A Fish Bone Named Melancholy

Have you ever had a singular fish bone stuck down your throat?

Up until now, it was an everyday, and this was just another meal

Fishes for you are a routine really

You've washed them and marinated them, and cooked them and relished their soft flesh disintegrating into flavours your palette has had  a fondness for

And yet, here you are, choking on a bone, the eyes can't see and the throat can't feel

And yet every time you even try to gulp down water, it hurts, it scratches the walls of your throat, somewhat like a needle scratching the insides of your skin

It bleeds but you can't see, it hurts but there's no ointment, no quick fix

You wait a while thinking it will move on, and you'll forgive and forget

The bone, is it really just a bone, or a rather flimsy yet solidary reminder of a bygone that shouldn't have mattered

All you really want is to get over with it

And yet, the bone doesn't move an inch

Stuck onto the insides so intricately, you wouldn't even trust a surgeon to get it right

You think you'll wake up tomorrow, and it'll be a better day

The fish bone will be gone like a short-lived nightmare, buried in your sleep

You wake up and as if on cue, the prick of the bone wakes up too

You're scared of your body, your being

Every time your parched mouth pushes down a lump of spit down the throat as a habit, you hurt again

It's not a fresh wound anymore

It's the blunt pain of a cut being continually cut open before it can even stand a chance at healing

Thoughts cloud your head

Thoughts you'd thought you'd left behind

Thoughts you'd think you wouldn't want to think

Thoughts that have transformed mere mortals into mind-numbing poets

And yet, you don't bleed a word

The brain can't gather words

The pain within, asking to for a fix you don't have

Life inside, seeking hope you seem to have lost

You wish for all of it to just end, whatever the cost

Who decides how costly is too costly

As you begin to lose your sanity, drawing inspiration from your withering voicelessness, thrives

A fish bone named melancholy

Ba Ba Black Sheep

It's funny, isn't it

How words, phrases, sentences, change meanings in ways you never thought was possible

It's funny, isn't it

How possible is one of those very words

Growing up, possible determined the intricacies and difficulties of the task at hand

Grown up, possible was a lot more about how I was never good enough

It's funny, isn't it

That the father I was expected to idolise, is the same father who beat me and didn't stop till my skin was thick enough to hurt him back

It's funny, isn't it

That the mother I was expected to feel indebted to, is the same mother who didn't blink an eyelid before making a sacrificial lamb of my self-respect in front of a thousand strangers, to prove a point, to win the battle of egos

It's funny, isn't it

How once, not very long ago, ba ba black sheep was a nursery rhyme, and yet today, ba ba black sheep is the truth of my life, for that's what they call the ones who don't fit the prescribed standards of a family

It's funny, isn't it

How what was once the blood in their veins is now the clots on the linen of my shirt, as I murmur softly in my heavy breath "ba ba black sheep", and the curtains fade

The Shit Called Art

High above the stinking poverty line

And waist below the sickening exorbitantly rich

Exists layers of mediocrity 

Wrapped in levels of narcissism

Add up all possible permutations and combinations of the mediocrity layers and narcissism levels

And you get the whole of the shit-stained public lavatory that calls itself, the middle class

Every fuck-up needs a distraction

A mirage in the endless desert of a life

Deep down you know it's not real let alone be worthy

But then aren't we all empty crab shells pretending to be wholesome meals

Trying hard to forget our day jobs being skeletons in coffins in graveyards that smell of coffee, bullshit, and decayed dreams

In between measured lifespans wasted between complete sobriety and the utter lack of it

That's why the middle-class invented art

A privilege for the poor, a pastime for the rich, and a bucket load of false hopes for the ones existing in the in-betweens

Art is no rebellion, art is no revolution

Art is a disease; acute schizophrenia of a momentary greatness

Art exists at the tombstone of aspirations, at the morgue of truth

Art exists because you need a false sense of purpose in your otherwise mediocre existence

Art exists because you need a made up meaning to your rather meaningless being

Trapped in between the war to survive life and the luxury to auction it

You are no artist for art is illusion

You are a gaslighting escapist at best

Non-Aligned

You say poetry is liberation, poetry is a movement

Yet you guard it's gates like it's your birthright, like poetry is your ancestral heritage you have to safeguard from things you don't consider poetry enough

You say poetry is for one and all

And yet you bark rules and impose terms like a dictator fearing his imaginary empire will come crashing down like a house of cards

You say poetry is art

And yet all you ever talk is tall tales of cheap, rented ideas, like an ageing ape aiming for the low hanging fruits

