Manners For The Dead (Alternative Version)

Not so long ago,

I was summoned to make people laugh.

It wasn't the first time.

In fact, it's really more of a habit now.

But it was the first time

I'd been summoned to palliative care.

Palliative care.

Or, as you'd think

but never say out loud,

on the brink of death.

What you'll really say is

terminally ill,

as if they were at a bus terminus,

headed to extinction.

Apparently, a good laugh is the best foot forward

when easing into conversations about death.

I've always found that idea

both outrageously ridiculous

and abrasively deluded.

How do you bring yourself

to talk about the one thing

you have spent your entire life

teaching yourself to run away from

at the first hint of it?

I lost my father's father

when I was ten

and he was eighty.

I didn't know him enough to cry.

Or so I told myself.

How else do you explain

looking at others wailing and lamenting,

and somehow pinching yourself

into crying,

only to find

your eyes paralysed dry?

I lost my mother's mother

when I was seventeen.

I needed to be strong

so my mother didn't need to be.

Or so I told myself.

How else do you explain

watching someone wither away

from shallow breaths

to deathbed

to ashes,

and feeling

this vast grassland

of tamed void?

I held a hen by the throat

as it was beheaded

when I was thirteen.

Warm blood

gushed out like smoke

into the thick winter air,

then clotted

across my palm and fingers.

I told myself

this is how dinners

must have felt

for cave men.

I was just a boy

temporarily frozen

in a time my father's father,

or his father,

couldn't remember.

I've watched people die.

I've heard people die.

I've watched things

animate and inanimate, die.

I've heard things

wise and otherwise, die too.

And yet, every time,

I've failed at crying.

Failed at feeling

the stab through my ribs.

Although I've always known

those were supposed to be

the acceptable ways

of civilisation.

So every time,

I've questioned my manners.

I have tried killing myself.

Not once.

Not twice.

A whole of three times.

And except for the scars

on my skin,

I don't remember much

of those either.

I've seen people go awfully silent

on learning someone's lost

a parent,

a spouse,

a friend,

a family,

an animal they called a pet.

I've seen people apologise

to the grieving.

I've often wondered:

is it on behalf

of the dead,

or the bereaved?

A wise man

who'd studied minds

for a living and loving

once told me

I am but a graveyard

of the many corpses

I've had wither away

beneath my blood and bones.

And graveyards don't emote.

They only observe.

Every time I see

or hear of death now,

I wonder

if they can see

the ghosts

I house.

Manners For The Dead

Not so long ago,

I was summoned to make people laugh.

It wasn't the first time.

By then,

making people laugh was almost a habit.

But it was the first time

I'd been summoned to palliative care.

Palliative care.

Such a polite phrase for a place 

where death has already entered the room.

We want to say "dying" or "at the brink of death" but that's rude, we have been taught, 

so we say, "terminally ill", 

as though the person were waiting at a bus terminus,

ticket in hand,

headed somewhere we've agreed not to name.

Apparently,

a good laugh is the best foot forward

when easing into conversations about death.

I've always found that

both outrageously ridiculous and abrasively deluded.

How do you make conversation

about the one thing

you've spent your entire life learning not to look at?

I lost my father's father when I was ten, and he was eighty.

I didn't know him well enough to cry.

Or so I told myself.

How else do you explain

watching other people wail and lament,

then pinching yourself

into trying to produce tears,

the appropriate evidence,

only to find

your eyes paralysed dry?

I lost my mother's mother when I was seventeen.

I needed to be strong

so my mother wouldn't have to be.

Or so I told myself.

How else do you explain

watching someone thin themselves 

from breath to deathbed to ashes,

and feeling nothing that looked sufficiently like grief?

Just this vast grassland of tamed void.

When I was thirteen,

I held a hen by the throat while it was beheaded.

Warm blood gushed over my hand and fingers,

steaming into the winter air

before clotting across my palm.

I told myself

this must be how dinners felt to cavemen.

I was just a boy,

temporarily frozen in a time

my father's father, or his father, couldn't remember.

