You've Got Places To Be

You know what I love about cities?

You.

Yeah, you.

Don’t look behind.

Nobody there is doing better.

You wake up.

Pick up your phone.

Not even a thought in between.

You stare straight

into the soul of the screen

mostly because muscle memory

also because that's the only place

souls dwell these days. 

You look at your phone

to check if you still exist

in other people’s lives.

No notifications?

You feel you've been downsized;

in thoughts, prayers, and relevance.

You shrink a little.

And then you get ready.

Dress up.

Step out.

And for what? 

Work? 

No. That'd be too simple.

You head out

to perform stability.

You walk fast.

Everyone does.

It’s not urgency.

It’s camouflage.

Because if you slow down,

even for a second,

it might look like you have nowhere to be.

And in a city,

having nowhere to be

is worse than having nothing to be.

In a city, 

you've got places to be.

So you keep moving.

Like your life has directions.

Like there’s a destination

that isn’t just… another version of this.

Conversations are efficient.

“How are you?”

“Good.”

We’ve reduced human emotion

to a loading bar that never completes.

Because the real answer —

“I don’t know what I’m doing, I’m tired in a way sleep can’t fix, and I think I built a life I don’t want to be in” —

is not a conversation.

It’s a liability.

So you learn the script.

“I’m good.”

You say it enough times,

it becomes less of a lie

and more of a habit.

Which is worse.

And relationships?

We’ve optimized those too.

You don’t fall in love.

Falling requires faith in gravity

and gravity is too slow.

You enter a negotiation instead.

A mutually beneficial association, 

a symbiotic ecosystem, 

until a sudden realisation dawns upon, 

"How do you tell symbiotes from parasites?"

You grow romance 

like entrepreneurs scale business.

Timing.

Availability.

Terms and conditions.

“I need space.”

Take it.

There’s plenty.

That’s the problem.

You’re not competing for love.

You’re competing for attention

in a room where everyone is also competing.

It’s not rejection.

It’s just…

you weren’t the best distraction at that moment.

Sit with that.

No actually, 

don’t.

That’s how people spiral.

So you move on.

New chat.

New person.

Same pattern.

Different name.

Same conversation.

Same ending.

And you call this experience.

Growth.

Clarity.

It’s not.

It’s repetition

with a foreign accent.

And then there’s ambition.

You’re building something.

Of course you are.

Everyone here is building something.

A company. 

A career.

A brand.

A version of yourself

that sounds convincing

when you say it out loud.

Nobody asks

“Can I live with this?”

Because that’s not the goal.

The goal is, 

“Can I keep going?”

And you can.

That’s the tragedy.

You can keep going

in a life that doesn’t fit

for a very long time.

Years.

Decades.

Entire identities.

Until one day,

you get everything you worked for.

The job.

The money.

The version of you

that once felt impossible.

And it’s quiet.

Not peaceful.

Not satisfying.

Just…

quiet.

And in that quiet,

for the first time,

nothing is chasing you.

No deadlines.

No urgency.

No next thing.

Just you.

And your brain finally asks, 

“Was this the plan, 

or just what happened

while you were too busy to question it?”

That’s the moment.

That’s the one moment

the city cannot protect you from.

And you will try.

Oh, you will try.

You’ll pick up your phone.

Open something.

Scroll.

Refresh.

But it won’t hit the same.

Because once you see it, 

you don’t unsee it.

That your entire life

has been a series of well-timed distractions

keeping you from a question

you were always supposed to answer.

Not because you couldn’t answer it, 

but because you already knew you wouldn’t like the answer.

And now it’s here.

No notifications.

No noise.

No escape routes.

Just one simple, stupid, terrifying question:

“If none of this was necessary, 

then what was?”

Anyway.

Alarm’s set for tomorrow?

Good.

Let’s not fix anything.

You’ve got places to be.

Ladybug

I might not make it, ladybug.

Wars eventually end

with piles of rotten flesh

on either side;

long dead

before oxygen

finds its way back.

And whoever ends up

with the most dead

loses the battle,

so the living

can stitch myths

of the ones

who couldn’t be killed.

All wars run the same course.

More or less.

Except

the ones you wage within.

Those wars

you keep telling yourself

are against the whims of the world.

You never really lose

a war with the world, do you

the world doesn’t bother

with a singular grain of sand

crashing into it.

To believe

you could scar its latitudes

is a dangerous delusion.

One I succumbed to early.

And once you fall

off that height,

spine broken, tendons bruised, 

you don’t quite learn

to walk straight again.

But then, 

the difference between delusion

and obsession

is only depth:

how far into your bloodstream

the daydream runs,

whether there’s still

something left

to cure.

I have always been persistent;

more often

with what should’ve been forgotten.

If only I had grown enough skin

to not feel the needle.

If only I had enough eyelids

to shut out my pupils.

You called it attention to detail, ladybug.