You and I are poets nevertheless

But peers, we never were, we never will be

You need background scores to make your words bearable

I trade in awkward silences and heavy gasps to clothe my words in

You throw around words complicated enough to break jaws

I deal in ideas non-binary and non-aligned, that crumble biased backbones of spineless existences

You use words like diamonds, a veil of borrowed sophistication to mask your inner shallow

I use words like crumpled notes and clinking coins, the only currency I've ever known

You write poetry for greatness

I write poetry because I'd have to cut myself open if I didn't

Your poetry smells of expensive aftershave and sells abstract dreams

My poetry reeks of cheap liquor and tells ugly truths

You and I are poets nevertheless

Except, you're the pimp and I'm the flesh

F*ck Faith, Piss Hope

Dignity was never a quality

It was but merely a benchmark

A self-righteous price tag for the ones who could be bought

Thus was born Capitalism

The ones who thought not being auctioned would make them pricier

But had no buyers in actuality

Desserted, discarded, narcissistic philosophers

They called themselves Communists

The sore greedy losers who had their feet on both the ships and fell in the abyss below

Basards of no faith, no price, no face, and no skin, they identified as Socialists

You ask which side was I on

I was on the outside watching them all tear each other apart, each dripping blood of the other, and the semen of their pretended self-glory

What can I say

I'm a hedonist, a sadist, an opportunist

While they fought to tell the world their stories

I sold the world three paperbacks of unadulterated fiction

The Shit Called Art

You say the world needs art

As I watch your delusion wallow your existence

The world doesn't need privileges, only the basics

And art you see, is a privilege

Do you ever see the rich care as much about art as you do

Do you see the poor care as much about art as you do

Art matters to them only if it means money

For the rich want to get richer

And the poor want a day's meal

But you, you my dear delusion middle class fuck

You think art is a struggle

When truly it's really you romancing the idea of it

Art is your eulogy to your dead dreams

Because you were privileged enough to dream

But never privileged enough to be dished them out to you

And while you were busy begging privileges for paychecks

Life aged in wrinkles and not chardonnays 

So you sought art to be your refuge

A desperate lament to hold onto your long dead dreams and long lost life

For the ones who could sell art have sold them to the lust of luxury

And yet here you are, screaming your art to the world

A middle class madman who calls himself an artist

Bougainvilleas

We humans, are like bougainvilleas

A species divided by colours

A species crying out loud the irrelevant differences, irreverent of the existential truth that it's all really the same

Each colour screaming out it's vanity and deluded perceptions of self-assigned importance

Each colour waging a cold war for supremacy, because the world is for singulars; more than one and it's comparative, more than two, and it's superlative

You look close enough, and you know it's all the same, just different shades of a primary colour really

You look from afar, and it's nothing but a bunch of coloured dots, the dots so miniscule you could barely tell the colours

We humans, are like bougainvilleas

No purpose, no meaning, no poetry, no art

No real necessity in the measured existences

Some made up stories we tell ourselves

From generations gone, to, generations to come

Just so we don't feel as trivial as our lives truly are, because existential isn't comfortable, and if death is inevitable, why not make living comfortable

We humans, are like bougainvilleas; a species that exists only and only because extinction hasn't caught up on us yet

The Goddesses Men Made

I come from a land of seas and oceans and mountains and ravines and clay and sand

I come from a land where they're all addressed as goddesses, not gods, but goddesses

I come from a strange land 

I come from a land where the goddesses are plenty and the gods are few

What is so strange, you might wonder

You see, where I come from, the goddesses are the protagonists and the gods more often than not just a piece of a greater jigsaw, and happily so

And it's said, mothers and lovers and wives and daughters and sisters and teachers, they're all goddesses

Yet, the men of the land shiver in cold sweats trickling down their invertebrate spines, every time a woman has let her thoughts out loud

Yet, the men of the land, to make up for their missing spines, batter and bruise women every time they dare to grow a spine, smother their insides until their guts fall out, and their spine is just a bunch of bones in a body bled out of blood

And for years, I questioned myself, why this strange dichotomy

You see goddesses are like weekends, their stay is short-lived

While women, women are persistent, unwilling to give up on their ideas of existence and being

You see godesses are made of clay, faith and fairytales

But women, women are blood and bones, every inch real, every voice loud enough to not be able to play deaf to

You see goddesses are worshipped, for goddesses are superheroes

While women are lived, for women aspire to be just women, no capes no wings, just an indomitable desire to be the women they are

You see goddesses are an idea, and ideas don't complain or fight for their worth

But women, women are chapters beyond the novels and words beyond the poetry, who aren't limited to paper existences, but skin and teeth breathing fire and passion like an everyday