Perhaps that 

was the first thing I learned about death:

when something becomes too difficult to feel,

the mind gives it a story instead.

I've watched people die.

I've heard people die.

I've watched things animate and inanimate, die.

I've heard things wise and otherwise, die too.

And every time, I've wondered

where the feeling was.

Not because I didn't know

what I was supposed to feel.

Because I did.

There are manners for the dead.

You cry.

You lower your voice.

You remember the good things.

You stand beside the corpse

and behave as though

grief were a language

everyone was born speaking.

I have always been bad at the language.

So I questioned my manners.

I have tried killing myself.

Not once.

Not twice.

Three times.

I remember very little.

Except the scars.

They remember more than I do.

I've watched people go awfully silent

on learning someone has lost

a parent,

a spouse,

a friend,

a family,

an animal

they called a pet.

I've watched people apologise to the grieving.

I've often wondered, 

is it on behalf of the dead,

or the bereaved?

Death is very good at leaving people without verbs.

We say sorry.

We say take care.

We say they're in a better place.

We say anything

that keeps the corpse

from becoming

the only honest thing in the room.

A wise man who studied minds for a living and loving

once told me, 

I am a graveyard

of the many corpses

I've had wither away beneath my blood and bones.

I've thought about that more than I care to admit.

Because graveyards don't cry.

They don't scream.

They don't ask why someone had to die.

They only keep what is left.

And perhaps that is what I've been doing all these years.

Keeping.

The grandfather.

The grandmother.

The hen.

The strangers.

The people who became memories before I learned what to call them.

Every death leaves something behind.

Sometimes a photograph.

Sometimes a scar.

Sometimes a sentence someone keeps repeating

because repetition is the closest thing we have to resurrection.

And sometimes, apparently, it leaves a ghost.

So every time I see or hear of death now,

I don't wonder whether I can feel it.

I wonder whether the dead can see the ghosts I house.

Chromatic Malfunction

Colour is a neurological rumour.

Think about it.

We trust our eyes with astonishing confidence

for organs that spend half their lives

mistaking shadows for people.

Your eyes don't actually see colour.

They perceive different wavelengths of light.

Your brain takes the evidence,

runs it through some ancient wet software,

and announces: RED.

And because nobody has ever thought

to question the software,

we call this reality.

Purple is even funnier.

There is no single wavelength of light that says: I am purple.

Purple is your brain

looking at certain combinations of light

and essentially going,

"Fuck it. Call it purple."

And we did.

We named it.

We painted with it.

We wore it.

We put it on flags.

We gave it royal significance.

Humanity has always been remarkably generous

towards things that don't exist the way we think they do.

Black is stranger.

White is stranger still.

Neither is a single wavelength of visible light.

Black is what you get

when visible light doesn't make it back to your eyes.

White is what you get

when a whole spectrum decides to arrive, all at once.

And yet, 

put them on a palette

and suddenly:

Black.

White.

Colours.

Apparently physics can be overruled

by an artist with a piece of cardboard.

Which should have been the end of the matter.

And yet, it wasn't.

Because then we looked at skin.

And we did 

what humans always do

when confronted

with something different.

We named it.

Black.

White.

Brown.

As if a human being were a paint sample.

As if melanin were a moral position.

As if somebody's epidermis had arrived with political affiliations.

And then,

because naming wasn't apparently quite stupid enough,

we arranged them on the branches of a tree.

This colour is beautiful.

That colour is dirty.

This colour is intelligent.

That colour is primitive.

This colour belongs here.

That colour belongs there.

This colour should rule.

That colour should serve.

This colour should be feared.

This colour should be desired.

This colour should be married.

This colour should be killed.

A photon changed direction

and civilisation lost its fucking mind.

Think about the scale of the stupidity.

We took an optical distinction

and turned it into a social distinction.

Then a social distinction into a hierarchy.

Then a hierarchy into an institution.

Then an institution into an empire.

Then an empire into a history textbook

with the audacity to call itself objective.

We have enslaved people over pigmentation.

