No Smoking

Had it not been for smokers,

matchboxes would have been just another commodity;

the kind you keep losing track of

between haywire groceries

and unpaid electricity bills.

But once you make a habit

of burning cigarettes like calories,

the matchsticks begin believing

they hold the strings to sanity.

Give them enough time,

and one even starts believing

fire exists because it does.

Illusion is a rather efficient analgesic;

numbs you just enough

to mistake proximity for power.

Gather enough matchsticks together,

and suddenly matchboxes become religion;

a revolution sworn

to cleanse the world of its filth.

Except fire has never cleaned a thing.

It merely blackens what survives it.

But who explains nuance

to a box full of matchsticks

thumping their chests

like Neanderthals discovering thunder?

And then one day,

the matchstick finds itself

on the other side of gasoline;

unaware of scale,

anatomy,

or architecture.

So it gathers its little army of matchsticks

and begins screaming battle cries

at a thing

built entirely

to swallow fire whole.

And gasoline, almost tenderly,

spreads its arms and legs,

lies still with a wry smile,

and waits.

The matchsticks learned that day:

you cannot absolve

what you cannot contain.

To The Women Who Use Feminism Like Barricades & Throw It Like Grenades

I want you to know, I know.

I know you are not feminists.

I know you are nothing like feminists.

I can smell your rehearsed disgust

for a gender you have neither lived nor loved.

And while you insist you survived men,

you have mostly used them

as caricatures in stories of your battle scars;

the same scars you inherited

from mothers and grandmothers

like trauma was a family heirloom

stitched into the skin.

I can see through your audacious eye-rolls,

basking in victories

borrowed from books

borrowed from friends

who borrowed them from another century.

Every passing day,

you collect rage

like public toilets collect change at the entrance,

and by the end of the week,

as your jean pockets clink and clatter,

you write poetry

about the rattling noise of shackles.

I can hear through your loudly hollow screams;

the ones visible in your epiglottis

but never in your spine.

Because calloused hands and battered bones

are not beautiful.

And revolutions, contrary to what you were told,

rarely survive air-conditioning.

Ever since you read Lady Lazarus,

you have mistaken feminists for phoenixes.

But Sylvia Plath lived her metaphors,

and you can barely survive your scribbles.

You think you will burn men

and rise from their ashes.

But if you truly understood metaphor,

you would not have to torment your tonsils

to manufacture one.

I want you to know, I know.

I know who you are.

I know what you are.

I can smell the scorn in your breath

like the stupor of a functioning alcoholic;

worn in crimson lipstick

the way lions wear vanity in their mane.

You walk with the air

you imagine warriors walk with,

because seeing one

is largely impermissible

through rose-wine evenings

and air-conditioned rebellion.

So you call it sisterhood

and inherit victories by association,

as though courage were contagious

and suffering transferable through proximity.

I can see the lies

you tell the world,

and yourself a little more carefully.

Because intoxication is important.

One must remain allergic to daylight.

And it is imperative

the world mistakes insecurity for mystique.

So the closer sobriety approaches,

the more the cracks begin appearing;

small and sudden

like acne before photographs.

And every last shred of logic and reason

is drowned quietly,

because once a person learns

to deny existence despite evidence,

invincibility becomes

a remarkably achievable magic trick.

I can hear through the corridors

of your pedicured pedagogy

and manicured mannequin existence;

almost as though feminists

were not flesh and blood

but carefully typed placeholders

for fashionable suffering.

Because humans are fragile,

and fragility is inconvenient

to those who masturbate

to weaponised vulnerability

like it were a revolutionary act.

But then,

when has truth ever inconvenienced

plastic prophets?

And when has the food chain

ever bothered vegan vigilantes

choking politely

on tofu and almond milk?

I want you to know, I know.

I know what you think of men like me.

I know you want to burn me,

because burials are never proof enough of death

for vermin like me.

I know you want me erased,

because even the silence of a question mark

feels intolerably audacious

inside republics built from feelings.

I know you want every trace of me gone,

because germs like me

have an ugly habit

of returning from nothing.

I want you to know, I know.

I want you to know, 

it troubles me

about as much

as your housemaid’s menstrual cycle

interrupts your good night’s sleep.

The Ragdolls Of Rubber Revolt

When evidences pile up

like dead flies around a flicker,

feelings rush through criminal crevices

like leaking drains in monsoon cities.

Words, they insist,

have the power to hurt,

but only when those words

refuse to kneel at their imagined altars.

Not when they sculpt them into effigies

and set entire lives ablaze

for public spectacle.

Feelings, they say,

are what make a country democratic.

So they mourn its death

while torching every textbook

that ever mentioned judiciary.

And when the scales of law

curl into a constitutional middle finger

shoved down their audacious thoraxes,

they howl about failed systems

like arsonists

calling the fire brigade.

Because every mob

believes itself wounded.

Every slogan

thinks itself sacred.

Every fanatic

calls his reflection persecution.

That is how countries rot:

not when hatred arrives screaming,

but when cruelty learns to sit straight

in a fancy dress of feelings.

And every arsonist becomes

a historian of smoke,

insisting the fire

was a misunderstanding of light.

What a remarkable privilege it must be,

inside an ironclad republic

of damning defections,

to become

a freedom fighter

for candyfloss feelings.

Internal Bleeding

Noise has never killed anyone.

Struck by thunder

is merely a heart

beating faster than usual.

Silence, on the other hand —

struck by lightning

is struggling

to keep that same heart pulsating.

Noise is firecrackers;

remove the decibels

and it’s hollow through and through.

Silence is a needle:

easy in,

quick closure.

What Will It Take To Take Me Down

It’ll take a lot more than sticks and stones

and marrow-hollowed bones.

It’ll take a lot more than whispers and charades

and rose-tinted princess parades.

It’ll take a lot more than matchsticks and gasoline

and brains shrink-wrapped in cellophane.

It’ll take a lot more than paper straws and a misplaced Plath,

and air-conditioned fits of rehearsed wrath.

It’ll take a lot more than black lipstick and kohl-eyed sighs,

and rebellion stitched into readymade ties.

It’ll take a lot more than revolutions sold as grocery,

and trauma repackaged as ancestral sorcery.

It’ll take a lot more than pastel scratches and iced teas,

and flightless birds and headless bees.

It’ll take a lot more than borrowed rage

sold in café lights, 

and fashionable bruises mistaken for fights.

It’ll take a lot more than all of those and a frown,

to drown a thing that survived learning how to drown.

Scarecrow

Back when elephants grew on trees

and holy cows ruled the ill-lit jungles,

there lived a crow, who’d caw through days and nights

like cawing was the only thing she was made of.

She cawed at the cows,

and the monkeys,

and the pigeons,

and the leopards, 

and they all turned away,

because that is how the jungle learned to treat noise without teeth.

The crow thought otherwise though;

elated how every soul in the jungle was terrified of her.

She was a magician, and fear was her sleight of hand.

Then one afternoon,

she cawed at a wolf.

She cawed, and cawed, and cawed, 

and followed it too far to turn back.

And when she finally ran out of distance,

the wolf held her by the throat

and kept chewing at her silence

while her eyes stayed open.

Oh Darling, I'm A Romantic

Oh darling, I’m a romantic.

I love you

like the constitution loves its criminals,

like pesticides love writhing worms.

I love you

like a butcher’s knife loves flesh.

Press against me hard enough

and I’ll watch you drain out of yourself.

Oh darling, I’m a romantic. 

Stain me

and I’ll dry-clean you

on a rope strung oblique.