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.
