The Stanza After Skin

Once you've spent years

unclothed,

unsheathed,

unhinged,

walking to the kitchen and back,

butt naked,

gone from cooking meals

to doing the dishes

to lying on the bed

staring at the ceiling

for no reason at all,

not a shred of fabric

between your skin

and hers,

you realise

how easily

people have peddled

sex for salvation,

mistaken

intercourse

for intimacy.

You wake up

to the quiet truth

that waking up

to bare bottoms

and open tops

was never,

by itself,

reason enough

to fuck.

Those who believe otherwise

are still learning

the difference

between access

and affection.

Because novelty

has an expiry date.

Tenderness doesn't.

Need

arrives

like a clock hand,

faithfully returning

to where it began.

Desire,

however,

has always been

a visitor.

It knocks.

It waits.

It is invited in.

You realise

the blemishes on her buttocks

resemble spines drawn on sand, 

as if finger impressions

left by

the undercurrents of the ocean 

beneath and beyond, 

the singular mole

at the south-western edge

of her left breast

resembles an island

still fighting 

to stay above water, 

how somehow,

even after years,

your breath

against her neck

still creates

a geography

of goosebumps.

You realise

intimacy was never

about two bodies

finding each other.

Bodies have always

known how to collide.

It was about two histories

learning

how to inhabit

the same silence.

Two people

shedding clothes

is easy.

Two people

losing disguises, 

revealing everything 

they spend years

pretending not to be, 

takes a long time.

Long enough

for ordinary

to become sacred.

Long enough

for belonging 

to stop needing

proof.

Sex is never finished

when the body is.

It continues

in the certainty

that tomorrow

you will still

walk naked

to the kitchen,

still steal from each other's plates,

still discover

new maps

on familiar skin.

Ice Cream

This afternoon,

I learnt

a scoop of ice cream

can be an unbearably long stretch of time.

This was supposed to be our treat —

to us,

from us,

for being us.

And yet,

here we were,

divided

by three scoops of Belgian chocolate.

She has never settled for one.

I have always found

two of the same

too lingering, 

and two different, 

too distracting.

We have rituals like that.

Like never having a meal

at the dining table,

always on the bed,

while trying to figure out

what should accompany us

from dinner

to dreamland.

She's never managed

to finish a movie,

let alone

a television series,

unbothered by sleep,

unhinged in determination.

She's a woman

of iron will,

make no mistake.

But the moment

food reaches

her stomach,

iron

remembers

how to melt.

I, on the other hand, 

am compulsive, 

in my need to see beginnings end.

We have rituals like that. 

Like how,

when she says

she wants coffee,

what she really wants

is coffee-flavoured milk.

She calls that abomination

coffee,

and calls coffee

an abomination

of humanity.

She has never quite understood

how anyone

could willingly savour bitterness, 

and yet

she chose

to go to bed

every night

with a man

who drinks

his coffee black,

as though

there were no other way.

She calls me

a psychopath

for that.

I call her

a psychopath

for sleeping

with her mouth

open wide enough

that an entire civilisation

of mosquitoes

could walk right in,

and walk right out, 

their stomachs full, 

fat with gratitude.

Today,

for the first time,

I met

a lazy Friday.

Even an empty one.

I never knew

Friday afternoons

could contain

so much silence.

And even though,

following ritual,

she spilled

ice cream

on her dress,

today

wasn't the day

I could laugh about it.

How could I,

having fought

with her

seventeen minutes earlier?

This is one

of our rituals too.

Our conversations 

and confrontations 

have always 

been married 

to each other,

the way

we are,

on the days

we aren't fighting.

Conversations,

if left unattended

for more than

twenty-one minutes,

have a peculiar habit

of becoming

confrontations.

Then

I blame her.

Then

she blames me.

Then

we both take turns

blaming ourselves,

while quietly insisting

the other

started it.

Then come

the apologies,

still pointing fingers,

only softer

than before.

Neither of us

ever remembers

the precise moment

the accusations

stop making sense,

and affection

quietly resumes

its ordinary duties.

Every time

we fight,

I discover

newer truths

about ice cream.

Cognitive Bias

The more I learn about animals,

the more I grow wary of humans.

And among the humans I distrust most,

there is one subspecies

I remain particularly circumspect of,

those that arrive breathless with righteousness,

announcing,

with lungs swollen by their own virtue,

that they are here for the greater good,

that they are here to build a better world,

as though salvation were a lesson in public speaking,

as though they were alchemists

mistaken for everyone else,

their humility

performed with theatrical precision.

People call them names.

The wise.

The worldly.

The intellectual.

The liberal.

They polish these names

until they gleam like medals

pinned to a conscience

eager to be corrupted.

I prefer simpler taxonomy.

I prefer to call them what they spend their entire lives trying not to become —

ordinary lives cloaked in extraordinary lies.

I'd rather pet an alligator 

than mistake a parasite for a prophet.

Call a parasite a prophet long enough,

and eventually

language forgets they weren't synonyms.

