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

The Goddesses Men Made

I come from a land of seas and oceans and mountains and ravines and clay and sand

I come from a land where they're all addressed as goddesses, not gods, but goddesses

I come from a strange land 

I come from a land where the goddesses are plenty and the gods are few

What is so strange, you might wonder

You see, where I come from, the goddesses are the protagonists and the gods more often than not just a piece of a greater jigsaw, and happily so

And it's said, mothers and lovers and wives and daughters and sisters and teachers, they're all goddesses

Yet, the men of the land shiver in cold sweats trickling down their invertebrate spines, every time a woman has let her thoughts out loud

Yet, the men of the land, to make up for their missing spines, batter and bruise women every time they dare to grow a spine, smother their insides until their guts fall out, and their spine is just a bunch of bones in a body bled out of blood

And for years, I questioned myself, why this strange dichotomy

You see goddesses are like weekends, their stay is short-lived

While women, women are persistent, unwilling to give up on their ideas of existence and being

You see godesses are made of clay, faith and fairytales

But women, women are blood and bones, every inch real, every voice loud enough to not be able to play deaf to

You see goddesses are worshipped, for goddesses are superheroes

While women are lived, for women aspire to be just women, no capes no wings, just an indomitable desire to be the women they are

You see goddesses are an idea, and ideas don't complain or fight for their worth

But women, women are chapters beyond the novels and words beyond the poetry, who aren't limited to paper existences, but skin and teeth breathing fire and passion like an everyday

The men made goddesses so they could be goddesses in temples and prayers

While the same men lynched women on the streets for they are no goddesses

The men made goddesses so men could tell women that they worship women, albeit in fiction

While the same men shoved their penises and opinions down unconsenting vaginas and throats of women, in daylight truth

Goddesses never were women, never will be women, just a faceless, meaningless abstract

Godesses are but, mansplaining women to the world by men pretending to be gods

Elementary

For years and decades and centuries and ages

Boys have waited to turn men, girls have waited to become women

And often fought each other, sometimes with each other

And all of it for a singular word, a twelve letter word that has plagued every human existence older than twelve

INDEPENDENCE is a twelve letter word; a rather lengthy word for vocabulary but, a rather short one to sum up the obsession of a billion lives

A word that's got so many addicted to it, a lion's share of them have forgotten what it truly means

Imagine being so independent that your independent brain is no longer capable of independently deciphering the meaning of the word independence

If you're looking for irony, human existences have defeated every other, known in the history of any and every language ever

So many lives costed for the independence of lands divided by imaginary latitudes

So many lives costed in the name of independence of people divided by imaginary gods

So many dreams of independence crushed and obliterated to pay for the dreams of independence of an entitled few

One begins to wonder, is the idea of independence really worth fighting it all and more often than not risking losing it all

So many selling their independence to suit their lust and so many buying someone else's independence simply because they can and because it lubricates their dildos of pride

One begins to wonder if it's independence or just condoms on sale at the supermarket, waiting to be used and thrown down carelessly into a pile of stinking garbage

Is independence even a real thing, an actual idea that can be remotely attempted to achieve let alone be won

Or is it just another opiod designed to bluff the whole of human race into gaslighting themselves with the mirage of an imagined superiority

Because if that day were to actually come that you were truly independent

Who'd you blame your failures on

Isn't that why you made up the gods in the first place

So you could escape admitting to your own self staring right back at you from across the mirror, that you are nothing but an aggregation of a never-ending cycle of continual and monumental fuckups

You seek refuge in the nostalgia you call childhood and gloat in the glory of how innocent, how happy and how blissful it was

Ever thought it was probably because you weren't independent, in fact the idea of independence wasn't even an idea your convoluted brain cells had conceived

Isn't it funny how you treat independence like it were good fuck you found in an off-season sale when the truth of it is, independence is that shit expensive divorce that costs you your everything

The happiness you thought you'd find is the price you paid to be audacious enough to even dream you could afford such luxury

Identities

Who would you be

If tomorrow you were to wake up without a job to go to

Who would you be

If tomorrow you were to wake up to your cubicle, your colleagues, your identity as an employee, wiped off, as if a clean slate

Would you still matter

Would you still be relevant

Who would you be 

If tomorrow you were to wake up without a family to call your own

Who would you be

If tomorrow you were to wake up to you being a parent, a child, a sibling, a friend, a lover, completely forgotten as if a distant dream

Would you still be someone

Would you be anyone at all

It's rather ironic that a world obsessed with claiming individuality is in actuality, nothing but a rather inexpensive photocopy machine

Churning out clones of existences deluded in their false sense of identity

Take away their delusion and watch them crumble, their hollow insides shedding skin like the stale ash of an overburnt cigarette

Existential crisis isn't everyone's glass of whiskey, after all

Till Death Do Us Apart

The love stories they talked about, in the sonnets and the ballads and the novels and the four-act plays

For ages and ages, across continents and countries, across languages and faiths

Not the ones about rose petalled dreams and the in-tune violins, no, because even as a naive adolescent, I knew they were false advertising of imagined hopes at best

The ones that just had a regular love story you know, the love story that'd be bruised and battered, black and blue, but in the end, still be a fucking love story

Where the fuck are they

Have any of you ever wondered

It's a hard world to live in, a harder world to love in

No one likes labels and boxes, while craving clarity and transparency

Everyone likes a sense of humour and yet not one can't not be offended at the very idea of being the butt of a joke, for a joke's sake

No one wants to be alone even on solo trips and yet keep complaining of space to their partner, in 600 square feet of a rented dingy 1-bedroom flat

Everyone wants to be a part of something like a herd of cattle, while hoping to stand out in the crowd of social media algorithms

