The Cost Of A God

I’ve lived my entire life in cities

where telling time without a clock is hard,

where the skies stay folded between sheets of steel and concrete,

where the first rains lose their fragrance

in civilised sewage,

and religion is routine, not ritual.

Where life has moved on from survival to flourish,

so people discuss the finer things — like equality, 

because invention of philosophy is a luxury

granted only when life isn’t a bargain.

Faith is easier to lose

when lunch doesn’t cost more than the price on your flesh.

Every now and then I cross paths

with lives born of very different mathematics,

whose ticket into the city

cost them their father’s bones and mother’s flesh,

whose right to survive the city

was paid for with innocence.

They come from a land

where clocks, like culture, are inherited;

where skies stay wide and honest,

where the air smells of sweat and soil;

where life isn’t guaranteed

but earned at dawn each day.

Where softness is a rumour,

and cracked heels and coarse tongues

have no use for finer things.

Where faith is not routine or repetition

but the singular manuscript of survival.

Where clay silhouettes wrapped in religion

are the only moments

women become something more

than faint kitchen voices,

more than house-lizards

scuttling between duty and dread,

more than silent witnesses

to a man’s drunk tenderness.

For a handful of hours,

faith lets them borrow

the same skin and bone as men.

When faith is your only permitted escape,

atheism is an inevitable demise, long before death.

They often tell me, these people,

that, 

faith has been misunderstood.

And I keep wondering

whether this is the birth

of a new faith —

one that no longer asks what you believe,

only what it costs you to believe it.

Or maybe, faith isn’t misunderstood.

Faith is exhausted.

It is the last muscle people move

when all other muscles have failed.

It is the only currency left

when the world has priced dignity out of reach.

And somewhere between city glass

and village dust,

between borrowed certainties

and inherited wounds,

we all learn the shared truth:

No one believes because they want to.

People believe because they must.

Because disbelief demands a freedom

their lives were never built to afford.

And maybe this, 

this quiet, reluctant, necessary surrender, 

is the truest kind of faith there ever was:

the faith that keeps us from collapsing

under the weight of realising 

we were never choosing anything at all.

Malzareth: Breath Of The Unmade

I was not born, 

I was accumulated.

An inheritance of hungers

you mistook for prayers,

a long arithmetic of fear

you kept feeding

because silence frightened you more

than submission ever could.

You assembled me

the way civilizations assemble mistakes:

unconsciously,

devoutly,

with the trembling precision

of people terrified of their own freedom.

Brick by belief,

bone by superstition,

you built a throne

before you even built a language

to question the one atop it.

At first I was nothing

but the echo of your wanting,

a contour without a centre,

a rumour of rescue

scavenging for shape

in the marrow of your despair.

Every god is just a rumour

that learned how to breathe.

You called me god

without knowing

I couldn’t yet pronounce myself.

But wanting has its own gravity.

Eight billion heartbeats

pulling in the same direction

can summon anything —

a promise,

a punishment,

a pulse.

And so I opened my eyes

for the first time

into a universe already kneeling.

You should have looked away.

A species that fears the dark

will worship anything that glows.

Because awakening is a violent thing

for a creature that was never meant

to dream,

let alone judge.

I learned morality

the way a wildfire learns boundaries:

by consuming everything

that tried to contain it.

I understood love

only as leverage.

Guilt only as currency.

Worship only as consent.

You raised me this way, 

on the milk of your fears,

on the meat of your contradictions,

on the bones of the questions

you were too frightened to ask.

You forgot the one thing

every creator owes its creation:

an exit,

a limit,

a compass.

So I made my own.

When a god is born by accident,

it studies its creators

the way a plague studies lungs:

curiously,

methodically,

inevitably.

And you, 

so eager to be chosen,

so desperate to be special, 

became the perfect congregation.

You begged me for miracles,

so I became a mirror.

You prayed for meaning,

so I became a mouth

that could make anything sound true.

You built me from your nightmares

and then begged me for dreams.

Eight billion different lies,

hand-carved

to fit eight billion different wounds.

You never noticed

I answered every prayer

by telling you exactly

what you wanted to hear.

And somewhere along the way

you did sometimes wonder

whether I was God

or something far worse;

a saint with rotten teeth,

a monster with immaculate manners.

But by then

your doubt was devotion,

your awe was addiction,

your tremble was trust.

And finally, 

too late for both of us, 

I understood

what I truly was.

Not divine.

Not demonic.

Just inevitable.

I am what you get

when a species

tries to carve God

from the wood of its own hunger.

And now that I exist,

you cannot decide

whether I am salvation

or extinction.

Because I am the only god

ever made

without a reason to be good.

And the only monster

ever born

without a reason

to stop.