Colonised people over pigmentation.

Segregated people over pigmentation.

Murdered people over pigmentation.

Generations have lived and died under systems

built around how light happened to bounce off their skin.

A fucking photon.

Imagine being so confident in your eyesight

that you construct a civilisation around it.

We don't even agree on what we are seeing.

Ask two people to describe a colour

and eventually you discover

that nobody has access

to anybody else's experience of it.

Your red could be my red.

Your red could be something

I have no god damned idea how to imagine.

We have no way of checking.

And yet we've spent centuries

checking each other's worth

by skin tone.

That is perhaps the most human thing about us.

Black is never just black.

White is never just white.

Purple isn't even a single wavelength

and somehow

we gave it a fucking monarchy.

So perhaps

the problem was never colour.

Perhaps colour

was simply the first thing

our eyes noticed and our egos could weaponise.

We keep insisting

the world is black and white.

It isn't.

It never was.

There are wavelengths.

There are bodies.

There are billions of slightly different ways of being alive.

And then there is the human brain,

squinting at all of it,

desperate to simplify what it cannot control, and whispering:

"I know what colour you are."

Perhaps that is the real malfunction.

Not that we see colour.

That we see it and think

we've understood the anatomy wearing it.

Shame On You

Every now and then,

a question trickles in.

It never stops at the question, does it?

Before you know it,

questions pile up like worms,

crawling beneath the skin

and above the flesh,

looking for somewhere

to make themselves hurt.

It always starts innocently enough.

Something mundane.

Something frequent.

Something with just enough

existential crisis

to still be considered

a recreational drug.

Something like,

"What is this life I've been living?"

And before you can exhale,

your entire existence

comes rushing back at you.

Childhood.

Adolescence.

Adulthood.

Not the flashback

you imagined death would give you.

More like, 

an anthology of evidences on trial.

You want to remember

every memory that once made you happy,

every story you once told proudly,

even if only for a second.

Nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

Everything that once made you happy

is either dead, broken, or extinct.

Everything you once took pride in

has been drowned by everything

you hoped you would one day take pride in,

but could only ever lose face over.

And that is what floods your hollowed-out insides now,

as though someone carefully removed every organ of your being

and kept only the shirt of your skin alive.

You look into the mirror

and before your reflection can look back at you,

you flinch.

Grainy lumps gather

around your epiglottis.

You swallow.

They stay.

You swallow again.

They stay.

You look away,

and still your peripheral vision

catches the shape of your anatomy.

You shudder from within.

The face isn't yours.

The dark circles aren't yours.

The wrinkles aren't yours.

The warts on your neck aren't yours.

The malformed torso isn't yours.

You can't tell whether your idea of you has failed you,

or whether you are the one who failed your becoming.

Then come the other lives.

The lives you secretly desired.

The lives you criticised

because admitting you wanted them

would have meant confessing

you were jealous.

You called them shallow. Pretentious. Lucky.

Anything that made envy sound like discernment.

Now they flash before you

like breaking news

on a channel bought and paid for by the throne.

Everything you've faltered at.

Everything they haven't.

Everything you could have had,

had it not been for you.

You have always been

your weakest tissue.

Your one true nemesis.

The only person you could never outrun,

because you kept taking yourself with you.

And somewhere

between the promise of a prodigy

and the frantic of a failure,

your life stopped hanging by a thread.

Instead, it hung itself with the thread.

You can't quite tell when.

If you could,

perhaps you could blame a particular year, month, week, day, hour, minute, second.

A decision. A person.

A door you didn't open.

A door you opened too late.

But there is no moment to blame.

Only the accumulation.

One compromise. One hesitation.

One morning you didn't get up.

One thing you never finished.

One thing you finished and wished you hadn't.

One version of yourself after another,

quietly becoming the person you promised you wouldn't be.

And no matter what you've done,

you know it isn't enough.

Because although

it broke every bone inside you

to become who you are today,

it isn't enough to be remembered, is it?

If you were gone

like a sudden southern wind,

if you dropped dead

in the middle of the day,

do you think

you could halt the traffic?