I think

the secret to life

is learning

to be inattentive.

I might not make it, ladybug.

It’s easy to give up on a fight

when you can’t walk straight.

But then again, 

when had I ever liked anything

that didn’t threaten

to take everything away?

The first time I charged

like a raging bull,

you thought

maybe this time

would be different.

I believed it.

When you grow up in warzones,

you learn to survive wars.

Survive long enough;

you start believing

you can win them.

I had more scars than wrinkles.

And those were just the ones

on the skin.

I had seen wars for decades —

lived them,

survived them,

outlived them.

It felt reasonable

to assume

this time too

I would make it;

scarred,

but unscathed.

The truth about those

who learn to live through wars is, 

they know

one day,

a war will end them.

There’s something almost sadistic in it:

the way they half-wish for it,

just to outlive extinction

one more time.

I fell again.

This time, harder.

Three broken ribs.

A punctured spleen.

You hoped

the gods would show mercy.

But my disbelief

was far too audacious

for forgiveness.

This time,

I healed less.

What do you heal into

when only half your body

remembers how to breathe?

I wasn’t just deluded.

I was obsessed

to the point of obsolescence.

Everything you once loved about me,

you now wish

I had, only much lesser.

I know.

You think, maybe then, 

it could all be different.

And I only ever wished, ladybug,

that one morning

we’d wake into sunlight

and call this

an elaborate nightmare.

But I’ve been out of wishes

for a long time.

You’d scold me first,

cry after,

then hold me, 

all of me, 

so tightly

I’d forget

how fragile you were.

You’d look me in the eye

and say

the most clichéd thing

known to the dying:

“It’s going to be fine.”

And the conviction

in your pupils

almost made me believe it.

Almost.

“Why do you want to leave early?”

you asked.

“Do you not like living with me?”

I could never tell you the truth:

that I was on a death wish

long before you came along.

And for a brief while,

I believed

you could save me.

I really did.

But death wishes collect.

Always.

No almosts.

No ifs.

No buts.

The truth about those

who learn to live through wars is, 

they know

one day,

a war will end them.

And sometimes,

they want it to.

Except this time, 

there is no wanting left.

No hope.

No windows.

You’ll scold me first,

hold me after.

You’ll call me a coward.

You always knew

how much I despised the becoming.

You’ll hope

I come back

to prove you wrong.

Like all those times.

But ladybug, 

look around.

The war is over.

There is no victory.

No defeat.

Just a body

that stopped fighting

before it stopped breathing.

And from here on, 

it will only ever 

be remembered

for as long as it takes 

to spell out a name.

Liar's Dice

Have you never lied

to friend, family,

or an absolute stranger?

Not the lies that bleed

like knives through the chest,

but the truths you borrowed

off lives you’ve spent

to be where you stand, 

for the theatre

of your truth-telling.

Have you never lied

to friend, family,

or an absolute stranger?

Not the lies that split atoms in two,

smudging ashen crimson

on the concrete canvases

of proud cityscapes,

but the truths you buried

in your bones

until your brain caved in, 

for the illusion

of greater good.

Have you never lied

for the love of your faith,

for the sake of your creed,

for the truths you told yourself

needed crafting with care?

Have you never lied

when questions were left at your door;

questions that threaten

to crumble the spines

of your acquired taste?

Have you never lied

when lives were put to trial;

lives that never agreed

to your inheritances,

and yet you found yourself

on the jury?

Have you never lied;

the thin, flimsy ones,

the fat, morbidly obese ones, 

as you looked yourself in the mirror

and muttered in shallow breaths:

"This is my story,

and I’ll tell it

however I deem fit."

The ghosts of yesterday

haunt today’s hangmen.

The past returns

not for memory;

but for flesh.

Grammar knew this

before we did:

the past participle

always comes back

to finish the sentence.

Power, like planets,

orbits in ellipses.

Today’s revolutions

are tomorrow’s kingdoms.

Ellipses do not close.

They continue.

And so do you. 

No matter how much you lie,

none of it will ever be enough.

Because beyond us simpletons, 

lies an entire universe

unbothered

by what we call truth

and what we disguise as lies.

But that won’t stop you,

will it?

Truth is a gamble, 

and you must roll the dice.

Sapiens

When a dog dies,

it just dies.

Horizontal,

returned to the ground,

until it loosens

into the grammar of soil;

as if liberation

was always fluid.

Other dogs continue.

A life in dog years

does not permit philosophy.

When a Sapiens dies,

it is never about death.

Not even about the dead.

I could have said

man, woman, people, 

but identity

is a stove left on;

look away long enough,

and it learns your name

by burning it.

Such are the times of Sapiens.

Sapiens:

an honourable skin to wear.

What other species

pets what it perfects killing?

Feeds it, names it,

breeds obedience into survival;

because survival,

once negotiated,

begins to look like love.

When a Sapiens dies,

it refuses to be just death.

