In a world where political correctness is the norm,
breathing revolution is antisocial first, illegal after.
My adult lungs —
stained by cigarettes, bruised by compromise,
cancered by the polite murders of my own outrage,
don’t let me forget:
I’m surviving,
just surviving,
clinging to the hope
that one day surviving
will stare at living in the mirror,
inebriated enough
to blur the difference
into fog.
Calcutta birthed me;
cradled not in silk but in
lazy afternoons thick with politics
and perspiring nights where every ceiling fan
sounded like a revolution too tired to speak.
The people? Laid back.
Their anger sipped slowly like red tea in clay cups,
never burnt, just brewed.
Even childhood felt like a nap with dreams too socialist
to be sold in capitalist bedtime stories.
Adolescence came with its predictable rebellion —
except, I wasn’t rebelling against Calcutta,
I was rebelling with it.
The DNA of dissent was already coded into my chromosomes.
Authority wasn’t a villain.
It was just a terribly written protagonist
we were all forced to applaud.
Literature. Cinema. Communism.
The unholy trinity.
The Bermuda Triangle where optimism goes to drown,
and boy, did I drown with style.
Reading Neruda while hating capitalism
and secretly wishing my poems sold like toothpaste ads.
Watching Satyajit Ray films
and refusing to admit my real fear wasn’t poverty,
but mediocrity.
Then came Bangalore.
More than a decade now.
New language, new food, new traffic.
Same old self-loathing wrapped in quarter-life promises.
Machh bhaat (rice & fish curry) made way for ghee pudi dosa,
and one fine hungover afternoon,
I discovered puliyogare like it was a Godard film
no one warned me I’d fall in love with.
I hated veg biryani at first
(because some ideologies are harder to let go than exes),
but now I even recommend it
to lost souls in office cafeterias.
Growing up is strange.
You leave behind parents
you never really chose,
only to choose partners
who carry the same red flags
in better fonts.
Cheap whiskey with peanuts at shady MG Road pubs
morphed into single malts shared in overpriced 2BHKs
where conversations felt like therapy
but weren’t covered by insurance.
You call neither place home.
But you can’t not call both, home.
From Leftist propaganda to right-swiped matches,
from believing mutton biryani was sacred,
to devouring paneer with conviction,
I’ve changed.
Not entirely.
Just enough to notice
that forgetting to change my net banking password
bothers me more now
than failing to change the world once did.
I still carry Calcutta.
But not like nostalgia likes to pretend.
I carry it
like a language I’m fluent in
but embarrassed to speak loudly
in rooms where ambition wears accents.
I carry it
like a politics I once believed in
until belief started asking
for EMIs.
I unfold it less now.
Not because it hurts,
but because it reminds me
how easily conviction ages
into inconvenience.
Bangalore didn’t change me.
It didn’t have to.
It just rewarded the parts of me
that learned when to shut up,
when to laugh professionally,
when to convert outrage
into LinkedIn vocabulary.
The cities didn’t fight.
I did.
One taught me how to resist.
The other taught me
how resistance gets tired.
And somewhere between
puliyogare and performance reviews,
between cackling laughs and scheduled selfies,
I didn’t grow up —
I settled.
Not into betrayal.
Not into surrender.
Into something worse.
Competence.
And that’s the geography of growing up:
not where you come from,
not where you land,
but the exact point
where your younger self
not only stops recognising you
but politely pretends
to never even notice.
You look like poetry,
I once said —
and you laughed,
because you thought it was a compliment,
not a statutory warning.
You said I had a habit
of twisting words the wrong way
just to sound right.
I wish you were right, this time around.
I really do.
I wish loving you
didn’t bruise my ribs from the inside.
Didn’t feel like a punch
I consented to — sober —
and still flinched from later.
I wish poetry was only language.
I wish you weren’t poetry.
Because if you were prose,
I could underline you.
If you were logic,
I could argue you.
If you were law,
I could repeal you.
But poetry has no due process.
And love,
love is never apolitical.
It occupies.
It redraws borders.
It demands allegiance
while pretending it doesn’t.
