The Art Of Saying Nothing

Don't write if you have nothing to say

that hasn't been said over and again,

in more ways than your vocabulary permits,

your imagination allows.

Don't borrow metaphors

like they're your neighbour's scissors

and you've misplaced yours.

Don't claim them either,

unless you got them as birthday gifts.

Don't scribble mindless mnemonics

until your brain freezes,

then inspect the wreckage

and call it literature.

Don't waste pages upon pages

if not one of them makes you angry,

teary, or dizzy

when you read them aloud in your head.

I know what they say.

Anyone can be an artist.

Anything can be art.

Well, they lie.

Delusion has sold more art supplies

than Nobel Prizes ever could.

Narcissism has slaughtered more trees

than greed ever would.

Because the world has never run short of people with something to say;

only of those who'll say what everyone thinks but no one else would.

Dead To Rights

Someone told me today

I should die.

Someone told me today

that a good man 

lives with the consequences of his errors

every time he is told he has erred, 

and that if he dares to question the telling,

he should die

to cleanse himself of the sin of asking.

Don't get me wrong.

I've been asked to die before.

In fact,

I've failed more death wishes than cats have lives.

I'm sure each of them had reasons.

Reasons grand enough to warrant a death.

Wetting a bed of expectations is a rather expensive crime,

I've been made to understand.

But today wasn't one of those days.

Today I was asked to die 

because I had the audacity to question.

Today I was asked to die

because I had the arrogance to refuse surrender.

Today I was asked to die

because I had the gall to be allergic to commodes for mouths.

Today I was asked to die

because I had the tongue to read the law of the land aloud,

and the teeth to enunciate it,

to call a felony a statutory violation.

Someone told me today

I should die

because the creatures of convenience

lurking inside their nervous systems

whispered to them:

"He is the crime. He is the criminal."

Someone told me today

I should die

so they wouldn't have to live with their consequences.

And perhaps that, after all,

was the greatest crime I had committed:

I had refused to die 

so they could bury me guilty.

A Systemic Guide To Annihilation

I won't slit your throat.

What am I, a butcher?

I won't break your bones.

What am I, a thug?

I won't take your life.

What am I, the State?

I'll break your nerve.

Your nerves, actually. Plural.

I'll break them like they weren't.

And then I'll let you live.

Because the dead

can't spend the rest of their lives

waking in the middle of the night,

breaking into cold sweat,

wondering when I might return.

I'll leave you alive.

With your pulse intact.

Your doors locked.

Your windows shut.

And that little suspicion that none of it matters.

You'll wake up tomorrow.

Then the day after.

And every morning

will have to explain itself to you.

That's the kind of bastard I am.

Call me cruel.

Call me evil reincarnate.

Call me whatever you like.

The wound doesn't care what you name the knife.

I'm more of a sledgehammer, though.

Knives are too efficient.

They cut quick.

And what cuts quick doesn't cut deep.

A sledgehammer gives every surface

the depth it deserves.

That's how I have always imagined poetic justice;

when you want to plead with all your mouth and all your life for mercy, 

but you have too little left of either. 

If you must know, I take my poetry rather seriously.

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.