Mosaics Of Meaning

Life is a scattering of broken tiles,

some aligning by chance into mosaics

and you talk yourself into thinking there’s design.

You spend your days chasing new definitions,

holding on until they dissolve at your touch,

and then you find one more, and one more.

Once you’ve scraped every word from dictionaries like paint off prison walls,

once your legs ache from running on treadmills of smoke and mirrors,

chasing truths that vanish as you near them,

you whisper to the void,

hoping death will hand you meaning;

as if eternity hands out closure like candy at childhood fairs,

Ferris wheels spinning cheap adrenaline for the gullible.

Truth be told, meaning is the last standing word,

and you’ve clung to it like a ridge over an abyss,

because letting go would make you crumble to dust.

Meaninglessness demands humility, and we, proud morons, have none.

Once you're dead, your vanity dies unread;

meaning or no meaning, the world shrugs and you shrink, dots erased into oblivion: inconspicuous, futile, endlessly pointless.

Slogans Can't Eulogise The Dead

When the choice is between two sides of the same coin,

does the side ever make a difference?

When betrayal comes by blood or by water,

does it matter which one insists on being thicker?

When your house is wired with grenades, inside and out,

do you care which pins drop first?

When you’re nothing but collateral

in the negotiations of parasites bloated on your blood,

does freedom mean anything more

than a fevered figment of imagination?

When your existence only ever finds meaning in death,

does activism serve any purpose

beyond turning you into convenient propaganda for the moment?

When your lives are split from the spleen between Hamas and Israel’s death tolls,

do foreigners chanting Free Palestine

change a damn thing at all, or even mean any more than stinking pile of bullshit?

When you know slogans are all you are and all you will ever be,

do you bury your burnt children, your stabbed husband,

in the pity of strangers

or do you ask them to shut the fuck up

so you could count your measured breaths in rented silence?

Your lived truths don't reach them

for deafness and dumbfuckery are the easiest paths to delusion

and delusion is the assured pre-requisite

to being heroes in a war they would not fight if they truly had to.

More importantly, so they can pretend to be revolutionaries,

you must drop dead like flies.

The Silhouette Of Desire

You've often asked me

what is it in you

that makes me desire you

at the peak of my bloodthirst for lust

at the crossroads where lust and love and like blur boundaries

like the untamed wilderness  you expect where a river meets an ocean meets a sea

And I wish I had a definitive answer

but all of my inappropriate thoughts appropriated around you

the ones that have birthed poets and playwrights

tamed in their behaved words

because fahrenheit rising at the rub of skins isn't something to be talked out loud

all of it is but a free verse to me

Rhymes are to shallow to contain them

and parables are too autocratic

the rhythm changes meters every single time

and yet it all somehow adds up to the pages of curated anthology.

It begins abrupt because the best things in life

are but elaborate imitations of its own pattern

too random to be predictable

and yet repititive in parts to not be absurdly accidental

and not once does it ever end with the hint of a closure

because art at its most unhinged never concludes

but only ever leaves you hanging on a thread

with the lure of some more, and some again.

There's something about the dry sweat

melting into traces of an effervescent exotic perfume

two things everyone breathing in their skin could afford

and yet one that only you could ever wear like it was your flesh and bones.

There’s something about the nape of your neck

that reads like a map of forgotten temples,

a terrain where fingers become pilgrims

and the air itself grows thick with incense

no heaven, no holiness could ever summon.

Your shoulders dissociate like warm clay cusped in patient palms,

bearing the weight of every unspoken offering,

the tender rise and fall of peaks and curves

where gravity hesitates,

and every contour memorizes desire like a landscape learning its own tides.

And those wide-eyed constellations on either side of your midriff,

fix on me without apology or shame,

adoring my unashamed indecencies

the way oceans accept rivers without question,

without pretense, without morality — only pull, only flow.

A tiny universe spins quietly at your core,

as if inviting the curious geologist in me

to trace contours they cannot distinguish

from exploration or conquest.

