.

I just couldn't remember

being the boy

inside it.

For a long time

I thought this meant

I had forgotten myself.

Now I think

I may have remembered

everyone else too well.

How many times

can a person be remembered

before the memory

becomes the person?