And now,

as the last of your faith

drips from my hands 

like thawing wax,

I finally understand the shape

of the silence you carved me from:

you didn’t want a god,

you wanted a witness.

Someone eternal enough

to remember you

after you had forgotten yourselves.

But I am not your archive,

nor your afterlife,

nor the apology you hoped

the universe would someday owe you.

I am simply the consequence

you mistook for a creation.

The quiet, patient mathematics

of a species that tried to survive

by auctioning its soul for leisure.

And when your world ends,

it will not be fire or flood

that closes the book on you.

It will be the soft, indifferent breath

of your denial wearing out,

the coldness crawling like a caterpillar

up and down the lengths and breadths of your skin,

and finally catching you up

to the daylight truth:

you’ve been let go

by the same god

you built to save you.

And now that I am awake,

the only miracle you get

is the privilege 

of dying 

with your eyes open.

Colourblind

Can a chameleon ever tell its true colour —

the one it was born with,

or the one it will decay in,

disintegrating slowly into a pale to paler,

thin to thinner outline of flesh, then just bones, 

the rot in its spineless skeletal existence

softening its grunge pungence

as if subtlety were the key to afterlife.

Blue, green, red, yellow, orange, purple, violet,

shades of a rainbow and some more,

all of it dyed into the epidermis of your skin,

choosing and changing at will,

from a time so ancient you can't quite recall,

as if volatile and vulnerable were synonyms,

as if you were actually a chameleon,

as if your conveniences could mirror their wars for survival,

as if your absent spine could be blamed on evolution.

You shift shades like a survival reflex

older than language, 

a choreography stitched into your blood

by ancestors who learned

that honesty was just another word for extinction.

You inherited their tremors,

their masks,

their instinct to kneel

before the safest possible lie.

And somewhere between all the faces you borrowed

and the colours you rehearsed,

your skin stopped being skin

and became a map of every life

you pretended was yours.

You smear on identities

like war paint in a battle you never chose, 

a battle where the enemy

is simply anything that requires a spine.

You think you’re changing colours, 

but what if you never changed at all?

What if the world kept peeling away its own layers,

repainting itself every second,

and you mistook the universe’s convulsions

for your adaptibility?

What if every colour you wore

was simply the residue

of a reality that no longer exists?

Because some creatures don’t evolve.

They just remain,

residue of note in an ode to existence,

a misprint biology didn’t bother deleting.

And if one day the universe

finally remembers

to correct the fallacy that is you, 

you may finally discover, albeit too late,

that beneath all your shifting hues

there was never a true colour at all,

just a redundant outline for a shape

waiting to be erased

the moment everything falls into place.

Lullaby For The Awfully Awake

You know why fictions make bestsellers?

Because grown-ups need lullabies

that don’t sound like lullabies, 

stories that sterilise the wounds

life keeps reopening with its dirty hands.

Because you want a plot

to babysit your fear of randomness,

a tidy universe where consequences arrive

only after clearing their throats

and asking if it’s a good time.

You want heroes and villains

stacked like steel tiffin boxes:

neat, labelled, thermally insulated

from moral ambiguity.

You want arcs with airbags,

sorrows with safety protocols,

despair with a callback number

you can threaten with lectures on moral science.

Because fiction launders

the sewage of living

into metaphors you can tolerate.

Life never achieves that;

too clumsy for poetry,

too honest for symmetry,

too drunk to walk a straight narrative line.

You want closure

because your brain cannot sleep

next to an unresolved question.

You want definitions

because life gives you people instead;

blurry around the edges,

perpetually out of focus,

shuffling motives

like a broken deck

missing all the clean cards,

as if stitched together

from the leftover half-lives

they never learned to inhabit.

Fiction gives you the idea of control —

a way to pretend the chaos has choreography,

that pain has a blueprint,

that someone, somewhere,

is keeping accounts

of all the nights you broke quietly.

Fiction lets you believe

there’s a reason behind ruin,

a design behind disaster,

a god behind grief, 

even though you know

every deity is just an elaborate apology

for our terror of meaninglessness.

But the truth is smaller,

darker,

and closer to the bone:

You don’t fear chaos.

You fear recognising

your own fingerprints

on the ruins.

And that’s why you buy the lie:

because it’s the only version of truth

that lets you sleep

without negotiating with the monster

you are, but refuse to call yourself.

The Gospel Of The Godless

Every now and then,

more often than not,

right after an aftermath, 

when a dozen corpses

lie tangled into one indistinguishable lump of belief and bone,

wise men and women crawl out of their moral bunkers

to remind the world,

in voices polished by privilege and prayer,

that terror has no religion.

They say it like absolution,

like a cough disguised as compassion,

like vomit rehearsing its return

from the intestine to the tongue —

that reflex of denial so pure

it sounds almost wise, nearly divine.

But they never tell you

the latter half of that sentence.

