If Only People Could Be Particles

If faiths decided the virtue of believers,

and intentions were defined by revolutions,

if ideas were enough to civilise instinct,

every religion would function

with more consistency

than quantum fucking physics.

Emulated Epiphanies (Extended Beginning)

I heard someone once say, "the angry have a visible epiglottis", in the name of poetry

and I thought to myself, what a waste of words to throw up unadulterated bullcrap!

A visible epiglottis isn’t poetic,

merely anatomy.

If anger were a measure of righteous,

matchsticks would arbitrate justice.

If screams could weigh casualties,

autopsy rooms would be the loudest.

An epiglottis is as much an epiphany

as a shrunken ball-sac;

worth a thought when functional,

and an embarrassing metaphor

when it mistakes imitation for origin.

Emulated Epiphanies

A visible epiglottis isn’t poetic,

merely anatomy.

If anger were a measure of righteous,

matchsticks would arbitrate justice.

If screams could weigh casualties,

autopsy rooms would be the loudest.

An epiglottis is as much an epiphany

as a shrunken ball-sac;

worth a thought when functional,

and an embarrassing metaphor

when it mistakes imitation for origin.

Weather Update

Last night, an acquaintance got small talking, 

it’s something acquaintances apparently do, 

and I’ve only just recently come to realise

there’s no gentle way to ask someone to fuck off,

so I indulged

in stretching the conversational rubber band.

“What’s with the weather?” he asked,

with politically correct politeness.

It’s the kind of weather

that makes you crave a good cup of tea.

That way you know

if you’d ever be invited over.

But more importantly because,

the one who was supposed to be selling tea

is presently unavailable,

preoccupied selling what a billion and a half

call a democracy, apparently.

I can neither confirm nor deny;

both require documented evidence,

and let’s just say,

our good old grandfather

isn’t particularly fond of paper, 

or as he calls it,

being eco-friendly.

The one thing he hates more than paper

is evidence.

Because imagine

every grandfather having to prove

all the rivers they crossed to get to school,

or the simpler fact

that they ever went to one.

Twelve summers

of broken spines,

jailed mouths,

London Bridges falling down

like architecture fell in love with gravity,

and an army of monkeys

scratching and biting

until you agree

the only colour this country

and its people

could ever bleed

was saffron.

Because crimson

is too reminiscent of criminal evidence,

and by now

we know

dear old grandfather

abhors the idea of evidence.

At an age

most reconsider life choices

and potential osteoarthritis,

dear old grandfather gathers around

his pack of hyenas, 

or as he likes to call them,

the petals of the lotus

he’s the epicentre of.

Lotuses are very specifically precise

to his peer group.

Both thrive in

and from

absolute and utter filth.

Almost as if

they are a walking, talking, breathing

washing machine —

or as he prefers being called,

the geopolitical Ganges

of a nation

being told

its past

is the only future

it ever had.

Dear old grandfather wakes every morning

complaining

how noisy and nosy

his neighbours are,

sipping imported tea

from saffron-embossed porcelain

bought and paid for

with taxes he collects

like inheritance mistaken for birthright.

He doesn’t read newspapers.

Partly because

one can’t quite tell

if he ever learned to read,

but more importantly because

he dislikes anything

that doesn’t have him printed in capitals

across the front page,

the back page,

and every page in between.

Every now and then

he reaches for his designer chappal.

Now don’t you dare judge him

for million-dollar footwear

while he hands you a list

of everything

you shouldn’t be buying,

because greed

is his sole inheritance.

He reaches for those chappals

every time he sees a cockroach.

Word has it

he’s been suffering

a rather severe infestation lately,

and it’s got his cholesterol-choked heart

beating rather fast.

A grandfather however obnoxious

you are taught not to pray ill for,

and we are, after all,

a land of cultured chromosomes,

so we ruin another night’s sleep

breathing through

his audacious farts.

I could have called him an appendix,

but appendices,

when arrogant enough,

can be uprooted overnight.

He is, to be factually precise,

a variant

of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus:

the Hindutva Immunodeficiency Virus.

A potentially lethal,

definitely contagious disease,

mostly spread

through unprotected mindfuckery,

commonly found

in civilisationally virgin nuisances

desperately seeking purpose

through the pointless pride

of a polluted past.

And the most fascinating thing

about the HIV virus

is how effectively

it convinces the body

its own cells

are the enemy.

Because once you wage war

against yourself,

death becomes

a matter of clockwork.

Imagine believing

you’re a martyr,

when all you ever were

was the last nail

in your own fucking coffin.

Imagine drinking cow piss

as beverage,

and still wondering

why your skull,

split open,

smells of stale bullshit

and fresh cow dung.

“I had just asked

what’s with the weather,”

is, I’ve just discovered,

a remarkably efficient way

to lose acquaintances.

Temple Of Flesh

Have you ever held

the papercut edge of a shaving blade

against the epidermis of your skin —

a flimsy thin slice of stainless alloy,

smelling of metal

like it had sensed the fahrenheit rising

beneath the thick sandwich

of flesh, sweat, skin and hair,

and gone through with it?

You’ll be surprised

how quickly it cuts through,

and how deep.

And that’s when you realise

meat is just about meat;

naked pink

sprayed in hues of crimson,

man or chicken.

The first few seconds,

the flesh stares back at you,

almost as if caught by surprise.

