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.

All That Glitters Is Glass

When you eat glass truths,

you shit a kaleidoscope;

your asshole tears apart,

and you call it the price of liberation.

And when one calls it for what it is: shit,

you lose yours,

as if you were your illusion's only victim.

Deluded dumbfucks,

free falling off opioid illusions,

has always been

my preferred choice of entertainment.

Arachnoid Matter

Imagine a spider 

that houses a hundred thousand spiders within,

each crawling out to every crevice that exists,

every nook and corner your rounded fingertips will miss.

And as each of those spiders crawls back into their mother,

shredding every last morsel of information there exists,

the mother accumulates it all, gurgling her children's spoils,

and throws it up as the one thing humans could never digest:

equity.

No wonder, we call it artificial intelligence.

I grew up watching black widows in encyclopedia pages

and a singular tarantula, alive and well, in a glass jar.

And before you think I'm a psychopath for the second, if not the first, let me clarify:

my father was a scientist working in wildlife conservation, is all.

Long story short,

I've always found spiders fascinating.

Whether they breathed oxygen or internet

was never a discussion up for debate.

So I let the spider out and onto the web,

to do what it does best:

judge.

I know you thought I'd say humans for that,

but hey, I'm talking about who does it right.

The task was fairly simple.

Two poets.

Fifteen poems each.

Strip away the names.

Strip away the applause.

Strip away everything that arrived before the words.

Leave only the work.

Let it defend itself.

You'd be surprised

how swift justice becomes

when nobody gets to introduce themselves first.

The two poets had nothing in common.

One was the epitome of sainthood.

The other was chaos' love child.

One was measured sips of sangria,

reminiscing Byron and Keats.

The other was lusty gulps of whiskey,

debating why humans were the glitch in evolution.

One believed language was sacred

and kept it in temples.

The other believed it was utility

and wore language like footwear.

I know what you're thinking.

You think it would be rather obvious.

That the sangria-sipping, words-worshipping saint of sophistication

would make the classic sales pitch for poetry.

And you wouldn't be wrong in your assumptions.

I mean, how could you possibly?

When literature festivals screamed their faint asthmatic lungs

and declared it.

Artificial intelligence isn't a single spider.

It's more a glass jar full of them.

Pick any.

And if what you get doesn't satiate you,

pick until you run out of numbers.

So I obliged.

Five spiders.

Five different digestive systems.

And yet, the vomits had one commonality.

The whiskey-gulping, uncouth bastard

wearing alliterations for slippers

scored higher every single time.

I know you want to believe that anticlimax was me.

No, it wasn't.

I'm not Icarus.

I won't be the laboratory guinea pig to prove a point.

I'm a poet.

My narcissism won't let me see me judged.

I mean, how dare you?

Thank God for human stupidity.

Else who knows

how many of us

would have dared

call ourselves poets.

Marigolds On My Iron Windows

Every year,

we iron the flag,

dust the portraits

of those who came before us,

and rehearse gratitude

for the air we inherited.

The nation wakes up

to celebrate

the day it stopped belonging

to someone else.

Funny.

How a house can celebrate

changing landlords

without ever asking

why its windows

were designed like bars.

The empire left.

The emperor stayed.

It changed clothes,

learnt our languages,

memorised our prayers,

and discovered

the easiest way

to rule a people

is to hand them keys

to a door

that was never theirs.

We broke the chains.

Then melted them down

into jewellery.

Wore them around our necks.

Passed them down

like heirlooms.

Called them tradition.

Called them culture.

Called them

the way things have always been.

Freedom is a strange thing.

Everyone carries

a photograph of it.

Few recognise

the face looking back.

The soil remembers

what borders forget.

The child inherits

a surname

before inheriting a sky.

The woman inherits

a body

the world keeps trying

to own.

The hungry inherit

the right to choose their master

before they inherit

the right to choose a meal.

Perhaps independence

was never merely

the absence of a foreign hand.

Perhaps the cruelest lesson

was discovering:

a hand does not need

to come from elsewhere

to become a fist.

And perhaps the deepest cage

is the one

we decorate every year,

hang flowers on,

invite guests into,

and proudly call

home.

Table Manners

Morality is a lukewarm finger bowl

we rinse our stained spines in,

so we can point at the hands

carrying the crumbs

from the world we made them eat.