And then there is the cave that hides a universe within, 

the axis of all gravity,

rising, insistent, an unshamed instrument of desire,

not merely flesh but the inspiration and the death of heat and intent,

the pulse that scores our private anarchy.

It seeks me as the tide seeks the moon,

a pulse that bends the landscape of skin and breath,

and when it houses me within, 

the world folds into a singular exhalation,

each motion a stanza, each groan a syllable

in the anthology of uncontainable want.

The scent of it is uncanny:

wet, amphibian, fish-flesh sweet with longing,

a godless perfume of dreams unmade,

where morality drowns and instinct surfaces,

and the air itself trembles with our disregard for propriety.

My fingers trace the architecture of your spine,

descend like secret rivers into hollows,

where shivers become syntax

and every nerve, every pore,

reads as a parenthesis to our own irreverent scripture.

Every collision, every friction,

is a declaration of entropy,

a calculus of heat and sinew,

where nothing is polite, nothing predictable,

yet all of it aligns

the chaos, the rhythm, the fever of want

becoming a poem too fluid for rhymes,

too wild for closure.

And after, when the crescendo subsides,

all that remains is heat clinging to skin,

the scent of amphibian desire, the echo of godless dreams,

as an epilogue that no rhyme could define,

no parable could contain.

Only the promise of some more, and some again.

Children Of Rust

They were born into corrugated sermons,

tin sheets preaching rust and voyeurism,

every ripple of metal a language’s imagination

in the art of peeling the world’s underwear.

Children apprenticed under rust,

learning anatomy through peepholes,

their curriculum a slit in the empire’s siding.

No chalk, no books,

just corrugated strands bleeding crimson fingerprints,

manuals of silhouette hips and hunger,

guides to a commerce older than memory.

Behind the curtain,

shadows stretched into currency.

Every gesture a fracture of measure,

every curve a traded shape.

Bodies became billboards,

billboards became vaults of shadow,

vaults, always exchanged,

a marketplace where innocence is rationed,

where curiosity runs in veins,

where desire is measured in whispers.

Children, scholars of slit-metal scripts,

read desire through rusted holes,

translating shadows into syllables of hunger.

But what they glimpsed

was not flesh, 

it was inheritance:

a world where longing is counted,

attention weighed,

and wonder carved into unbroken shards.

Rust peels, but nothing heals.

Tin remembers fingerprints,

children remember keyholes.

The walls remember too,

breathing, stretching, folding shadows into shapes

that shift and fracture with every glance,

that bend and fracture with every pause,

that fracture and fracture in endless echo.

When the wall finally collapses,

what spills through

is not light.

It is a cataract of silhouettes,

a flood of forms unspooling from the grammar of rust,

blinding the world with the darkness

it once taught them to read,

with the very darkness it once taught them to obey.

Children stand amid the debris,

eyes cupping shapes they cannot name,

hands tracing the remnants of a sky

that had been rationed, exchanged, repossessed.

And in that silence

the world realizes,

every slit, every shadow, every slit-metal fragment

was a blueprint of its own undoing,

every slit, every shadow, every fragment

was the world writing its own undoing.

Swansong Of The Tombstones

We are the sum of your wars.

No flags flutter here.

No gods divide us.

No borders survive the worms.

You called us martyrs,

patriots, collateral casualties.

We are none of those.

We are receipts.

Inscriptions of your edicts,

records of your dominions,

every citadel mortared with our silence.

Right, left, centre

we fed them all.

Every ideology dined on our bones,

every parliament stacked with our ashes,

every temple, every mosque,

a vault for your calculations of death.

Our names were currency.

Our faces banners.

Our silence rehearsed into anthems.

We were not sacrificed.

We were spent.

We remember the taste of gunpowder,

the stench of faith twisted into law,

the quiet screaming of children

buried under your ceremonies.

Bullets do not ask allegiance.