The Laws/Loss Of Inheritance

Mitochondrial DNA passes on

from grandmother

to mother

to daughter,

they said,

and suddenly

I understood

how easily

a fragment of biology

can become

a mythology.

When someone tells you

they believe in equality,

listen carefully

to how they speak

of the X chromosome.

But listen closer

to the silence

where the Y chromosome

was supposed to be,

but was quietly omitted 

for operational convenience.

Everyone remembers

being a mother's daughter;

raised by 

fathers whose names

were sold and told

as stories of absence,

their existence reduced

to the space

between two chapters,

forgotten

before the curtains

ever fell.

Misunderstand me

if you want.

Call me prejudiced

if that makes the argument

more convenient.

But singularity

never birthed

daughters

or sons

of mothers alone,

nor did it raise them.

The sperm carries

genetic marks

of a father's stress,

they said.

And yet,

no poetry was written,

no odes were gurgled,

no tombstone was placed

at the altar

of another forgotten inheritance.

As if learning

to be human

wasn't difficult enough,

we now

perform equality

by asking men

to become

male honeybees

and black widows;

valued for the purpose

they serve,

discarded

once the purpose

is fulfilled.

Or perhaps worse;

an inconvenient body

whose only recognised worth

is being

flesh 

with a function.

Procreation

or

pleasure.

Nothing beyond. 

Nothing in between.

Maybe humans

were never the right gods

to worship

for equality.

Maybe amoebas were.

No genders.

No asymmetries.

No inheritance divided

into convenient stories.

And most importantly, 

you are your father 

and grandfather,

and 

you are your mother 

and grandmother.

No singular lineage. 

No convenient mythology.

A civilisation's inheritance

contained

within a single cell.

Doppler Effect

It's a sunny afternoon outside,

the kind of sunny

that keeps buildings warm,

the lives within,

warm.

The kind of afternoons

paragraphs about hope

begin with.

Not scorched earth.

Not molten streets.

Just ambient enough

for lukewarm lives.

And yet,

on the ground floor

of a four-storeyed residence,

stands a man, 

his feet

three feet off the ground.

Hangs a man, 

tied to the ceiling

of his humility.

Apparently,

sunny afternoons

aren't warm enough

to keep

the cold decay within

from breathing.

Apparently,

clouded skies

and overcast existences

have never belonged

to the same weather.

And yet,

when the storm arrives,

we ask why the clouds didn't speak.

We offer umbrellas to people already underwater.

We say,

"I'm here if you need someone to talk to,"

as though silence

were merely a sentence

people forgot to finish.

As though

drowning begins

the moment

we notice it.

And yet,

the news will tell you tomorrow's weather,

the probability of rain,

the direction of storms,

the humidity in the air,

but never quite

the forecasts

of impending foreclosures.

The High Priestess Of Pretend Halos

Biology says I'm weeks away from menopause

but I've always had an aversion to uncomfortable truths

so I walk around with the angst of teenage drama. 

My father's lack of teeth is what I build my feminist out of

but I never forget to use his surname, 

you see I come from a long lineage of caste supremacy and an inherent sense of superiority for simply existing, 

and that's not a vice you can do away with; take away illusion and what is a magician left with?

I bleed every month for the dying and the decaying in Gaza, 

and I sell my support for Umar Khalid,

like that's all it takes to be called a revolutionary, 

but every time the country of Umar Khalid and of me, bleeds, 

I forget my words, because I can't afford to lose my teeth, 

because how does a snake continue to be a snake without its fangs?

I use my dysfunctional family as puppets to further my paper propaganda, 

and I chew my words, enunciating them with enough conviction

so no one dares question my intellect.

I don't have a spine so I offer unsolicited advice as a guise to latch my parasitic intentions on to, 

and before you realise, I would have crept so far up your ribs, 

you'd have to asphyxiate yourself to get rid of me.

Penises are my choice of scapegoats, 

I sever them, at the very first chance I get,

because butchery is all I really have, in the name of art. 

And, art is the dildo

I orgasm my casteist conscience to, every night, in the warmth of my cold bed.

I only flock myself with women two-thirds my age or younger, 

because the ones my age wake up to real-life consequences, 

and I am rather allergic to anything that questions the imagined Renaissance I'm the Michelangelo and the Da Vinci of.

Either them, or the men who've absolved themselves of their Y-chromosomes, 

the ones who have wrung themselves dry of the last traces of testosterone, and I'm the only one reeking of it

because in a congregation of flaccid penises, my clitoris becomes the only permissible erection, 

and that's how I like my feminism.

I breathe carbon monoxide into falsified vendettas, 

because it's twice the convenience;

it rids any spine with a penis I couldn't rid in person, 

and I am never cutting losses if and when the tables turn.

Call me whatever you like —

activist, artist, intellectual, revolutionary. 

Just don't call me honest.

I have spent a lifetime

mistaking manufactured applause for a mirror.

Residue

Human existence is

a curious phenomenon,

wasted

and wished away

believing

we're

a lot more

than

a good fuck

&

the residue

of another.