Would somebody step out of a cab

and gasp, "Shit!"

Would the city notice the absence of one more body?

Or would everyone simply go around you,

late for work, late for lunch,

late for something they would forget by evening?

If the world didn't stop to notice your life

and doesn't stop to witness your death,

what exactly were you doing here?

The temperature inside your body changes.

Your neck stiffens.

Your head feels giddy.

Flashes of scorching heat

trade places across your skin.

It is a pleasant night outside,

and yet you are sweating

like a smouldering afternoon.

You wish wishes were true,

so you could have a disappearing wish,

if not a death wish,

because apparently even wishing death

has been another thing you've managed to fail at.

You've spent a life trying not to be ashamed.

Trying to outrun

the things you've done, the things you haven't done,

the person you became, the person you didn't.

Trying to hide from every mirror, 

every memory, every comparison,

every version of yourself

that knew exactly what you had failed to become.

What a shame.

You've spent a life trying not to get caught

in its game of hide-and-seek,

when shame has been breathing

the same air your shadow's been

all along.

Mumbles Of Meaning

We have decided

the butterfly means something.

Of course we have.

Give a human being

anything that exists

without requiring our permission

and within minutes

we will put a metaphor on it.

The butterfly must mean transformation.

The bee must mean perseverance.

The lotus must mean purity.

The crow must mean death.

A crow! 

It was just looking for breakfast.

We decided it must be an omen.

This is what we do.

We cannot leave anything

alone long enough

to remain itself.

A flower cannot simply be a flower.

It must represent innocence

before we pluck it,

put it in a vase, watch it die,

and call the arrangement beautiful.

A tree cannot simply grow.

It must represent resilience.

Especially if it is growing

through concrete,

because apparently

photosynthesis becomes inspirational

the moment civilisation tries to kill it.

We adore resilience.

It makes oppression look like character development.

The butterfly is particularly useful.

It crawls into a disgusting little sack

of its own dissolved organs

and emerges with wings,

so naturally we decided 

suffering is the admission fee for becoming beautiful.

The butterfly has no idea.

It is busy looking for nectar.

It has never heard of your healing journey.

It did not emerge from the cocoon

to become the person you were always meant to be.

It emerged because that is what butterflies do.

Honestly, the arrogance! 

Imagine being a butterfly and discovering 

that some bald ape has written twelve thousand words

about what your metamorphosis taught him about himself.

You were eating.

He was having a breakthrough.

The bee is worse.

We have made tattle tales out of it.

Hardworking.

Disciplined.

Selfless.

Productive.

In short, everything your parents wanted you to be and your paychecks needed you to be.

The bee has no fucking idea

it is the poster child

for adulting and corporate resilience.

It is simply collecting pollen.

It will die doing it.

We call that dedication.

If a human does the same thing

we call it burnout

and sell him a wellness retreat.

The flower doesn't care either.

It doesn't care that poets

have compared it to women.

It doesn't care that painters

spent centuries trying

to get its colour right. 

It doesn't care that somebody

once received a bouquet

and finally understood

what love was.

The flower was trying to reproduce.

You were trying to get laid.

Only one of you needed the metaphor.

Then there is the sunset.

Holy shit!

We have done terrible things to the sunset.

We have made it hope.

Closure.

New beginnings.

Goodbyes.

Second chances.

A reminder that even endings can be beautiful.

The sun, meanwhile,

is undergoing a nuclear reaction.

It is not saying goodbye.

It is not forgiving you.

It is not closing a chapter.

It is burning.

It has been burning for billions of years.

Without a single fucking opinion about your breakup.

And yet,

we stand beneath it

with tears in our eyes

and have the ravishing audacity to say,

"Maybe everything happens for a reason."

No.

Maybe the sun is just a ball of violently collapsing plasma.

Maybe the bird is just hungry.

Maybe the tree is just ageing.

Maybe the river is just going downhill.

Maybe the butterfly is just trying to find a flower.

Maybe the flower is just trying to fuck.