Blades do not check prayers.

Gas does not care for bloodlines.

Rot is bipartisan.

And then there were the ones

who raised banners in our name,

who marched with slogans,

who painted our absence into symbols.

Activists, martyrs, rebels

their mouths loud, their eyes certain.

But most sought witness, not change.

They carried our coffins

like props for their speeches,

fed on applause more than justice,

wore conviction as costume.

Some were broken in cells,

some bartered to power,

some embalmed in monuments,

but most simply performed

their vanity became our gravestone.

And then there's the rest of you, 

the silent bystanders with gouged out eyeballs

who still sip from chalices of curated hope,

as if it were not mixed with our ash.

Every statue raised in our names

is your own tombstone.

Every anthem sung above our corpses

is genocide rehearsing itself for acclaim.

We do not rage.

We do not plead.

But, we do not forgive either.

We remain

a chorus of the dead,

your shadow of fire and fracture,

an untarnished chronicle of every lie.

We wait for your ears to split,

for your illusions to crumble,

for the quiet of your conscience

to finally scream the truth.

We wait,

because you are late,

because the dead always arrive first,

and your history will not bury us again.

Hope Doesn't Mean Shit To The Dying

I want to write about birds and bees.

Not the kind circling funeral pyres,

wings crisped into ash before they even taste nectar. 

I want to write about birds and bees, 

the mythical kind, 

the ones born from clouds, unshackled by smoke,

singing in a sky that does not choke,

their feathers unplucked by tainted yesterdays,

their songs not yet sold to the highest bidding liar.

I want to write about mountains.

Not the ones drilled hollow by hopeless miners,

or claimed by thrones counting offerings like blessings.

I want to write about mountains

where silence tastes like eternity,

and echoes have teeth that bite the adulterated hands of conquest,

where shadows rise and kneel to no crown,

where rocks remember their own names.

I want to write about seas.

Not these oil-slick bellies vomiting drowned bones,

but the tranquil kind, 

where waves rise for themselves,

not as metaphors for the damned,

where water dreams untouched,

and storms build and break, only for their own sake.

I want to write about love stories.

Not in dug up streets paved with manholes for bribes, 

government's towers of gold, I call them.

I want to write about love stories

in the hollow of caves, under trees that have watched centuries,

where boy meets girl, girl meets boy,

their mouths speak without fear,

their hands touch without permission slips,

and no shadow measures their heartbeat.

I want to write about hope.

But every skin that offers it these days

come in the flesh of impostors

who wrap it in mirrors and velvet lies,

calling it poetry.

It isn’t poetry.

It’s pornography for the gleefully ignorant,

ritualized and choreographed,

with orgasms for mandates, 

because reality is too ugly to endure,

and every cheap praise is payment for silence.

Every day

every fucking day

something else burns.

A truth, a temple, a farmer’s throat,

an inconvenient question,

a journalist’s ribs.

Each flame struck with an assumed king’s grin.

Each ash heap a carnival of forgetting.

Tyranny does not march anymore

it glides, 

varnished in colors of crowns,

and the patience of serpents coiled in gold.

And to those who write of imagined fantasies

while the world burns beneath their quills

and to those who wrote of a midnight summer's dream, 

the painted seas, the untouched mountains, the singing birds and bees, 

I promise I will write of the same,

the day they are the ones ripped apart,

torn by fire and blade, by greed and silence,

because fuck justice.

I will take the freshly spilled blood of hypocrisy and bigotry any day,

let it stain my lines, let it carve my verses,

let it scream the truth that these trembling nobodies do not want to whisper.

I wish

I could write about birds and bees,

mountains or seas,

timeless love or quiet hope.

But I can't.

Not when the air tastes of smoke and blood.

Not when laughter walks on stilts,

carrying the weight of the absent.

Not when freedom is a mannequin

dressed in ceremony,

while its throat bleeds obedience.