The men made goddesses so they could be goddesses in temples and prayers

While the same men lynched women on the streets for they are no goddesses

The men made goddesses so men could tell women that they worship women, albeit in fiction

While the same men shoved their penises and opinions down unconsenting vaginas and throats of women, in daylight truth

Goddesses never were women, never will be women, just a faceless, meaningless abstract

Godesses are but, mansplaining women to the world by men pretending to be gods

Elementary

For years and decades and centuries and ages

Boys have waited to turn men, girls have waited to become women

And often fought each other, sometimes with each other

And all of it for a singular word, a twelve letter word that has plagued every human existence older than twelve

INDEPENDENCE is a twelve letter word; a rather lengthy word for vocabulary but, a rather short one to sum up the obsession of a billion lives

A word that's got so many addicted to it, a lion's share of them have forgotten what it truly means

Imagine being so independent that your independent brain is no longer capable of independently deciphering the meaning of the word independence

If you're looking for irony, human existences have defeated every other, known in the history of any and every language ever

So many lives costed for the independence of lands divided by imaginary latitudes

So many lives costed in the name of independence of people divided by imaginary gods

So many dreams of independence crushed and obliterated to pay for the dreams of independence of an entitled few

One begins to wonder, is the idea of independence really worth fighting it all and more often than not risking losing it all

So many selling their independence to suit their lust and so many buying someone else's independence simply because they can and because it lubricates their dildos of pride

One begins to wonder if it's independence or just condoms on sale at the supermarket, waiting to be used and thrown down carelessly into a pile of stinking garbage

Is independence even a real thing, an actual idea that can be remotely attempted to achieve let alone be won

Or is it just another opiod designed to bluff the whole of human race into gaslighting themselves with the mirage of an imagined superiority

Because if that day were to actually come that you were truly independent

Who'd you blame your failures on

Isn't that why you made up the gods in the first place

So you could escape admitting to your own self staring right back at you from across the mirror, that you are nothing but an aggregation of a never-ending cycle of continual and monumental fuckups

You seek refuge in the nostalgia you call childhood and gloat in the glory of how innocent, how happy and how blissful it was

Ever thought it was probably because you weren't independent, in fact the idea of independence wasn't even an idea your convoluted brain cells had conceived

Isn't it funny how you treat independence like it were good fuck you found in an off-season sale when the truth of it is, independence is that shit expensive divorce that costs you your everything

The happiness you thought you'd find is the price you paid to be audacious enough to even dream you could afford such luxury

Identities

Who would you be

If tomorrow you were to wake up without a job to go to

Who would you be

If tomorrow you were to wake up to your cubicle, your colleagues, your identity as an employee, wiped off, as if a clean slate

Would you still matter

Would you still be relevant

Who would you be 

If tomorrow you were to wake up without a family to call your own

Who would you be

If tomorrow you were to wake up to you being a parent, a child, a sibling, a friend, a lover, completely forgotten as if a distant dream

Would you still be someone

Would you be anyone at all

It's rather ironic that a world obsessed with claiming individuality is in actuality, nothing but a rather inexpensive photocopy machine

Churning out clones of existences deluded in their false sense of identity

Take away their delusion and watch them crumble, their hollow insides shedding skin like the stale ash of an overburnt cigarette

Existential crisis isn't everyone's glass of whiskey, after all

Till Death Do Us Apart

The love stories they talked about, in the sonnets and the ballads and the novels and the four-act plays

For ages and ages, across continents and countries, across languages and faiths

Not the ones about rose petalled dreams and the in-tune violins, no, because even as a naive adolescent, I knew they were false advertising of imagined hopes at best

The ones that just had a regular love story you know, the love story that'd be bruised and battered, black and blue, but in the end, still be a fucking love story

Where the fuck are they

Have any of you ever wondered

It's a hard world to live in, a harder world to love in

No one likes labels and boxes, while craving clarity and transparency

Everyone likes a sense of humour and yet not one can't not be offended at the very idea of being the butt of a joke, for a joke's sake

No one wants to be alone even on solo trips and yet keep complaining of space to their partner, in 600 square feet of a rented dingy 1-bedroom flat

Everyone wants to be a part of something like a herd of cattle, while hoping to stand out in the crowd of social media algorithms

How do you keep up in a world where newer oxymorons brewing froth every day is the only acceptable version of normal

You hope you'll find love in a world this fucked up

Because hope you see, is a potent drug, more potent and more delusional than a cocktail of cocaine, meth, and hashish

You hope someone who read the same books as you did, and believe the same shit as you do, will cross paths with you at the crossroads of a dating app algorithm