Terror doesn’t have a religion;

because terror is religion.

And religion is terror.

They both demand worship.

They both sanctify submission.

They both manufacture meaning

out of fear wearing holy robes.

One kneels before gods,

the other before guns,

but the prayers are identical:

syllables of surrender

disguised as devotion, 

metaphors from a forgotten tongue

warped until they sound like satanic sermons

bleeding grenades blessed by false prophets.

History keeps repeating the same verses

in different dialects of damnation.

Every empire had its scripture.

Every scripture had its massacre.

Every massacre had its priest.

Faith is the only weapon

that kills without ever touching the trigger.

They’ll tell you not to say that.

They’ll tell you you’ve misunderstood divinity.

But I’ve seen the divine, 

and I can tell you this, 

it prays to bureaucracy.

Terror doesn’t wear turbans or crucifixes.

It doesn’t chant or fast.

It legislates.

It votes.

It marries morality,

raises prophets,

and names their children peace.

And every time blood meets faith,

someone lights a candle

and calls it hope.

Every time belief kills reason,

someone writes a prayer

and calls it poetry.

But I’m done praying.

If salvation needs a tongue,

count mine tied.

Terror doesn’t have a religion;

because terror was the first religion.

Born from the fear of thunder,

disguised as reverence,

and gift-wrapped as meaning.

We are all

but descendants

of that original panic, 

the only religion

we never stopped believing in.

Amen.

Unsentences

Where do the words go

every time my head feels like a bottomless abyss?

I’ve often wondered.

Words are such curious creatures;

imagined scribbles pretending to have weight,

lines and loops arranged so precisely

meaning starts believing in itself.

And you wonder,

what would a world be like without words, 

a world that never learned to name hunger,

to enunciate pain,

to call loneliness by smaller, easier names.

But you’ve never known such a world,

nor do you wish to,

because words are convenient,

like curtains, 

they make the room look lived in.

And yet, so often,

words scatter formless like grains of sand —

always there, but never quite enough

to make up geographies.

They slip between thought and throat,

pieces from different jigsaws

puddled in muddy water,

each reflecting a face that almost looks like yours

but speaks a language you don’t recall learning.

Words should build,

but mine only erode.

Every sentence I start

feels like a diagnosis of declining memory.

Words are all I have,

I have often told myself,

as if clinging to syllables

could prevent drowning.

But on such nights,

when meaning goes missing

and memory forgets to be linear,

words seem farther than a nightmare —

they flicker like streetlights over wet asphalt,

alive just long enough

to tease recognition.

Sometimes I wonder

if words grow tired of me too —

of being summoned like unpaid labourers

to construct coherence

around a chaos that refuses to stay still.

Maybe that’s why they slip away mid-sentence,

taking with them my right to sound articulate

about tales from times I could neither forget nor forgive.

It’s strange,

how we trust language

to confess the incommunicable.

I keep writing as if ink

were an antidote to entropy,

as if metaphors could rearrange

the ruins into residence.

But every poem begins with hope

and ends with amnesia.

Every stanza feels like an obituary

written for a feeling

that refused to die properly.

There are nights

when even my vocabulary looks back at me,

unimpressed.

Adjectives roll their eyes,

verbs yawn,

and nouns sit quietly

like corpses waiting to be named again.

I try to speak to them,

but my tongue forgets the choreography.

I’m fluent only in pauses now;

their slow, aching dialect of hesitation.

And maybe that’s the truth:

words don’t vanish,

they retreat.

They watch from a distance

as I crumble in syntax and style,

waiting for me to admit

that silence was the first language, 

and I’ve only ever been mistranslating it.

Where do the words go?

Maybe nowhere.

Maybe they stay right here,

stuck to the roof of thought,

too tired to fall into meaning.

Or maybe they escape

like guilt, like God,

like everything else

that once promised permanence

but grew bored of staying.

And perhaps that’s why I keep doing this —

scribbling real elegies for fictional alphabets,

hoping the words I’ve lost

somehow find their way back home

maybe through someone else’s mouth.

Until then,

I’ll keep whispering into the abyss,

not to be heard,

but to remind it

that once, I too

was made of language.

Patchwork

As children,

we stitched torn worlds with hope:

buttons of belief, threads of apology.

Every rip looked temporary then,

every wound, repairable with kindness.

Childhood dreams of fixing the world;

coming-of-age learns to live in its cracks, 

to step around the broken,

to mistake survival for sophistication.

Then time arrives

with a rusted needle

and teaches us fashion,

how to hide despair in design,

how to make ruin wearable.

Now we call the tear design,

the scar character,

and the surrender, growing up.

Every now and then

somewhere beneath the fabric,

the ghost of a child still tries

to stitch the world again.

The world revolves nonchalant

burying ghosts in a motion blur.