Those You Call Collateral Damage

There are crimes that begin with certainty

and still end in paperwork.

And systems that no longer wait for certainty

because waiting is a liability.

An allegation enters

and nothing checks if it should.

That checking function is already deprecated.

So it enters.

And once it enters, everything begins rearranging itself

to make the entry feel inevitable.

What happened bends first.

Then what was said.

Then what was meant is quietly removed

because meaning slows throughput.

What survives repetition becomes real.

Not because it is real.

Because it remained usable.

Nobody is fully right. Nobody is fully wrong.

That is not balance. That is clearance.

Inside that clearance

a life stops being a life

and becomes something that can be spoken without resistance.

That is the first loss.

And people keep speaking.

And almost nobody believes they are the ones doing harm. 

The system does not accuse.

Accusation requires distance.

This is not distant. This is immediate processing.

It does not hate.

It does not verify.

It does not pause at the edge of consequence.

It continues.

And what it continues through

is not stored as impact.

It is stored as passage.

By the time truth arrives, 

if it arrives, 

it is not late.

It is non-compatible.

Nothing is waiting for it that still knows how to receive it.

Reversals exist.

But they arrive like afterimages of impact.

Technically present. Operationally irrelevant.

Corrections written after damage has already chosen its shape.

They update records. They do not update outcomes.

Because between accusation and correction

there is a silent interval

where lives are rewritten without consent.

Names lose stability.

Identities collapse without reversal path.

Relationships end without procedural origin.

Entire futures are quietly replaced

by versions that would never have existed otherwise.

Someone is always “just sharing.”

Someone is always “just agreeing.”

Someone is always “just amplifying.”

As for the accused,

some people stop returning to themselves correctly, 

and some do not return.

And the system does not call it a failure.

It phrases it as completion.

Because the life was never the unit being measured.

The procedure was.

The appearance of resolution was.

The outcome was whatever survived the procedure.

The life was merely where the process occurred.

Like fire occurring in wood.

Like impact occurring in flesh.

Necessary for the event.

Irrelevant to the report.

And that is why nothing stops.

Not because nobody notices.

Because noticing changes nothing.

The destruction is not outside the process.

The destruction is what the process passes through.

So when it says insufficient evidence

it is not undoing anything.

It is exiting.

Leaving everything else exactly where it fell.

No rollback exists for that interval.

Only documentation of closure.

And closure is not repair.

Responsibility disperses immediately.

Into process.

Into timing.

Into correctness of procedure.

Which is another way of saying:

nothing is accountable for what moves fast enough.

And once it moves

the only thing that matters

is how cleanly it can be described later.

Not what it did.

Only what remains writable without hesitation.

And what remains writable

is never the same as what remained alive.

Land Of Vulture Virtue

Activism has become a luxury accessory.

An earring.

A tote bag.

A curated identity layered over inherited comfort;

an intellectual strap-on

for people fortunate enough

to mistake boredom for oppression.

The children of privilege

inherit houses,

surnames,

investment portfolios,

and house help

who have spent lifetimes

learning when not to exist loudly.

They inherit convenience as oxygen.

Then they inherit guilt.

And guilt is not morality.

It is metabolism gone rogue.

Leave it unattended long enough,

and it stops being an emotion

and starts becoming architecture.

It builds rooms inside perception

where everything begins to echo as harm.

A glass of water becomes symbolism.

A clean floor becomes evidence.

A functioning household becomes violence written in impeccable grammar.

Soon the mind no longer observes reality.

It audits it.

Then college happens.

And revolution arrives

the way acne does.

Biological. Predictable. Socially contagious.

It does not announce itself as ideology.

It arrives as aesthetic urgency.

A new vocabulary.

A new sensitivity threshold.

A new way of saying “I am aware”

without ever saying “I am involved.”

Suffering enters circulation.

And like all circulating things in privilege economies,

it becomes stylised.

They read suffering

the way tourists read maps —

not to inhabit terrain,

but to collect ink trails on paper passports.

Enough detail to perform understanding.

Not enough exposure to lose comfort.

Soon they stop admiring martyrs

and begin auditioning for proximity to martyrdom.

Not survival.

Never survival.

Just narrative adjacency.

Just enough pain to be legible in the correct circles.

So they borrow wounds.

Rent tragedies.

Curate suffering

the way others curate wardrobes.

Pain becomes interchangeable.

Grief becomes modular.

Trauma becomes portable identity.

And it must always be returned

before consequences arrive.

Because the entire performance depends on one condition:

that nothing actually breaks them.

And when someone notices the performance, 

when someone points out the choreography, 

they respond with sincerity.

Not defence.

Sincerity.

The most dangerous form of armour,

because it makes contradiction look like cruelty.

They say they speak for those who cannot.

The silenced.

The erased.

The dead.

A perfect constituency.

No rebuttal. No revision. No correction.

But watch closely, 

because representation is selective.

The silenced are always those

whose suffering can be quoted safely.

Never those

whose suffering might implicate the speaker.

Never those

whose pain disrupts the moral supply chain.

Curious how solidarity

has geographical limits.

Curious how empathy

requires ideological clearance.