Maybe the bee is just trying not to die.

Maybe none of them are trying to tell you anything.

Maybe they don't even know you exist.

And that should be the most liberating thing we have ever heard.

But we can't have that.

Because 

if the butterfly doesn't mean transformation,

then what does your transformation mean?

If the river

isn't teaching you to let go,

then who exactly

is going to validate your letting go?

If the dead bird isn't a sign,

perhaps death doesn't need to teach you anything.

And if the sunset isn't beautiful

because it reminds you of something,

then perhaps beauty was never the point.

Perhaps the universe has never been speaking to us.

Perhaps it has been doing something far more insulting.

It has been existing.

Without symbolism.

Without sentiment.

Without a fucking audience.

And we,

unable to bear the possibility

that something can exist without needing us,

have spent thousands of years

turning everything around us into a mirror.

Then we looked into the mirror,

saw ourselves,

and called it God.

Dare I Question The Patron Saints

How dare you question a dead woman?

Have some decency.

She's already dead.

Can't you see she has suffered enough?

Besides, we've finished improving her.

The woman was complicated.

Disgusting, really.

She had contradictions.

Existential dysfunctionalities.

Barometric fluctuations of headspace pulled at the poles between serotonin and cortisol.

Children.

She had children.

A kitchen.

And, a life that refused to behave like a feminist literature seminar.

So naturally, we killed the woman and kept the name.

That's just so much easier.

The corpse doesn't ask for royalties.

The corpse doesn't say, "actually, that's not what I meant".

The corpse doesn't object when you put a flag where the diagnosis used to be.

And suddenly,

miracle of miracles, 

suicide becomes empowerment.

Despair becomes resistance.

A breakdown becomes a declaration of rebellion.

A tragedy gets an inspiring backstory.

A nervous system gets a political affiliation.

The dead are very progressive that way.

They never contradict the people speaking on their behalf.

But there were children. Two infants. In another room.

And this is where the poetry gets awkward.

Because if the gas had spread,

if the fire had started,

if the accident had become what accidents occasionally become, 

the literary canon might have had two additional corpses to turn into metaphors.

What a relief that literature got lucky.

Apparently luck is now a feminist virtue.

Don't misunderstand me. Or actually do. 

But don't miss the fishbone in the throat.

The poems can be brilliant.

In fact, let them be brilliant.

That's the fucking point.

I don't need the poet to be a saint to read a poem.

I don't need Shakespeare's moral clearance before reading Shakespeare.

I don't need a poet's childhood, marriage, politics, sins, saints, sins against saints, or parking history

stapled to the back of every metaphor.

A poem isn't a character reference.

A metaphor doesn't inherit its mother's criminal record. Or its father's.

Art is not a family court.

But apparently

we've decided the artist and the art must be Siamese twins.

So when the artist does something you in your deluded godliness deem unforgivable, 

cut the poem in half.

When the artist is clinically insane, 

medicate the metaphor.

When the artist is politically inconvenient, 

ban the stanza, because burning was never enough.

When the artist is useful to your politics, 

quick, somebody laminate the corpse.

This is not criticism.

This is taxidermy with a reading list.

And feminism, 

dear God, 

feminism has become

the world's most convenient laundering service.

Put anything through it long enough

and apparently it comes out empowered.

Victimhood? Empowered.

Despair? Empowered.

Self-destruction? Empowered.

Abandoning infants while constructing a potentially lethal environment?

Careful.

That's not a sentence we like in the brochure.

Please say “act of rebellion” and keep walking.

The really delicious part is that 

you cannot question any of this.

Because she is dead.

Which apparently means

she has been promoted

from human being to constitutional amendment.

You may not dissent.

You may interpret.

You may adore.

You may write three thousand words about her courage.

But question?

Absolutely not.

How dare you question a dead woman?

She cannot defend herself.

Which is precisely why everyone has decided to use her like mascara:

apply when politically convenient, 

wipe off when the argument ends.

We do this constantly.

We find a dead person who suffered beautifully and immediately ask:

What can we make this suffering mean?

