Gang Of The Fall

Termites scream camaraderie,

hoping infestation will be mistaken for community,

fermenting folklore in their gassy guts:

"everyone with a gang is a gangster".

Until one morning, pest control arrives.

A lone silhouette,

unbothered by the arithmetic of mobs.

A hint of sulfuryl fluoride,

and camaraderie falls to its death,

like Communism in Soviet Russia, 1991.

Call it justice, vengeance, due process,

actualities have never bothered with etymology.

Sometimes,

sulfuryl fluoride is spelled Constitution.

The Singularity Of Plurals

I have a moustache, long and thick,

and I don't shave my armpits.

I think that's rebellion,

and I'm the discounted Medusa

of a Friday clearance sale.

So what I was pushed out of a burqa-clad uterus?

That's not oppression.

Not unless I say so.

So what I nitpick religion

and wear it with liberalism,

like I wear my ripped jeans

on a saree

on a pair of sneakers?

My fingers are so jangled

in affordable junk metal,

they almost don't let me forget

the oppression I was conceived in,

because then,

what story would I sell my moustache to?

I was born into filth, really.

But apparently

that's how you gather privilege:

that,

and money,

and entitlement,

and the arrogance

to believe you are beyond consequences.

You know how the greatest sinners

flock to the greatest demigods?

Because they see in them

what they could become.

Show them enough filth

and they'll call it a wet dream.

And so flocked my mom and dad

to a man wrapped in saffron,

from a cult that reeked

of sweat and blood,

of women it had pillaged,

raped,

and murdered.

I wear fishnet stockings

to roleplay as a poet

because I learnt nuance from pornography.

I airbrush my obesity

because navel

is the only language

my poetry sells in,

and my lovers

like it skimmed.

Low-fat.

I have cut my arms,

wrist to elbow,

umpteen times,

both hands,

because nothing screams trauma

quite like scars do.

I peddle stories

about things I diagnose myself with,

depending on what the weather

is like that day,

and pity usually follows.

Right on cue.

My words,

my opinions,

my art

are a lot like my life:

borrowed.

But I've learnt

egos are like snakes.

You pet one long enough,

it eventually flashes its fangs

at everything

you don't approve of.

And so I hiss.

At every one of them

who dares call a spade a spade,

oblivious to the daylight truth

that I come from a land

where even breathing is a privilege for a lot many.

I've traded my mediocrity

for manners

and called that professionalism.

So when someone refuses

to give me my wins

simply because I demanded them,

I call it

carcinogenic corruption.

Because whatever isn't convenient

must be cancer.

I bully like an oligarch

and cry like a homeless orphan

the minute the tables turn on me.

And somehow,

people like me

have convinced the world

that this is called inclusion.

That this is equality.

That this is justice.

That this is voice.

We are four,

but really one,

because singularity 

demands spine,

and we are mostly plastered holes.

Long Live The Dead

Culture.

Such an interesting catchphrase.

A fifteenth-century English word, derived from Latin,

meaning “tilling of land” or "agriculture" —

or, as the ones whose lives depended on it would call it,

“farming.”

Interesting how farming means moving on

from yesterdays,

no matter rain or drought,

because tomorrow won't be yesterday.

Never forgetting that

is the only road to a good harvest.

And yet, six centuries

and a handful of evolutions later,

culture means the cheap whiskey of nostalgia,

of yesterdays that came long before yesterdays,

poured into a crystal glass of false pride,

sprinkled with deluded vanity.

You put silkworms in a culture,

and you get nine yards

of unadulterated elegance;

you put humans in a culture,

and you get a future spent sniffing

the claimed flowers of a yesterday

no one alive has ever seen

or smelled.

Life killing life

because the dead need to be defended,

even if what's alive now

needs to be dead first

so another life can kill another

to defend this dead.

It's funny how easy it is

to kill something;

all you've got to do

is pretend you're saving it.

Death By Origami

The thing about paper bullets is,

they make bullet holes of papercuts,

then cut right through

the heart of the gaping void.

Where once was all blood and tissue,

now stands a giant wormhole

of absconding matter.

Where once was a throbbing, pounding epiglottis,

now rests a dehydrated raisin

of bled-out larynx.

And if you thought 

paper couldn't

buy you, bury you, and buy your burial

at the very same instant,

you sure have never

cashed a paycheck,

been in an autopsy room,

or watched empires fall.

Slaughtered For A Stanza, Served For The Rest

You sprawl seven thousand two hundred and thirty-nine words laid out in spleen-stained sheets,

your handcrafted paper origami of yourself, that you peddle on the internet,

hurl slogans like the madman at the traffic signal hurls abuses at nothingness;

you swirl dirt and dust into the blurred lines of disdain and disguise it as revolution,

over the rotting flesh of lives damned and devoured by depravity.

And you think you have moved worlds,

like they were globes spinning on your fingertips,

and you think you have brought mountains down,

like earthquakes bringing homes, housed in mortar and concrete,

down to dust and debris.

Do you think they died

with their entrails dug out and their ribs caved in

so they could be an asterisk in your tainted tale of an existence?

Somewhere beneath your carefully arranged outrage,

beneath the metaphors, the manifestos,

the magnificent little catastrophe you have mistaken for an identity,

there is a simpler obscenity:

they were lives;

you needed them to become your literature, 

you needed their deaths to become your significance.

Tell me —

what species does that make you?

The Importance Of Pronouns

The ones on the inside

and the ones on the outside

always have the same thing to say:

"We are in the right lane,

they aren't."

Temple, church, mosque.

Continent, country, colour, class.

Government, asylum, jail.

Change the latitude.

Change the longitude.

Homo sapiens barely changes its certainty.

"We" are always on the right side of the border.

Newton's First Law Of Motion

The loneliest moment in someone's life

isn't necessarily when their whole world falls apart.

It's when they are watching it fall apart

and all they can do is stare blankly.

Sometimes for a day.

Sometimes for weeks.

Sometimes for months.

Sometimes for years.

More often than not,

long enough

for what was once a life

to become the remnants of a lifetime.

Most people who you know and who know you,

won't ever know.

The ones who do, will tell you it'll pass. It'll all be fine.

They'll say it with the confidence

of people standing outside a burning house

knowing firemen are on the way,

explaining that fire is temporary.

And perhaps it is.

Perhaps they're right.

Perhaps tomorrow,

you'll wake up and discover

that the thing you thought was the end

was only another morning you didn't know how to survive.

But there are nights when none of that matters.

You lie there, staring at the stagnation

of the moving blades of the ceiling fan,

watching them go 

round

and round

and round,

and wondering

how something can move so much without going anywhere.

Slowly, the wondering stops.

Not because you've found an answer.

Because you've run out of questions.

And somewhere between one revolution and the next,

you slip from wondering to accepting 

that maybe

this isn't something you're passing through.

Maybe this is what remains.

Maybe this is the life

you'll remember

as the moment

your life stopped being something you were living

and became something you were watching.

Maybe this is how the dying watches life halt.