And then the blood arrives.

First,

a few droplets of red sweat.

And then follows the crimson monsoon.

And suddenly,

it’s far more

than you expected;

like someone

had punctured

the heart of a cloud.

Minutes in,

it all begins to look

and smell like a fish market.

Because spilled blood

is never only blood.

It is blood and sweat

on unswept floors,

fast losing colour,

fast losing shape,

and yet somehow

still smelling of itself all along.

And that’s the first time

you truly understand:

blood is embarrassingly democratic.

Man or fish,

it never learns the difference.

Once you've held a blade

against your own skin

and gone all the way through,

enough times,

the body stops feeling singular.

You begin to forget

the parts of you 

you'd intended to keep intact. 

For meat is just meat

when there is no one left

to disagree.

May Live, May Not Survive

I may or may not

have memories from before I was born.

Mostly administrative footage.

Ceiling fans.

Doctors.

Rubber gloves.

Someone saying,

“Congratulations.”

My soul visibly trying to leave the room.

I may or may not

be a reliable narrator.

Memory is just gossip

the brain spreads about itself.

Every year,

my childhood changes details

like politicians changing ideologies

before elections.

At this point,

even my trauma

contains factual inaccuracies.

I may or may not

have a personality anymore.

After years of survival,

all my opinions feel like hostages

developing Stockholm syndrome.

You call it maturity.

I call it

the slow extinction

of original thought

under fluorescent lighting.

I may or may not

be hallucinating adulthood.

Everyone explains taxes to me

with the exhausted confidence

of prisoners describing weather.

“Bro, this is just how life is.”

Which is historically

what people say

right before revolutions,

murders,

economic collapse,

or arranged marriages.

I may or may not

have been in love.

Hard to tell honestly.

Loneliness is incredibly talented

at voice acting.

Sometimes the heart

doesn’t miss people.

It misses

who it became

when someone was watching.

I may or may not

believe in honesty anymore.

Every conversation now feels like

mutual advertising

disguised as intimacy.

Authenticity itself

has become a marketing strategy.

Even spirituality arrives

with podcast microphones,

thumbnail expressions,

and early-access discount codes.

Enlightenment, apparently,

is available at 30% off.

I may or may not

be mentally ill.

The problem is,

once self-awareness

becomes performance,

even breakdowns start feeling rehearsed.

I once cried genuinely

and immediately thought,

“This metaphor could work in a poem.”

That’s not healing.

That’s capitalism

occupying the nervous system.

I may or may not

hate civilization.

But I do find it suspicious

that we created skyscrapers,

satellites,

quantum physics,

and biryani,

yet still lose arguments

to men whose display pictures

contain sunglasses inside cars.

Evolution clearly

has loopholes.

I may or may not

fear death.

What scares me more

is surviving long enough

to become motivational.

Imagine suffering for decades

only to end up chanting:

“Good things take time.”

That phrase alone

should disqualify people

from having political opinions.

I may or may not

want children someday.

Not out of love.

Mostly curiosity.

I just want to watch

a smaller human being

stare at existence

with the same betrayed expression

I currently reserve

for salary slips.

That’s not parenting.

That’s intergenerational field research.

I may or may not

be losing my mind.

But the world keeps behaving

like a group project

where nobody read the instructions

and the dumbest person somehow

became team leader.

Wars.

Riots.

Algorithms deciding relevance.

Teenagers learning confidence

from airbrushed existences

that look AI-generated

even in real life.

Every day now feels like

God accidentally sitting

on the remote control of reality.

Channels changing mid-sentence.

Natural disasters between advertisements.

Genocide sponsored by children’s charities and wellness campaigns.

I may or may not

have written this poem.

Maybe insomnia did.

Maybe accumulated disappointment.

Maybe thirty years

of overhearing adults

confidently explaining things

they clearly never understood.

Or maybe consciousness itself

is just the universe

developing anxiety

after becoming self-aware.

Who knows.

At this point,

even humans feel less like an actuality

and more like

a conspiracy theory

with excellent marketing

and no measurable proof of intelligence.

C-Section

They say Caesareans are painful,

mine hurt a bit more than hurt.

The kind of hurt you feel

when something is taken out of nothing,

breathing bones, trembling flesh

hollowed out of my emptiness.

It was the most beautiful something

that could possibly be born out of what I’d have liked to forget as nothing.

Would I go back and undo it all, if I could?

I don’t know. I can’t quite tell.

Has it ever happened to you —

your worst regret and your best reason to wake up

have cohabited?

Mine is thirteen years old today.

And as he prepares for a lifetime of grown-up feelings and adult aspirations,

I make sure he doesn’t become the dreaded half of his becoming.

I need him to know that desire doesn’t knock before it changes intent,

that love is not an insurance for the distorted notions of a perverted mind.

I need him to know monsters don’t live under the bed,

but within the sheets;

breathing down your neck, warm and sweaty,

in cold air that smells like resigned fear.

I want him to know monsters need not beget monsters,

that he could become what his mother had hoped his father would be.

That his mother’s vanity and valour were inheritance,

just as much as his father’s ego-battered testosterone

and his broken ideas of what a man is supposed to be.

That a marriage certificate is not a permission slip for ownership,

that love is made; not demanded,

not grabbed, not extorted.

I want him to know, 

Caesareans hurt a little less

when there is something left inside

to empty out from.