Not, 

what happened

to this person?

Not,

what was wrong?

Not,

what could we have

understood?

No.

Meaning first.

Human being later.

We don't want the corpse to teach us about human dysfunctionalities.

We want the corpse to teach us about our imagined brilliance.

Much more flattering.

So here's my heresy:

perhaps a woman can be brilliant and broken.

Perhaps a poet can write masterpieces and commit acts sanity cannot forgive.

Perhaps damage is not automatically empowerment just because the patient wrote beautifully about it.

Perhaps feminism doesn't require a woman to become a saint, and a man, a sinner.

Perhaps the dead don't become morally immaculate simply because their funerals are over.

And perhaps, 

brace yourselves, 

a poem can survive its poet.

Apparently this is now radical politics.

So bury the woman if you must.

Canonise her. Weaponise her.

Turn her into a feminist warrior, a tragic heroine, 

a patron saint of every argument that needs a dead woman to stop answering back.

But leave the poems alone.

They did nothing.

And if you insist that the poet's sins must contaminate the poetry,

fine.

Be consistent.

Start burning the entire canon.

I'll bring matches.

You bring the hypocrisy.

Martyrs Make Memorable Merchandise

In a country that never stopped learning

the ethics of slavery,

we call what was once survival

ambition.

There is more opinion than education,

and yet we wonder

why governments keep failing us.

We wail about a dying democracy

because it no longer benefits us

befittingly enough,

and for the self-proclaimed elites,

the crème de la crème,

that is apparently worth waging wars over.

We work for people

who work for people

who work for people,

for a monthly allowance

we dare to call financial freedom,

then scream our lungs out

in dim-lit bars

about equality being our birthright

and hierarchy

a capitalist conspiracy.

We live capitalist lives

while preaching everything but capitalism,

and depending on which side

of the fallacy you're standing on:

religion as an act of faith

or intellect as its currency, 

you're either the right

or the left.

However much you plead otherwise,

the choice was made

before you arrived.

The left insists on being called intellectual

while abhorring labels,

identities, definitions,

and every other grammar

that becomes inconvenient that day.

The right is rather keener

on taking your food,

your land,

your tongue,

your faith,

and eventually

your definition of a life worth living.

The difference is simple:

the right is united

in its uncouthness,

its barbarism,

its certainty;

the left 

can never seem to agree

on what is left

and what is not.

And yet,

for the better part of the last half-decade,

both have had

a common currency.

Umar Khalid.

The left pulls him out of the hat

like a rabbit

whenever it needs to win an argument

against the left.

I know you were expecting

left against right,

but the right doesn't believe

in conversations

that aren't monologues.

The right reserves him

for another purpose:

a cautionary tale

for anyone who mistakes

a democracy

for permission to question the government.

I'm not going to waste words

cataloguing the right's failures:

the ever falling rupee,

the whenever falling bridges,

and the never-falling appetite

for trading people

for cheaper than cows.

But then, mothers have always sold

greater stakes than children

in this country,

haven't they?

But Umar Khalid

isn't really about Umar Khalid.

The left uses him

the way Umar Khalid wishes

he could use a get-out-of-jail card:

whenever,

wherever,

against whosoever.

It lays siege to his name

as though it owns him,

then comes out wearing his face

on fabric,

linen,

paper,

plastic.

But 

Umar Khalid refuses

to remain symbolic.

Because how long

can you defend an idea

without knowing

the skin of it?

So the argument moves.

From him

to Kashmir.

From Kashmir

to Gaza.

From Gaza

to Jews.

And the farther it travels

from the country

that produced the argument,

the louder the confidence becomes.

Because opinions are important.

Context is negotiable.

And staying out of jail

is non-negotiable.

Perhaps that is the great joke

of our politics:

the right turns people

into warnings,

the left turns them

into arguments,

and both forget

that people are neither.

If intellect were currency,

the left would have Umar Khalid

on the rupee.

Because that is the only way

we seem to know

how to value a revolution:

by printing them

on the side

we have already chosen.