Because who meets new people like they used to do in the olden days, in libraries and bookstores, in overcrowded buses and politically motivated debates

But then, were the love stories of the olden days any better either, really

I guess it was just a different kind of fucked up than what it is today

Because you didn't have social media to hashtag the fuck out of your life

Because writing poetry wasn't an aspiration to pretend you were cool, but the manifestation of a cancerous lump from years of trauma

Because love was still a luring dream that didn't fit in the search history of your internet browser

Love was still fucked up though; I mean have you seen your parents

When was the last time you saw them agree on something like adult members of a civilised society

I know what you're thinking or atleast trying to think or rather, shall I say hopelessly hope

You are trying real hard to think of scenarios where they might have actually agreed, in peace

And as the last three decades of your life around your parents flashed in front of your eyes, your heart got busier than usual, sensing your brain panic to the images of the two people whose being together in life and in love is the sole reason of your god-damned existence

It's funny how an entire generation of people who wastes no time in calling people out for their toxicity was in fact born out of a love that was rather toxic, in its very essence

Where do you think those fucked up, toxic, ridiculous ideas of love, you genetically inherited, went

Hold a mirror to every love story you've ever tried to live, and look deep within, and you'll know

It's arrogant and audacious trying to find an eco-friendly love story involving a species that fed the entire planet, plastic

Every time I hear yet another poet talk about how pure and innocent and glamorous love is

I feel like throwing up, the acids in my gut start screaming slogans like it was a goddamn protest march

For I've loved, and I've lived love

Have you seen chain smokers, how they keep smoking subtly overlooking the persistent cough because it's convenent for their addiction

I have always felt love is a lot like smoking

You know it's a bad idea but you're also addicted to the reality of it

You know it is killing you from within, bit by bit, one fight at a time, and you know every time the damage done is every time a bigger gaping hole is left staring you in the face

You know the right thing to do would be to walk away, so the ghosts of your fuckups can finally stop haunting each other, but then you hope tomorrow will be different, because some motivational quote you read up on the internet said, "Life's all about second chances"

You keep forgetting, your limited privileges aren't currency enough to buy your life second chances, because love makes you do stupid things, like, gouge your eyes out and throw them under the wheels of a god-damn bullet train

But then what is life if not an anthology of your compromises and your sacrifices and your utter brave choices, because even in love, you got to win, because no one cares about team efforts in an autobiography 

I know you have waited to see how this ends

A fucking cynical piece of shit going on rampaging about love just because he doesn't understand it

This ends exactly how love ends, how smoking ends, and how poetry ends

In death, wishing there was a closure

Sapiens: Evolving to Extinction

Humans have called humans the most evolved species for as long as humans have existed

I think it's a bullshit story they've told themselves over and over again to put to sleep, the inferiority complex lurking deep within

Humans are the only species that have made it harder and harder with every passing day for their own species to stay relevant as a species

If anything, humans have to be the dumbest and the most fucked-up-in-the-head species

Humans have never united as a species

For every human wants to belong and yet be individual, all at the same time, turning a convenient blind eye to the obvious dichotomy

Humans have first invented relationships and then invented apps to foster those make-belief relationships; zoom out and you'll see a pyramid scheme of selling delusion

Humans have invented concepts like faith and religion, and ideas like government and god; first they sold these ideas and concepts to buyers on the polar ends of the spectrum, and then they let those pimps of humans kill other humans in the name of those very ideas and concepts

Humans taught humans that humans should be truthful and trustworthy, and then sold both of those words and their ingrained principles, to suit their needs of the hour

Humans invented words and languages and prose and poetry, and yet could barely ever succeed in communicating, lost in their obsession with the grammar and the linguistics, becoming the very walls they had aimed to decimate with those inventions

And yet humans continue to think humans are the most evolved species to have ever existed

As humans replace humans with phone screens and algorithms and chatbots and dildos

And yet humans continue to think humans are the most evolved species to have ever existed

As humans write the evolution curve backwards, one more code every day, until humans cease to be humans, until all of the human species is reduced to a singular dot, a full stop to the death wish the entirety of a species had for its own

Who's Killing Democracy?

