Cost Of Living

Life doesn’t cost a dime.

Living is the debt:

a lifelong lease on a rotting body you never wanted,

paid monthly in blood, nightmares,

and the kind of screams that never leave the throat

because survival still needs them silent.

The Monster In The Margin

I come from a world

where culture is measured in literature and cinema,

and ambition is measured in the rung you die on

in the corporate ladder of salaried slavery.

A world that calls itself humble

because arrogance is a luxury

the middle class cannot afford

unless it’s borrowed from fiction.

A world where your stories —

your history, your literature, your cinema,

repeat the same convenient lies

until they fossilise in the marrow

and parade as truth.

They give you heroes and villains,

each dressed differently but built the same:

a hero wronged by the world,

never not naive enough to not sell his spine,

clutching rigid ideas of integrity

like second-hand moral hand-me-downs

from your sanctimonious neighbour.

But the villains, 

they get the nuance, the hunger, the musculature of motive.

They bleed redder, burn brighter,

and come in plurals

because the secret to culture and civilisation is:

the road to being a hero is always singular,

but there are a hundred ways

to be human enough to be called a villain.

Growing up, I wondered

why villains felt closer to my skin,

as if their shadows were stitched

into the lining of my own.

Why the heroes I was meant to worship

felt nauseating, perfumed,

plastic gods of plastic virtues.

I know now.

People love heroes

because their lives demand delusion;

hope curated, pain censored,

mediocrity disguised as destiny.

People despise villains

because villains are carved

from the same flesh and flaw

people scrape off their reflections.

Villains are the parts we exile,

the truths we smother,

the selves we bury alive

under inherited righteousness.

If only we learnt

to live inside our own skins:

skins that itch, bruise, contradict,

skins that still carry the mess

we pretend we outgrew, 

maybe we wouldn’t slaughter entire lives

just to inhabit half-baked imaginations.

Maybe then, we wouldn’t need to worship heroes.

Because the real tragedy isn’t that villains exist;

it’s that we birthed them

from everything we were too cowardly

to forgive in ourselves. 

So we buried them in thick pages of thin fiction

and called the corpse “culture.”

Lizard Skin

I wish your opinions and perspectives

were like your tattoos;

ink etched into your epidermis

pigment that survives seasons

even when the skin carrying it doesn’t.

I wish they weren’t just aesthetic statements,

like those tribal beads threaded

into oxidised, roadside jewellery;

cheap convictions you wore

the way lizards wear skin:

briefly, and only until

the weather demanded otherwise.

Because you know they aren’t you,

and you aren’t them.

You’re just a bus stop

between who you were last week

and whoever you’re auditioning to be tomorrow.

Identity, for you, was a marketplace,

and you shopped like a pickpocket:

quick hands, no conscience,

stealing anything shiny enough

to distract you from the hollow.

Years of borrowed loyalties,

rehearsed convictions,

beliefs worn only long enough

to impress a passing mirror, 

you’ve shapeshifted so often

your own shadow hesitates,

unsure which silhouette

it’s supposed to belong to.

Sometimes it doesn’t stand beside you at all.

Sometimes it waits

to see which one of you mimicries

hits the ground first.

Still, you call it victory, 

that no one caught the trick,

that you were the magic and never the misdirection.

But life has a way of watching

without ever interrupting,

the way an old audience watches a tired magician

still convinced the hat has a rabbit left.

And when the lights finally dim,

and the room refuses to applaud,

your fall won’t be a surpirse revelation,

it’ll be the only obvious, the inevitable certainty.

Because disguises aren’t armour;

they’re just countdowns in costume.

And yours has been ticking for years.

The world won’t need to expose you.

Gravity will.

Identity always collapses

exactly where the spine should’ve been.

And as you hit the ground, 

all moults cracking, all borrowed skins peeling,

you’ll finally understand

what the silence has been rehearsing for you

since the day you first lied to the mirror:

you weren’t the magic,

you weren’t even the magician;

you were the goddamn fault line, 

and collapse was never the consequence,

it was the character arc.

Remembering To Die

This feeling is not new;

not to life, not to me.

I’ve carried it since seventeen,

waited to recognise it since nineteen.

By twenty-one, I’d had three chances,

yet its realisation kept slipping past me

the way moths char to ash

still wishing flames would spare them.

I’ve rehearsed it,

mapped it in elaborate detail —

every step, every exit.

I hoped it would embrace me

in moments of unplanned clarity

whenever my blueprinted dreams

flushed down the commode at dawn.

I have hoped for death

the way moths beg for life

as the blue flame gulps them whole.

I have held a dull blade

deep enough for bone to speak.

I have swallowed sleeping pills

enough to wake the afterlife.

I have slept beside a pistol,

willing my sleep to pull the trigger for me.

I have stared at ceiling-fan blades

wondering if the rope in my hands

believed in gravity more than I believed in myself.

I don’t do any of that anymore.

Time wears you down

and calls it ageing.

I’ve aged enough to stop planning my death, 

but not enough

to trust the idea of life.

These days, I only hope

that every time I close my eyes,

it might quietly be the last.

A life spent negotiating deaths

deserves an anticlimax;

a soft ending,

a quiet disappearance,

poetic justice

lost in translation.

And I’m counting on it.

Syntax Error

If the world were wrung in words,

and life were parched in grammar,

the deaf would hear the birds sing,

and the mute wouldn’t voice love,

while language lost itself in translation,

and the literates burned each other alive over misplaced punctuation.

Overcast

You and I are clouds

in overcast skies;

a species stitched from similarities

we mistake for belonging.

From afar, we drift together.

Up close, the wind whispers:

belonging is an optical illusion;

it hollows the skin,

and scrapes every last crumb of flesh,

until you've nothing to belong with.

In Love Or Just Homesick?

I’ve rushed past more faces in my life

than years I will ever live;

blurred silhouettes I forget on purpose,

because remembering demands a reason.

Faces you like, bones you don’t.

Faces you know, lives you’d never survive.

Yet in that endless procession of utter strangers and familiar acquaintances,

a few faces stay,

the ones that turn themselves

into whole dictionaries of meaning.

One such word is home.

A word tossed around casually

by people who’ve never lost it,

never buried pieces of themselves

just to keep the peace inside four walls.

It cuts deeper for those of us

who grew up in crumbling households inside concrete houses,

where existence was measured in the weight of your wins

and questioned in the gravity of your failures.

In such houses,

home isn’t a destination;

it’s an escape route.

And I taught myself early

that survival begins

the moment you walk out of it.

I would’ve lived just fine

believing that,

if life hadn’t interfered

with inconvenient accuracy.

The first time I saw her was in a photograph —

a smile stretched too far for memory,

a singular dent on her right cheek, 

as if a crack in the flesh

to sink her frowns in

eyebrows drawn wide, outlined neat

over eyes that looked

as if they had innumerable questions

for every certainty in the world.

A nose jutting out like quiet defiance,

hovering above freckles

mapped like a constellation

only she knew how to read.

Lips thin enough to free a lie,

thick enough to hide a truth.

Years have passed since,

and years will pass after,

and that face will return to me

with the precision of a recurring season.

I could exhaust language

trying to describe it, 

stack metaphors until they collapse

under their own exaggeration, 

but some things refuse

the limits of vocabulary.

Some faces don’t become poetry.

They unsettle it.

They make the words step aside

and stand there,

suddenly aware of their own limits.

I wish I could hold her in language

without folding her into rhyme and ritual.

But then, 

do you ever really get to describing a home?

Some places you don’t define;

you grow around,

the way flesh grows around a wound.