Curious how outrage

thrives in abstract distance

but develops paralysis

when accountability becomes local.

Because state violence is always intolerable

until it can be narrativised safely.

Then it transforms.

Prisons become policy discourse.

Censorship becomes collective safety.

Surveillance becomes protection architecture.

Death becomes statistics with formatting.

And activism,

in its most socially transferable form,

has never been about the victim.

The victim is raw material.

The story is the product.

The applause is the return on investment.

Facts are not destroyed.

They are refined.

Facts become fiction.

Fiction becomes identity.

Identity becomes currency.

And currency, once stabilised,

begins manufacturing its own physics.

It produces wings.

They call them liberation.

Freedom.

Resistance.

Every feather stitched together

with approval, performance, and redistributed guilt.

From a distance,

it looks like flight.

Up close,

it is coordination.

Because vultures do not fly.

They orbit.

Not freedom, 

but availability.

And vultures do not locate corpses.

They locate instability.

A stumble.

A misworded sentence.

A joke that lands correctly but travels incorrectly.

A disagreement that acquires witnesses before context.

That is enough.

Because once something is marked as unstable,

it becomes metabolised.

Then they circle.

Not in chaos.

In pattern.

In rhythm.

In increasing certainty

that something must be wrong

for so many of them to agree.

And agreement itself

becomes evidence.

Suspicion becomes structure.

Rumour becomes gravity.

Accusation becomes environment.

Then they descend.

Not with violence.

With procedure.

With statements carefully stripped of doubt.

With solidarity that does not require verification.

With outrage pre-approved by consensus.

With morality that scales efficiently.

They do not tear flesh.

They distribute its removal.

They delegate the act

until no one remembers

who first decided it should be gone.

And by the time it ends,

even absence looks procedural.

Character assassination becomes accountability.

Public humiliation becomes correction.

Professional erasure becomes safeguarding.

Public manslaughter becomes collective hygiene.

And the blood is always absent

from the final narrative.

Because cleanliness is part of the product.

The audience never objects.

Not because they agree.

But because repetition

has replaced cognition.

Echo has replaced memory.

And memory is what would have asked:

“what exactly did we just do?”

But questions, 

questions are structural threats.

Why does justice require crowds?

Why does truth require amplification?

Why does accountability require anonymity?

Why does every moral certainty

arrive with identical handwriting

from different mouths?

Why do seventeen hands

always converge on one disappearance?

Why does the system

never consume its architects?

Nobody likes questions.

Questions interrupt circulation.

And vultures can smell interruption

before it forms language.

That is why

the moment you become trouble,

you are no longer engaged with.

You are processed.

Not because you are guilty.

Not because you are dangerous.

But because systems like this

do not require intent.

Only participation.

And participation,

once normalized,

does not distinguish

between justice

and appetite.

Bark

Dogs bark because it is their religion.

Let them bark.

Every creature deserves a faith,

and some are unfortunate enough

to find theirs in noise.

Let them bark at strangers,

at shadows,

at passing storms.

The day you take religion away

from the myopic and the illusioned,

they will have to confront

what they have been barking at.

So let them bark.

Until they realise

barks are all they have left.

No teeth.

No claws.

And bones too fragile

to carry the weight

of their borrowed convictions.

But should they wander

into your corridors

mistaking indifference for hospitality,

don’t let them confuse patience with permission.

They will bark.

That is what dogs do.

Offer them a chewed-on bone tomorrow,

and they will trade loyalties

before you have finished blinking.

You see,

faith is only valuable

as long as it is affordable.

Which is why

dogs do not worship god;

they barter him for bones.

The Sovereignty Of Hurt Feelings

If offending feelings were criminal,

democracy would have collapsed

the day ink first learned disagreement.

Imagine the audacity of a voice insisting

someone must not speak

because their existence scratches your comfort

the wrong way.

Ignorantly oblivious

to the hundreds of passing strangers

who would happily grant you

that same silence in return.

That is the fascinating thing

about fragile people pretending to be liberals;

they mistake tolerance

for a throne built specifically for themselves.

And the moment the world refuses to kneel

at the altar of their discomfort,

they begin confusing censorship

for civilisation.

Oh, the fucking tragedy.

“I was offended,” they cry,

as though feelings were handcuffs

and outrage a constitutional clause.

But democracies are not nurseries

built to childproof reality.

You heard something ugly?

Walk away.

Leave.

Never return.

That is freedom too.

But the moment you use your feelings

as an alibi for punishment,

the moment discomfort begins masquerading as law,

your liberal jaws 

bare their gnawing canines of censorship.

Because ideal democracies,

contrary to popular fantasy,

are not places where nobody is offended.

They are places where offense survives

without permission

to become persecution.

And the idea

of you finding my truths offensive

offends me too.

Now what?

Do we build prisons

large enough

for every discomfort

that has ever mistaken itself for virtue?

Because if ideal democracies

ever truly existed,

people addicted to policing thought

would become

their very first prisoners.

Does that offend your feelings?

Well then, 

democracy is right there by the door.

No Smoking

Had it not been for smokers,

matchboxes would have been just another commodity;

the kind you keep losing track of

between haywire groceries

and unpaid electricity bills.