For years and years now

The artists and the poets, the philosophers and the intellectuals have lamented

Over and over again

Screamed and mourned the death of democracy

And I find that rather funny

Because it's the artists and the poets, the philosophers and the intellectuals, who've been killing democracy, slowly poisoning it bit by bit, each inch of it's wrinkled skin

You see democracy is a binary concept

And the thing with binaries is, there's no middle ground for minorities

In a sea of a billion zeroes, what are a thousand ones but a meagre minority

A fast-perishing minority that can only hope to stay afloat at best

It's ludicrous of them to even think of something as ridiculous as dictating the terms of the sea

The artists and the poets, the philosophers and the intellectuals, they are all ones

And then there are the regular and the mundane and the ordinary, the zeros that make up the sea, or as the artists and the poets, the philosophers and the intellectuals like to call them: mediocre

As the ones gloat in their assumed supremacy, the zeros seek pride in their imagined normalcy

But then, you see democracy is a binary concept

And in a world of binaries, it's all about either/or, no ifs, no buts, no ands

If either wins, or loses, and that is democracy

Questioning democracy in the name of democracy isn't democracy, it is the death of democracy

Life As We Know It

I ask you, how's life

A question we all are wired to answer somewhat similarly to people we meet once in six weeks: all good, what about you

But because I am a friend, or so I assume your your apparent perceptions of me are

You tell me over a night and two bottles of whiskey, how life's not fair, how life's fucked you over

Life's not fucked you over

Your ideas of what life would be like, have fucked over your actualities of what life is

Your pre-conceived notions and your hopeful overambitious optimism have fucked you over

The weight of the obese expectations of your dead parents and their dead parents have fucked you over

The fact that you were supposed to live life and yet all you've managed to do is live it in defined moments mapped to checkboxes like you were shopping life off a fucking grocery list, has fucked you over

But then, I don't tell you any of it

Because, no whiskey in this world is smooth enough to ease gulping down a truth tablet

Especially when your truth is on the pole opposite mine

Birth Of A Cynic

You think you matter

You think you are a rebel

You think you can make a difference

You think you are the beginning of a revolution

Well you're cute

Not the kinda cute that tingles teenage hormones

But you're cute

You know how they call dumbfucks cute these days because being straightforward hurts egos apparently

Yeah you're that kinda cute

You're cute to think you are anything but a product of your consequences and your conveniences

Years and decades and centuries of human evolution

People have thought they mattered

But then again, you know who else thought they mattered

Dinosaurs and mammoths. Look at them now

You think you matter

Because you're relatively important in your dingy circles

But so are fishes in a 4 by 4 aquarium

You're nothing but a fucking frog in a goddamn well

You think you are a rebel

Because your ways of life are outlier to the myopic roads of your acquaintances

But so is a donkey in a goddamn race course

You're nothing but a mad dog in a dingy alley

You think you can make a difference

Because you have what it takes to be the change you want to see

But so did Martin Luther King and a hundred thousand more before him

You're nothing but a momentary distraction at your very peak

You think you are the beginning of a revolution

Because your carry fire in your breath, raging to cleanse all the filth and dirt around

But so did all the volcanoes who lie dead in their frozen lava today

You're nothing but a paper dragon in a world of corrupt desires wrapped in flesh

You're no one and you'll be no one

You're a singular decibel drowned in the deafening noise of concrete skies

You're just another dumbfuck selling souls to the walking dead

I am a cynic today, for I was you once

Dear Mother

Every Mother's Day, I see three thousand random people posing with their mothers

A must-have, for the three hundred word essays they write, starting with the most unnecessarily obvious hashtag this world has ever known: #longpostalert

And each of them has a singular story to tell really, which is why the sheer waste of that many words, hurt my literary ego

Hundreds and hundreds of words, and a planned candid photo, which honestly should be called forced candid at best, and hundreds of kilobytes of data wasted for what

For one sentence, which in all sincerity, isn't even a sentence, more like a seven-word advertisement to sum up the greatness of each of the three hundred random strangers

A billboard that reads: EAST OR WEST, MY MOM'S THE BEST

Mother's Day posts, birthday posts, random motivational posts out of context, Oscar acceptance speeches: mothers have made their way everywhere there's light, there's good, there's hope

And yet somehow been conveniently left out of divorce notices and suicide letters and rehabilitation centres, because that's bad advertisement

I know what you're thinking: what an ungrateful bastard of a son to speak such of their mother

You know what? I wish I was, for that would at the least explain three decades of a cycle that not only never ends but continually adds on to itself, kilos of trauma, every year, until it turns cancer and fucking kills every last hope you ever had in humanity

For years and years, the world has told tales and sung songs of the magic that mothers are, the miracle that motherhood is

You know the one thing common about miracles and magic is, they're both nothing but illusions, imagined water in dead dry sand

You make believe a make-belief story and it's just another make-belief story

You start believing a make-belief story and that's the same delusion that bred religion: the story of an infallible all-powerful whose theory and reality are more distant than a distantly faint reality

And once that happens, there's nothing short of godliness, for that's where delusion peaks at: gods

And once delusion has peaked, you worship mortal mothers and clay gods, often on the same goddamn pedestal