How do you keep up in a world where newer oxymorons brewing froth every day is the only acceptable version of normal

You hope you'll find love in a world this fucked up

Because hope you see, is a potent drug, more potent and more delusional than a cocktail of cocaine, meth, and hashish

You hope someone who read the same books as you did, and believe the same shit as you do, will cross paths with you at the crossroads of a dating app algorithm

Because who meets new people like they used to do in the olden days, in libraries and bookstores, in overcrowded buses and politically motivated debates

But then, were the love stories of the olden days any better either, really

I guess it was just a different kind of fucked up than what it is today

Because you didn't have social media to hashtag the fuck out of your life

Because writing poetry wasn't an aspiration to pretend you were cool, but the manifestation of a cancerous lump from years of trauma

Because love was still a luring dream that didn't fit in the search history of your internet browser

Love was still fucked up though; I mean have you seen your parents

When was the last time you saw them agree on something like adult members of a civilised society

I know what you're thinking or atleast trying to think or rather, shall I say hopelessly hope

You are trying real hard to think of scenarios where they might have actually agreed, in peace

And as the last three decades of your life around your parents flashed in front of your eyes, your heart got busier than usual, sensing your brain panic to the images of the two people whose being together in life and in love is the sole reason of your god-damned existence

It's funny how an entire generation of people who wastes no time in calling people out for their toxicity was in fact born out of a love that was rather toxic, in its very essence

Where do you think those fucked up, toxic, ridiculous ideas of love, you genetically inherited, went

Hold a mirror to every love story you've ever tried to live, and look deep within, and you'll know

It's arrogant and audacious trying to find an eco-friendly love story involving a species that fed the entire planet, plastic

Every time I hear yet another poet talk about how pure and innocent and glamorous love is

I feel like throwing up, the acids in my gut start screaming slogans like it was a goddamn protest march

For I've loved, and I've lived love

Have you seen chain smokers, how they keep smoking subtly overlooking the persistent cough because it's convenent for their addiction

I have always felt love is a lot like smoking

You know it's a bad idea but you're also addicted to the reality of it

You know it is killing you from within, bit by bit, one fight at a time, and you know every time the damage done is every time a bigger gaping hole is left staring you in the face

You know the right thing to do would be to walk away, so the ghosts of your fuckups can finally stop haunting each other, but then you hope tomorrow will be different, because some motivational quote you read up on the internet said, "Life's all about second chances"

You keep forgetting, your limited privileges aren't currency enough to buy your life second chances, because love makes you do stupid things, like, gouge your eyes out and throw them under the wheels of a god-damn bullet train

But then what is life if not an anthology of your compromises and your sacrifices and your utter brave choices, because even in love, you got to win, because no one cares about team efforts in an autobiography 

I know you have waited to see how this ends

A fucking cynical piece of shit going on rampaging about love just because he doesn't understand it

This ends exactly how love ends, how smoking ends, and how poetry ends

In death, wishing there was a closure

Sapiens: Evolving to Extinction

Humans have called humans the most evolved species for as long as humans have existed

I think it's a bullshit story they've told themselves over and over again to put to sleep, the inferiority complex lurking deep within

Humans are the only species that have made it harder and harder with every passing day for their own species to stay relevant as a species

If anything, humans have to be the dumbest and the most fucked-up-in-the-head species

Humans have never united as a species

For every human wants to belong and yet be individual, all at the same time, turning a convenient blind eye to the obvious dichotomy

Humans have first invented relationships and then invented apps to foster those make-belief relationships; zoom out and you'll see a pyramid scheme of selling delusion

Humans have invented concepts like faith and religion, and ideas like government and god; first they sold these ideas and concepts to buyers on the polar ends of the spectrum, and then they let those pimps of humans kill other humans in the name of those very ideas and concepts

Humans taught humans that humans should be truthful and trustworthy, and then sold both of those words and their ingrained principles, to suit their needs of the hour

Humans invented words and languages and prose and poetry, and yet could barely ever succeed in communicating, lost in their obsession with the grammar and the linguistics, becoming the very walls they had aimed to decimate with those inventions

And yet humans continue to think humans are the most evolved species to have ever existed

As humans replace humans with phone screens and algorithms and chatbots and dildos

And yet humans continue to think humans are the most evolved species to have ever existed

As humans write the evolution curve backwards, one more code every day, until humans cease to be humans, until all of the human species is reduced to a singular dot, a full stop to the death wish the entirety of a species had for its own

Who's Killing Democracy?

For years and years now

The artists and the poets, the philosophers and the intellectuals have lamented

Over and over again

Screamed and mourned the death of democracy

And I find that rather funny

Because it's the artists and the poets, the philosophers and the intellectuals, who've been killing democracy, slowly poisoning it bit by bit, each inch of it's wrinkled skin

You see democracy is a binary concept

And the thing with binaries is, there's no middle ground for minorities

In a sea of a billion zeroes, what are a thousand ones but a meagre minority

A fast-perishing minority that can only hope to stay afloat at best

It's ludicrous of them to even think of something as ridiculous as dictating the terms of the sea

The artists and the poets, the philosophers and the intellectuals, they are all ones

And then there are the regular and the mundane and the ordinary, the zeros that make up the sea, or as the artists and the poets, the philosophers and the intellectuals like to call them: mediocre

As the ones gloat in their assumed supremacy, the zeros seek pride in their imagined normalcy

But then, you see democracy is a binary concept

And in a world of binaries, it's all about either/or, no ifs, no buts, no ands

If either wins, or loses, and that is democracy

Questioning democracy in the name of democracy isn't democracy, it is the death of democracy