The Islands Beneath My Skin

I have known women

who left behind

climates I still live inside.

Some left behind the smell of food

from kitchens that disappeared

before I learned I was still hungry.

Some left behind sentences

that still arrive before my own thoughts, 

speak before I do.

Some left behind a silence so precise

I mistook it for peace.

There were women who taught me

that a person can be built from another person's belief.

A few words. A little faith.

A hand resting on a shoulder

at the exact moment the world felt too heavy.

And suddenly,

a boy begins to imagine himself

as something larger

than the name the world had given him.

There were women who taught me

that losing someone is not always absence.

Sometimes, someone remains everywhere.

In songs. In streets. 

In the way you pause before answering.

In habits you never noticed you inherited.

There were women who sat beside me

through ordinary days

and somehow convinced time to move differently.

The kind of miracles you fail to recognise

because miracles are supposed to arrive with thunder.

And there were women who taught me

the lesson I never wanted.

That a person can become a weapon

when another needs a story.

That truth can be stretched 

until it fits the hands holding it.

That sometimes,

someone does not reduce you because they hate you.

Sometimes,

they just need you smaller to make themselves larger.

The strange thing is,

I cannot separate the wounds from the gifts.

The same world that gave me my softest memories

also gave me my sharpest scars.

The same hands that taught me how to hold on

also taught me how easily humans let go.

So I do not write them as angels.

Angels do not disappoint.

I do not write them as demons.

Demons do not leave behind

pieces of themselves

you spend years mistaking for your own.

I write them as I have known them.

Incomplete.

Beautiful in places.

Terrifying in others.

Tender when they still knew how.

Capable of building worlds. 

Capable of burning them.

And perhaps that is the only honest story I can tell.

Not who they were. Not what they did.

But what they left behind after passing through me.

404 (Unabridged)

Every now and then,

my phone reminds me:

deleted items leave residue.

And I keep wondering

about all the things we delete:

the photographs,

the messages,

the names we stop searching for,

what they leave behind,

if anything.

Or whether deletion

is just another word

for moving something

somewhere we can no longer see.

Because the strange thing

about erasing something

is that the space it occupied

doesn't disappear with it.

It stays there,

quietly remembering

what used to be.

And I wonder

about all the things

we've deleted from our lives:

did they ever really leave,

or did we simply become

too good at pretending

we couldn't find them?

What technology couldn't, how could biology ever?

404

Every now and then

my phone reminds me:

deleted items leave residue.

And I keep wondering

about all the things we delete;

what do they leave behind,

if anything,

or do they ever really leave?

What technology couldn't, how could biology ever?

Name. Place. Animal. Thing. (Abridged)

Drawers are strange places.

Things go there when they are not ready to disappear.

Not because they are valuable, but because 

throwing something away requires admitting

you were wrong about why you kept it.

I keep broken things.

A watch that still ticks.

A sketch that still stares.

A paper falcon folded wrong but refusing to forget flight.

Perhaps that is why I keep them.

Because we call unfinished things failures and unfinished people potential.

The drawer is not where broken things wait to be fixed.

It is where abandoned versions of ourselves wait quietly,

hoping someone remembers they existed.

And every night, I open it,

hoping to find something I lost.

Only to discover

the only thing I ever abandoned was myself.

Terms Of Service

As she takes me in,

she looks me in the eye,

asks if it feels good,

tells me she loves me.

I look instead

at the pillow gathered beneath her nape.

I know she doesn't mean

to know any of it.

So I say nothing

and keep going.

She lets out measured, practised moans,

twitches her body by design,

and I arrive in silence;

evidence lodged in her depths.

She holds me tight for a minute.

Long enough to make the lie believable.

She needs to convince me of her fiction.

That's the thing about selling fiction:

the price of it lies in the conviction.

She gets up,

washes herself,

makes sure every last shred of evidence

is flushed down the commode.

Then she returns to bed

and tells me how good she feels

when I leave parts of myself inside her.

I pretend to believe her.

Because she needs me to.

She needs the tale to be true,

even if only for a moment,

before she collects her dividends in cash.

We go at it again.

And as the soft, rehearsed moans

begin their second performance,

I wonder,

does she know

it doesn't matter to me?

Any of it.

The moans. The love. The fiction.

Does she understand

that when you pay to eat at a restaurant,

you don't burden yourself

with unnecessary questions, like

whether the chef enjoyed making your meal,

whether they savoured every ingredient,

whether the pleasure on their face was genuine,

or whether they were simply bartering what they had

for enough money to take home some lunch?

You paid. They served.

And sometimes,

that's all there is,

no matter what needs to be believed.

Compost For The Cultured

I was once promised a stage

large enough to hold thousands,

and then denied it

because a geriatric piece of shit,

living on borrowed breaths

and overdue time,

who had lost a spouse

not to death

but to decay,

because they weren't merely old

but ancient,

decided obedience

was the price of admission;

submission,

the unwritten syllabus.

And no one had the tongue

or the teeth

to tell them:

poetry isn't the bastard child

of the colonial blood

they've spent a lifetime

mistaking for sophistication.

If buttering vanity

were the road to literature,

ghee podi masala dosa

would be the greatest poet alive.

They could say, 

this isn't a poem, 

but a rancid insult at best.

And I agree.

It is. 

But then, 

who gives a fuck, 

unless they have a comeback?

I could burn them with words

and call the ashes poetry,

but poetry would strangle herself

before letting them inside her —

dead or alive.

Life forgot them decades ago, 

and literature never bothered to remember. 

I have heard the doctors have diagnosed them with severe constipation

and I find myself wondering how;

considering all that butter, one would think their exit would be well-oiled!

You see I could go do this all day;

in fact I could have stopped three stanzas ago, 

and that would have been enough to bury them six feet under, 

right in the heart of irrelevance, 

and yet I kept going, 

because, boy oh boy, this is fun! 

But then again, 

I have more pieces of shit to flush, 

and they don't have many breaths for debt.

And as I stand here, 

watching them vanish into decomposition,

I leave this elegy:

the only poetry they will ever be inside of,

dead or alive.

Religion Begins At The Rectum

You know how

some people have

tissue papers for lips

and jet sprays for tongues;

their entire existences

measured in

how efficiently they clean up

someone else's rogue rectum.

You set one rectum ablaze,

and suddenly

every ass-wiping lip,

every butt-licking tongue,

every professional purifier of shit

starts searching for your asshole.

And sure,

for a moment,

even I understand the temptation.

Who wouldn't want

the same mouths 

that once spat condemnation

to line up 

and call your shit sacred?

But the problem with letting

every ass-wiping lip

and butt-licking tongue

near your asshole

is that they never arrive clean.

They carry traces of every asshole they worshipped before yours.

Every shit they once called sacred.

And eventually, your holy asshole isn't holy anymore.

It's just a pile of shit wearing a halo.

It's oddly fascinating,

how quickly worship crawls out

from the same mouths that once spat condemnation.

How versatile human saliva is:

on your face, it's humiliation;

in your ass crack, it's devotion.

What's odder is

how quickly

demons turn divine

when divinity itself

becomes a pain in the ass.