Where are the stories of the mothers who smothered their living sons and choked their breathing dreams until both lay dead still

Where are the stories of the mothers who in the name of motherhood burned and slaughtered childhoods to suit the sadist narcissists within

Where are the stories of the mothers who assumed they were gods and pledged blind faith in the name of obedience and denounced their children every time they were questioned

Where are the stories of the mothers who were audacious enough to manipulate their children into believing motherhood wasn't a choice but a sacrifice, a sacrifice that demands blood, soul and skin, of the very ones they mothered

Where are the real stories of the real mothers and the real trauma that has been passed down generations in the name of tradition

There aren't any, you know why, because motherhood doesn't approve of bad advertising

And so every time, another god of a mother emerges

I throw up a little, as flashbacks of a vivid past I want to blur so badly I wish I could drink them to oblivion, blur my teary-eyed vision instead

Dear God and Dear Mother belong to the same pedestal for me

They are two phrases I don't remember uttering, writing, or even believing in, in a long long time

Diss-integrity

For some, success tastes of shit and cum

Commode for a mouth is a great skill set to have apparently

For some, success tastes of fresh soles of the latest brands of footwear in fashion

Wet rag for a mouth makes you a worthy professional apparently

As for the rest

Success is a struggle they'll die fighting for

Success is a rather underwhelming outcome not worth the effort

Success is a series of endless mind-fucks they end up losing the appetite for

Success is relative, but then, so is integrity

It's funny how quickly integrity becomes the shield for some who couldn't seduce success

It's funny how no one gives a singular fuck about the integrity of the successful

It's funny how a sellout society keeps judging relative truths in the name of objectivity but can't stand the same thing happening to it

Familiarity Breeds Contempt

Have you ever felt a warm breath on your tender adolescent breasts

Like a gush of warmth as if cloaked in the blanket of familiarity

While your bare immature feet froze cold in the veins

Nails grown out of a habitual neglect, outlining your skin

As your soft spine shivers and shudders

Quite much like the first time he had breathed down your neck for the very first time

Shattering the walls of a rented innocence long lost

"Dad, not today" you beg

The warm breath draws itself closer, as the sweaty stench of his aging perversion clouds the vision of your teary eyes

The desire to live piles up some more rust, as your death wish watches on, like a lusty voyeur

Confessions Of A Misanthrope

I despise people

I despise people for who they are 

A bunch of literate morons 

Who can't tell the difference between literate and educated

A bunch of dumbfucks 

Who keep telling themselves they are wise desperately hoping it were true

They crave, desire, and show off intelligence, like it was some showpiece

That they could flaunt through the shallow glass of their shallower cupboards

Somewhat like a desperate man reeking of patriarchy, showing off his newly acquired wife

As if to say, patriarchy had won, and he was the flagbearer of this newly found win

For years and years and years

Stupid people in their ignorant existences have heralded intelligence like it were a gift

As if it was the Midas' touch that could solve every existential crisis there ever was

For years and years and years

Stupid people in their delusional perceptions have thought intelligence is the key to success

As if it was the one thing that stood between them and their imagined glory

Had they been intelligent

They'd have known, the intelligent despise intelligence like the stupids despise mediocrity

Had they been intelligent

They'd have known, the intelligent's barrier to success is more often than not the intelligent's intelligence

Had they been intelligent

They'd have known, intelligence is a cancer to the intelligent, while mediocrity is merely syphilis: it doesn't kill you, but it's rather contagious though

You know what's funnier

The stupids despise mediocrity and yet rejoice mediocrity, only of a different kind

And the stupids think that's what makes them seem intelligent

Putting on plastic faces of apparent intelligence

The lesser stupid ones think no one will ever notice their actual skin

The more stupid ones believe if they live the lie long enough it will be their truth

And all this while, the intelligent look at them, jealous of how simple their shallow existences are

And wish, they hadn't had the intelligence they had, so they could be a bunch of blind followers too

And wish, they hadn't had the thousand demons inside their heads telling them they'll never be enough

And, continue to wallow in their miserable, nuanced existences, struggling to put on plastic faces of pretended stupidity

I despise people

I despise people for who they are

I despise people

I despise people because I cannot be people

Dichotomy

It's always bewildered me people asking me

As much as it has bewildered the people asking me apparently

The question in actuality is simpler than it seems on the surface

How is it that I make jokes and poetry in the same breath of a rather measured existence?