Dying is too small

for a creature

that brewed religion

out of its own reflection,

and drank

until it believed

it could not spill.

It is not about the dead;

that would require letting go.

So the Sapiens keeps them.

Opens them.

Defines them.

Thinks through them, 

until philosophy

rearranges the corpse

into something

the living

can survive.

The Sapiens call it life;

wishing the living were dead

in the quiet mildew

of unventilated rooms.

The Sapiens call it mourning;

wishing the dead were alive

in the loud theatre

of refrigerated grief.

You would think

it values death

more than life;

a species

that can make meat

of anything,

and marinate itself

to taste.

Or that it cares

for the living and the dead

equally;

nothing,

until it can be sold:

in parts,

or whole.

But what do you know

of Sapiens.

What do you know

of honour.

Sapiens

is everything

that refuses to end

when it should.

You wish, 

instead of letting the dead stay dead, 

you could exhume them,

fingernails full of soil,

half-chewed silence in your mouth,

just to prove

you can still make

meaning

bleed.

Constipation

I come from

two contrasting generations of sperm cells;

a grandfather

whose poetry and politics

were equally loud and boisterous,

and a father

who chose subtlety

when it came to both words and wings:

so subtle

he could flip sides

without twitching eyebrows.

I was twelve

when I realised

the reason my grandfather

doesn’t speak to his brothers

is that they chose

a different flavour of communism.

Same tree.

Different branches.

And yet

that was enough

to make the roots of blood tremble.

I was twelve

when I realised

politics and petrol

should never be left out in the open;

give them oxygen

and they will burn down

entire civilisations.

Two decades later,

it is compulsory

to be political.

And being it

is not enough.

You must declare it.

Perform it.

Repeat it

until your politics

becomes tinnitus

in the ears of everyone around you.

Question one side

and you are accused

of being the other, 

with assumptions

too starved

to scrape past elementary algebra.

Call yourself apolitical

and they look at you

as if they are civilisation

and you are the jungle.

You see,

I have a persistent problem.

On one side,

a faith 

that diagnoses change for cancer, 

that worships the past

in the present

as the only future.

On the other,

a faith 

that calls change the singular truth, 

even when it abandons logic,

even when they can't quite add it up.

And I keep wondering, 

why can sanity not live

on the fringes,

in the middle,

or beyond them?

Why must thought

always pick a uniform?

Why must disagreement

always declare allegiance?

In a world

that cannot stop

emptying itself

loudly, publicly, endlessly,

and every street

stinks of ideological diarrhoea,

I refuse to flow.

I choose

to be constipation.

I Don't Wish To Paint Like You

I’ve never really been a painter.

You see, in my head

the word "painter" sprawls

in acrylic shades of a colouring palette.

And I could never quite find inspiration in colours.

It’s hard to, 

in a colourblind world

that sees skins

as pastel shades.

I paint what I see, 

how I see, 

in tinges and hues

of monochrome.

The colourblind call it

black and white.

Binary

is a convenient illusion

for the mathematically challenged.

I, though, call it

dwelling in greys, 

and the occasional burnt sienna.

I don’t sketch outlines.

I don’t reach for erasers.

I scribble.

I splatter. 

Blank page. 

Blank canvas. 

Bending lines. 

Pushing boundaries. 

A lot like 

the becoming of life;

no rough work,

no undo button,

no emergency exits.

But, 

what about 

getting it right

you ask. 

Right

isn’t the absence of wrong.

It is arriving

in spite of it.

In a world

that wants canvases

to look like photographs,

and photographs

to look like augmented realities, 

I am only

scribbling flawed faiths

and idiosyncratic incongruities

with absolute disrespect

for grammar.

How dare I call myself a painter?

When all I’ve done

is refuse

your colours, 

and still

paint.

The Syntax Of Survival

Life isn’t the story

you tell

after brushing lips with death.

That is spectacle.

A bullet.

A blade.

A bus. 

A bulldozer. 

A moment

loud enough

to be remembered.

Sudden.

Overwhelming.

Singular.

And singulars

are easy.

They arrive complete.

They leave behind

a clean sentence.

Life

is not written

in singular.

It stutters.

It repeats.

It refuses

completion.

Life is plural.

Not just

not dying once;

but surviving

again

and again

and again.

It is

not breaking the nib

when the hand trembles.

Not tearing the page

when the ink

thickens

into something

that feels like blood.

Because unlike death, 

surviving life

is not an event.

It has no witnesses.

No applause.

No language

that stays.

It is the discipline

of continuation.

And continuation

is not heroic.

It is mechanical.

A body

choosing

not to stop

without knowing why.

You are not alive

because you chose to be.

You are alive

because you have not

stopped.

And that's as hopeful

as hope ever gets. 

Hope

is not light.

Hope

is repetition.

And repetition

does not ask

if it means anything.

It continues.

So do you.