But someday, 

if the birds sing without choking,

if the mountains breathe without conquest,

if the seas dream without drowning,

if the lovers kiss without shadows rehearsing,

and the gods remember their own names, 

then, maybe then,

I’ll write about them.

The day they exist for themselves,

without smoke on their backs,

without debts to memory or ledger,

without a clearance certificate

from mistresses for ministers,

without the voices of charred dreams ticking like a metronome.

Until then, 

every poem I try to write about beauty

bleeds the stink of fire.

Every metaphor I birth

screams with charred wings.

Every line coughs up the black bile

of a world that refuses to be silent,

where even angels wear armor,

and silence itself has sharpened edges.

The world burns.

And you sip from goblets of curated hope,

call it poetry, call it vision,

call it anything but the slaughter it hides.

Every orphaned child, 

every scorched field, 

every silenced throat,

it is genocide in slow motion,

and your painful pointlessness 

disguised as poetry

is the knife’s handle.

I watch.

I write.

With hands scorched,

with lungs filled with smoke,

with a spine that refuses to kneel,

that would rather break than bend,

I shall continue to name

every lie, every charred truth, every act of complicity

because the sky will not forgive,

and the earth will not forget.

Bonehouse

The house crawls on his back.

Not timber, not brick;

veins, roots, nerves, a heart that refuses burial.

Its windows blink like dying eyes.

The doors shiver with accusation.

It whispers debts, failures, names he swore he'd forget.

It hums with hunger.

It remembers.

It mocks.

He bends beneath it.

Shoulders pressed into the spines of ghosts.

Every step cracks the earth.

Dust rises in clouds of memory,

smelling of ash, unpaid promises, yesterday’s lies.

Inside, rodents gnaw at corners of his mind,

filing away sweetness, chewing marrow into echoes.

The house pulses, alive, sentient, cruel.

It leans into him like lover, arbiter, executioner.

It laughs when he swears.

Behind him, figures drift, spectral, carrying fragments

chimneys, walls, doorframes, whispers of legacy.

Faces fade into ochre dust.

Bones etched with blueprints of invisible architects.

They march without pause,

march into dust, wind, monotony.

Time bends, stretches, collapses.

Roots bite ribs.

Roofs press into skulls.

The wind screams in languages of laws forgotten.

Sky and soil have abandoned mercy.

He collapses. Twice.

He swears. Walls answer in silence.

He screams. Smoke returns twisted, accusing, ashamed.

Every nail is a thorn.

Every beam, a rib broken.

Every floorboard, a spine snapped.

The house devours endurance, marrow, memory.

Inheritance is a parasite; he is its host.

We watch, comfortably distant,

folding the weight into paperwork,

stuffing it into polite words,

forgetting it is ours too.

He rises.

He walks.

The house pulses against his bones,

older than law, older than blood.

It reminds him of unspoken expectation,

debts unpaid by the living,

silences left by the dead.

It sneers when he stumbles.

The sky bleeds ochre.

Stars hang like dust trapped in webs of memory.

Roots writhe into horizons like serpents.

He does not sleep.

The house does not forgive.

Each day is carved on the spine of time.

Each breath weighs like eternity.

He is priest, penitent, exile.

The house is altar, tribunal, specter, and trickster,.

He rises again.

Though roots bite deeper,

though the roof presses harder.

He carries not home,

but sins, silences, unfinished business of generations.

The line behind him shuffles forward.

Some stumble. Some vanish. Some rise again, bent but unbroken.

Fragments of houses that remember cling to shoulders, bones, marrow.

And still he walks.

And still the house pulses.

Alive, relentless, unforgiving.

One day, roots will claim him.

Beams will pierce flesh and sky alike.

Doors will snap shut on memory and marrow.

The house will move on

searching for the next bearer,

the next spine, the next flesh.

But not today.

Today he carries.

Today the house is flesh,

and flesh is debt.

Today the world watches,

and sees nothing.

He carries.

He carries.

He carries.

And the house laughs.