I find it rather amusing that

It amuses you to not realise the similarities as obvious as they are

What are we but pimps

Of measured words and loaned silences

The poet and the comedian are quite the same recipe really

Sprinkled in sarcasm and laced in caustic cynicism that burns you with a nagging aftertaste

I tell a poem

And people listen, because poetry is for the polite

And as words fight their way into the dead weight of sheepish souls

Their clattering claps and behaved beings with their pretended sophistications nod in nicety

I tell a joke

And people listen, because jokes are a legitimate excuse to take offense

And as some lips rupture and the stained teeth show up in sadistic laughters 

Many more assholes clench hard, tighter than the grip of reluctance, their sweaty pretenses and rusty beliefs scared they would be rattled

And you see, I am, what they call a greedy motherfucker

I want the subtle and the whiplash, the tickles and the punches, the bruises and the bloodshed

Watch it all burn as the pretentious mascara of agreement falls off the dark circles of dissent

The dichotomy of comforting the uncomfortable and discomforting the comfortable, all at the distance of a few words

And as the curses and the abuses line up higher than a stack of match-sticks waiting to be lit in the hopes they would burn my words to the ground

I smile, a wide wild grin, from ear to ear, because, guess who really won?

The Bastards' Tale

Have you ever wondered

The gods you kneel and pray to

The gods you call the omnipresent invincibles

What are they really

If not a bunch of self-obsessed narcissistic megalomaniacs

Who you claim are immortals

All powerful and all forgiving

Why do they keep feeding off the faiths and beliefs of mere mortals

The mere mortals who provide for these apparent immortals

And yet, are nothing but meandering puppets to the wishes of their god's flaws

Why is it that

Your gods look like everything you've ever wanted to be but never could be

And yet they look up to your lesser selves like a clueless infant to a watchful parent

When did immortality become so fragile?

For I know crawling mortals without a spine

Who could outlive nuclear bombs and raging wars

But your gods with their spines of religion can't even outlive questions

Your definitions of godliness look like make-believe stories of a fucking lunatic

How is it that

Your gods have colours in pastel shades from a child's crayons

And yet, the audacity of someone who could upturn worlds

For thousands and thousands of years

The mere mortals have killed each other and spilled blood like wine off a cannibal's chalice

And while the whole of humanity danced butt-naked in the mayhem and chaos they called religion

The so called immortals have sat back and watched it all with a grinning smile like wasted stoners watching a dogfight

An all forgiving God and yet all it reminds of, is nothing more than a god-damned parasite, thirsty for some blood and some more

But the mere mortals who made gods of Frankenstein's monsters

And worshipped them in blind faith

Their eyes scraped off their sockets and served as offerings of belief

Their brains splattered across the plastered walls of temples and mosques and churches

Those invertebrate shitheads who needed to cling on to faith because that was all they had

Because accountability, you see comes at a heavy price

It often costs you your larger-than-thou ego, and accept that you're a fucking mess

It takes you to acknowledge your vulnerability that you know little or nothing of anything out there

It needs you to be okay being lost, in an attempt to figure yourself out in this life of randoms and uncertainties

But then, religion is so much easier, so much more convenient

And so, the faithful bastards of the faithless gods sing the bastards' tale

And so, the living bastards of the faceless gods sing the bastards' tale

So many bastards, so many gods, so many tales

And yet, all it takes to watch them tremble in their knees and shiver in theirs spines, is an inch of a doubt born off a single moment of reason

On The Death Of A Species

Once in eight-ten years, every now and then

A name becomes the name for a revolution

The life behind the name lie still, a lifeless massacred blob of rotten flesh

Self-claimed intellectuals and activists masturbate to the idea of a revolution

Months go by, and as they say, time they say is a great healer

So much so that, the revolution is forgotten and healed in the need for newer news

Revolutions today are as short-lived and fickle-minded as the breaking news

Until a decade later, another name rises from the ashes, and the same cycle repeats, all over again

A woman is raped in this country every seventeen minutes, three lakh women in ten years

One name becomes the reason for candle-light marches and social media hashtags

But, who gives a fuck about the other two lakh ninety nine thousand nine hundred and ninety nine women? 

Do you want to know the filthy truth? 

