A Fish Bone Named Melancholy

Have you ever had a singular fish bone stuck down your throat?

Up until now, it was an everyday, and this was just another meal

Fishes for you are a routine really

You've washed them and marinated them, and cooked them and relished their soft flesh disintegrating into flavours your palette has had  a fondness for

And yet, here you are, choking on a bone, the eyes can't see and the throat can't feel

And yet every time you even try to gulp down water, it hurts, it scratches the walls of your throat, somewhat like a needle scratching the insides of your skin

It bleeds but you can't see, it hurts but there's no ointment, no quick fix

You wait a while thinking it will move on, and you'll forgive and forget

The bone, is it really just a bone, or a rather flimsy yet solidary reminder of a bygone that shouldn't have mattered

All you really want is to get over with it

And yet, the bone doesn't move an inch

Stuck onto the insides so intricately, you wouldn't even trust a surgeon to get it right

You think you'll wake up tomorrow, and it'll be a better day

The fish bone will be gone like a short-lived nightmare, buried in your sleep

You wake up and as if on cue, the prick of the bone wakes up too

You're scared of your body, your being

Every time your parched mouth pushes down a lump of spit down the throat as a habit, you hurt again

It's not a fresh wound anymore

It's the blunt pain of a cut being continually cut open before it can even stand a chance at healing

Thoughts cloud your head

Thoughts you'd thought you'd left behind

Thoughts you'd think you wouldn't want to think

Thoughts that have transformed mere mortals into mind-numbing poets

And yet, you don't bleed a word

The brain can't gather words

The pain within, asking to for a fix you don't have

Life inside, seeking hope you seem to have lost

You wish for all of it to just end, whatever the cost

Who decides how costly is too costly

As you begin to lose your sanity, drawing inspiration from your withering voicelessness, thrives

A fish bone named melancholy

Ba Ba Black Sheep

It's funny, isn't it

How words, phrases, sentences, change meanings in ways you never thought was possible

It's funny, isn't it

How possible is one of those very words

Growing up, possible determined the intricacies and difficulties of the task at hand

Grown up, possible was a lot more about how I was never good enough

It's funny, isn't it

That the father I was expected to idolise, is the same father who beat me and didn't stop till my skin was thick enough to hurt him back

It's funny, isn't it

That the mother I was expected to feel indebted to, is the same mother who didn't blink an eyelid before making a sacrificial lamb of my self-respect in front of a thousand strangers, to prove a point, to win the battle of egos

It's funny, isn't it

How once, not very long ago, ba ba black sheep was a nursery rhyme, and yet today, ba ba black sheep is the truth of my life, for that's what they call the ones who don't fit the prescribed standards of a family

It's funny, isn't it

How what was once the blood in their veins is now the clots on the linen of my shirt, as I murmur softly in my heavy breath "ba ba black sheep", and the curtains fade

The Shit Called Art

High above the stinking poverty line

And waist below the sickening exorbitantly rich

Exists layers of mediocrity 

Wrapped in levels of narcissism

Add up all possible permutations and combinations of the mediocrity layers and narcissism levels

And you get the whole of the shit-stained public lavatory that calls itself, the middle class

Every fuck-up needs a distraction

A mirage in the endless desert of a life

Deep down you know it's not real let alone be worthy

But then aren't we all empty crab shells pretending to be wholesome meals

Trying hard to forget our day jobs being skeletons in coffins in graveyards that smell of coffee, bullshit, and decayed dreams

In between measured lifespans wasted between complete sobriety and the utter lack of it

That's why the middle-class invented art

A privilege for the poor, a pastime for the rich, and a bucket load of false hopes for the ones existing in the in-betweens

Art is no rebellion, art is no revolution

Art is a disease; acute schizophrenia of a momentary greatness

Art exists at the tombstone of aspirations, at the morgue of truth

Art exists because you need a false sense of purpose in your otherwise mediocre existence

Art exists because you need a made up meaning to your rather meaningless being

Trapped in between the war to survive life and the luxury to auction it

You are no artist for art is illusion

You are a gaslighting escapist at best

Non-Aligned

You say poetry is liberation, poetry is a movement

Yet you guard it's gates like it's your birthright, like poetry is your ancestral heritage you have to safeguard from things you don't consider poetry enough

You say poetry is for one and all

And yet you bark rules and impose terms like a dictator fearing his imaginary empire will come crashing down like a house of cards

You say poetry is art

And yet all you ever talk is tall tales of cheap, rented ideas, like an ageing ape aiming for the low hanging fruits

You and I are poets nevertheless

But peers, we never were, we never will be

You need background scores to make your words bearable

I trade in awkward silences and heavy gasps to clothe my words in

You throw around words complicated enough to break jaws

I deal in ideas non-binary and non-aligned, that crumble biased backbones of spineless existences

You use words like diamonds, a veil of borrowed sophistication to mask your inner shallow

I use words like crumpled notes and clinking coins, the only currency I've ever known

You write poetry for greatness

I write poetry because I'd have to cut myself open if I didn't

Your poetry smells of expensive aftershave and sells abstract dreams

My poetry reeks of cheap liquor and tells ugly truths

You and I are poets nevertheless

Except, you're the pimp and I'm the flesh

F*ck Faith, Piss Hope

Dignity was never a quality

It was but merely a benchmark

A self-righteous price tag for the ones who could be bought

Thus was born Capitalism

The ones who thought not being auctioned would make them pricier

But had no buyers in actuality

Desserted, discarded, narcissistic philosophers

They called themselves Communists

The sore greedy losers who had their feet on both the ships and fell in the abyss below

Basards of no faith, no price, no face, and no skin, they identified as Socialists

You ask which side was I on

I was on the outside watching them all tear each other apart, each dripping blood of the other, and the semen of their pretended self-glory

What can I say

I'm a hedonist, a sadist, an opportunist

While they fought to tell the world their stories

I sold the world three paperbacks of unadulterated fiction

The Shit Called Art

You say the world needs art

As I watch your delusion wallow your existence

The world doesn't need privileges, only the basics

And art you see, is a privilege

Do you ever see the rich care as much about art as you do

Do you see the poor care as much about art as you do

Art matters to them only if it means money

For the rich want to get richer

And the poor want a day's meal

But you, you my dear delusion middle class fuck

You think art is a struggle

When truly it's really you romancing the idea of it

Art is your eulogy to your dead dreams

Because you were privileged enough to dream

But never privileged enough to be dished them out to you

And while you were busy begging privileges for paychecks

Life aged in wrinkles and not chardonnays 

So you sought art to be your refuge

A desperate lament to hold onto your long dead dreams and long lost life

For the ones who could sell art have sold them to the lust of luxury

And yet here you are, screaming your art to the world

A middle class madman who calls himself an artist

Bougainvilleas

We humans, are like bougainvilleas

A species divided by colours

A species crying out loud the irrelevant differences, irreverent of the existential truth that it's all really the same

Each colour screaming out it's vanity and deluded perceptions of self-assigned importance

Each colour waging a cold war for supremacy, because the world is for singulars; more than one and it's comparative, more than two, and it's superlative

You look close enough, and you know it's all the same, just different shades of a primary colour really

You look from afar, and it's nothing but a bunch of coloured dots, the dots so miniscule you could barely tell the colours

We humans, are like bougainvilleas

No purpose, no meaning, no poetry, no art

No real necessity in the measured existences

Some made up stories we tell ourselves

From generations gone, to, generations to come

Just so we don't feel as trivial as our lives truly are, because existential isn't comfortable, and if death is inevitable, why not make living comfortable

We humans, are like bougainvilleas; a species that exists only and only because extinction hasn't caught up on us yet