But once you make a habit

of burning cigarettes like calories,

the matchsticks begin believing

they hold the strings to sanity.

Give them enough time,

and one even starts believing

fire exists because it does.

Illusion is a rather efficient analgesic;

numbs you just enough

to mistake proximity for power.

Gather enough matchsticks together,

and suddenly matchboxes become religion;

a revolution sworn

to cleanse the world of its filth.

Except fire has never cleaned a thing.

It merely blackens what survives it.

But who explains nuance

to a box full of matchsticks

thumping their chests

like Neanderthals discovering thunder?

And then one day,

the matchstick finds itself

on the other side of gasoline;

unaware of scale,

anatomy,

or architecture.

So it gathers its little army of matchsticks

and begins screaming battle cries

at a thing

built entirely

to swallow fire whole.

And gasoline, almost tenderly,

spreads its arms and legs,

lies still with a wry smile,

and waits.

The matchsticks learned that day:

you cannot absolve

what you cannot contain.

To The Women Who Use Feminism Like Barricades & Throw It Like Grenades

I want you to know, I know.

I know you are not feminists.

I know you are nothing like feminists.

I can smell your rehearsed disgust

for a gender you have neither lived nor loved.

And while you insist you survived men,

you have mostly used them

as caricatures in stories of your battle scars;

the same scars you inherited

from mothers and grandmothers

like trauma was a family heirloom

stitched into the skin.

I can see through your audacious eye-rolls,

basking in victories

borrowed from books

borrowed from friends

who borrowed them from another century.

Every passing day,

you collect rage

like public toilets collect change at the entrance,

and by the end of the week,

as your jean pockets clink and clatter,

you write poetry

about the rattling noise of shackles.

I can hear through your loudly hollow screams;

the ones visible in your epiglottis

but never in your spine.

Because calloused hands and battered bones

are not beautiful.

And revolutions, contrary to what you were told,

rarely survive air-conditioning.

Ever since you read Lady Lazarus,

you have mistaken feminists for phoenixes.

But Sylvia Plath lived her metaphors,

and you can barely survive your scribbles.

You think you will burn men

and rise from their ashes.

But if you truly understood metaphor,

you would not have to torment your tonsils

to manufacture one.

I want you to know, I know.

I know who you are.

I know what you are.

I can smell the scorn in your breath

like the stupor of a functioning alcoholic;

worn in crimson lipstick

the way lions wear vanity in their mane.

You walk with the air

you imagine warriors walk with,

because seeing one

is largely impermissible

through rose-wine evenings

and air-conditioned rebellion.

So you call it sisterhood

and inherit victories by association,

as though courage were contagious

and suffering transferable through proximity.

I can see the lies

you tell the world,

and yourself a little more carefully.

Because intoxication is important.

One must remain allergic to daylight.

And it is imperative

the world mistakes insecurity for mystique.

So the closer sobriety approaches,

the more the cracks begin appearing;

small and sudden

like acne before photographs.

And every last shred of logic and reason

is drowned quietly,

because once a person learns

to deny existence despite evidence,

invincibility becomes

a remarkably achievable magic trick.

I can hear through the corridors

of your pedicured pedagogy

and manicured mannequin existence;

almost as though feminists

were not flesh and blood

but carefully typed placeholders

for fashionable suffering.

Because humans are fragile,

and fragility is inconvenient

to those who masturbate

to weaponised vulnerability

like it were a revolutionary act.

But then,

when has truth ever inconvenienced

plastic prophets?

And when has the food chain

ever bothered vegan vigilantes

choking politely

on tofu and almond milk?

I want you to know, I know.

I know what you think of men like me.

I know you want to burn me,

because burials are never proof enough of death

for vermin like me.

I know you want me erased,

because even the silence of a question mark

feels intolerably audacious

inside republics built from feelings.

I know you want every trace of me gone,

because germs like me

have an ugly habit

of returning from nothing.

I want you to know, I know.

I want you to know, 

it troubles me

about as much

as your housemaid’s menstrual cycle

interrupts your good night’s sleep.

The Ragdolls Of Rubber Revolt

When evidences pile up

like dead flies around a flicker,

feelings rush through criminal crevices

like leaking drains in monsoon cities.

Words, they insist,

have the power to hurt,

but only when those words

refuse to kneel at their imagined altars.

Not when they sculpt them into effigies

and set entire lives ablaze

for public spectacle.

Feelings, they say,

are what make a country democratic.

So they mourn its death

while torching every textbook

that ever mentioned judiciary.

And when the scales of law

curl into a constitutional middle finger

shoved down their audacious thoraxes,

they howl about failed systems

like arsonists

calling the fire brigade.

Because every mob

believes itself wounded.

Every slogan

thinks itself sacred.

Every fanatic

calls his reflection persecution.

That is how countries rot:

not when hatred arrives screaming,

but when cruelty learns to sit straight

in a fancy dress of feelings.

And every arsonist becomes

a historian of smoke,

insisting the fire

was a misunderstanding of light.

What a remarkable privilege it must be,

inside an ironclad republic

of damning defections,

to become

a freedom fighter

for candyfloss feelings.