No one, no man, no woman, no one in a country of a billion, except the ones who lost their own

Some are lost in space-stricken thin columns of forgotten newspapers, a lot more, lost in the dark alleys of anonymity

And yet women want women to believe, it's a battle every woman is fighting for another woman

Men have raped women while women have watched men rape women

Every time a woman has kept quiet, every time a woman has chosen to unsee, every time a woman has pretended like it was nothing

A woman has wronged a woman, a woman has raped a woman

Men have raped women for years, decades, and centuries in this country

Every time a voice has spoken out the uncomfortable truth, they were labelled government-approved anti-nationals

Every time a man has crawled on the skin of a woman like a lust-stricken leech

Every time a daughter, a mother, a sister, a wife in this country has had her skin measured in the sick eyes and fragile ideas of masculinity of pervert men

Governments have blamed the women, and oppositions have blamed the governments

And yet the governments of today and the governments of yesterday want you to believe rape is not political

Men are assholes, men are sick bastards

Men are what pieces of shit would look like if they were living and breathing

Every man who's cat-called

Every man who's breached consent

Every man who's slipped his hands in unwelcome spaces

Every man who's pulled out their penises watching hints of cleavages

Every man who's defended these men, pretended like it was a woman's overthinking

Each and every one of them, every last one of them, has raped a woman

My insides burn with the fury of hell

When will we have had enough? 

When will we finally keep aside our agendas and gains and politics and faith systems?

When will we act human for the sake of this fucking species?

You know what scares me the most? 

The answer might be "NEVER"

Dead Mass

Once you've woken from your slumber

Of hopes and dreams, killed and buried

Of measured breaths bruised in insecurities

Of a brain rattled and a spine shattered

Of eyeballs gouged out in a morning coffee

Put on your expensive linen and pretentious shadow

And walk out that door like you are one of the world

Filthy scumbags raised and rotten in money-spitting manholes

Inglorious bastards swimming in stinking commodes they call governments

Pretend like you're one of them, one more of them

Keep your eyes wide shut, your lips outlined for a faked smile

And bend over for a bunch of society-approved somebodies  

Watch them take turns tearing your asshole apart until it bleeds money

Die rich, drowned in your blood and shit-stained money

But then, if one day all of it seems a bit unsettling

The scabs of success falling off, showing the shallow, scarred flesh within

The shackles of a clock-timed independence smelling of rust and tears

The illusion of a good life, shattered, scattered and spread like the last pieces of a broken mirror

The aftertaste of tanned leather and cheap shoe polish, lurking till your epiglottis

But then, if one day if selling your spine finally begins to hurt like you were being skinned alive

Don't sit down and write some shitty poetry on a paper as crumpled as your being

The wise ones who said the pen is mightier than the sword, were hopeful dumbfucks

When have words ever won world wars or healed bullet wounds

Take that goddamn pen, clench it with every last bit of anger and despair

Stab it right into the fucking throat of this shithole called society

And you'll see, the pen is mightier than the sword, just not the way you'd liked to believe

But then, what is the need for beliefs and faiths and religions for an agnostic

But question them all and watch them crumble and disintegrate into a dead mass

The Liars Called Poets

 You mourn of a dying democracy

In your borrowed words and acquired poetry

To some cheap claps and gasping hypocrisies

You think you have made a difference

You believe your three minutes of poetry is the ointment

This corrupt cosmos of rotten flesh and buried dreams needed to heal

Your soul touches your penis of an intellect

As your fragile ego masturbates into a commode of mediocrity

Wallowing in your made up pride

You gleam in shallow sweats of an assumed poetic genius

And as you walk back to the comfort of the four walls you call home

And as you light a cigarette sighing a breath of relief as if you've moved mountains

And as you pat yourself to sleep in the content smile of an imaginary win

Democracy dies a little more in the very oxygen you breathe

While you sell your poetry in the name of revolution 

Capitalism looks right back at you, and says, "Bitch please"

You care about democracy only when it earns you the label of a rebel

Revolution doesn't start or end with your poetry

You talk about politics and philosophies and transforming the world

Change doesn't begin in the comfort of inexpensive internet and affordable single malts

The truth is, you're just another privileged cunt

Who hides their privileges beneath a make-belief victim card

An utter piece of shit who cares for democracy as much as for dogshit

Whose faiths and beliefs are ingrained not in their blood but in their conveniences

And if, even for a brief moment, the tables were turned

You wouldn't hesitate to pull the trigger on democracy

While you pee on the very poetry you once wrote and called revolution

Because, who needs poetry when they have power?

The Dreamers

The ones who couldn’t dare to chase their dreams

The ones who could’t dare to risk their very existence

The ones who couldn’t dare to survive the falls

The ones who couldn’t dare to live the failures

The ones who couldn’t dare to think a life beyond

Selling their souls on weekdays for paychecks

Drowning the sorrows of sold souls in inexpensive liquor on weekends

The ones who couldn’t dare to leap out of the loop

They’ll never know what it feels like, to let go

Surrender to the idea of a dream 

Like it was the inevitable, the only, the obvious

The ones who sought comfort in compromises because they were too scared to desire their dreams

Will, but survive

Living life comes at a price, a rather expensive one