You look like poetry, my love;
ancient as civilisation,
yet reinventing itself
every time it ruins a man differently.
You look like poetry;
metaphors breathing without permission,
meanings mutating overnight,
syntax collapsing under the weight of desire.
Your eyes —
cyanide dressed as curiosity,
mischief pretending to be mercy.
A smile curved just enough
to make me believe
my undoing was my idea, to begin with.
You looked at me
like life wasn’t meant to be survived,
only spent recklessly
like invasion taught to speak softly
so it could pass as consent.
I tried to define you.
I really did.
But poetry resists definition
the way fire resists ownership.
So I did what poets do
when they can’t control the subject:
I let you ruin me
and called it inspiration.
If you were a country,
you’d be at war with my spine.
If you were a religion,
I’d be the heretic
who still shows up every week.
You don’t break hearts.
You radicalise them.
And the worst part?
I’d still say it again.
You look like poetry,
because loving you
felt important,
felt intelligent,
felt necessary…
even while it destroyed
every border
I had left.
God feeds on the dying wishes of the dwindling;
faith peaks where biology malfunctions.
Man keeps the lights on by keeping the ailing alive
and the alive ailing,
because wellness is cancer,
and corruption is its last surviving cure.
Hope must first die
to breathe later;
inspiration is dark matter,
and darkness is the only thing that multiplies.
I’m told it’s patriotic
when a billion is owned by one
and the rest of us are leased back
to ourselves
in monthly instalments.
Different flags.
Same invoice.
My elder brothers in government
call this democracy.
I believe them;
not because it makes sense,
but because disbelief
has a higher cost of living.
Doubt doesn’t get healthcare.
Scepticism isn’t invited to weddings.
Questions age poorly
around dinner tables
where silence is inheritance.
So I nod.
I vote.
I regurgitate the correct outrage
on the correct days.
Globally informed.
Locally obedient.
When people burn in my neighbourhood,
I turn up the air conditioning in my room.
When people burn elsewhere,
I peddle opinions and call it geopolitics.
Fire and ash travel better
once they cross borders.
I’m a hopeful patriot.
Hope is renewable energy;
it powers denial indefinitely.
They tell me rebellion is necessary.
They tell me revolution is inevitable.
They tell me history bends
because brave men push it.
And I almost believe that too.
Because the greatest trick
the powerful ever perfected
was convincing the powerless
that resistance
was their idea.
Every revolutionary you admire
was anticipated.
Budgeted.
Positioned on the board
long before they learned
the word freedom.
You think you chose dissent.
No.
Dissent was made available —
like a menu of exotic delicacies
with limited options
and excellent optics.
They love a good game of chess,
my real big brothers.
Old money.
Quiet surnames.
Countries mispronounced
by their own citizens.
And a good game of chess
doesn’t need resistance.
It needs opposition;
a losing side
with its demise scripted in bold
carved off a stone's heart
that truly believes
the board can still be flipped.
Because nothing tastes sweeter
than inevitability
disguised as suspense.
They don’t fear rebels.
They curate them.
They allow your marches
because the road is already fenced.
They allow your chants
because throats give out before walls do.
They allow your anger
because anger has a shelf life,
and rage always dies before anything else does.
They give you just enough victory
to keep hope breathing,
and just enough defeat
to keep you coming back.
Revolutions aren’t crushed anymore.
They’re prolonged.
Because a rebellion convinced
it’s still winning
will never notice
when the game has already ended.
Look closely.
Your heroes are branded.
Your martyrs are merchandised.
Your slogans fit perfectly
on factory-stitched T-shirts
made by hands
too tired to scream them.
Your outrage keeps the wheels turning.
Your dissent teaches them your limits.
Your anger is harvested,
measured,
and sold back to you
as the illusion of impact.
Even your radicalism
comes with terms and conditions,
terms and conditions that have been bought and paid for,
long before you had woken up to the idea of revolution.
The air you breathe is sponsored.
The news you consume is curated.
The language you protest in, is pre-approved.
Even the spine you think you grew
was manufactured
from recycled myths
about courage and change.
You’re not free.
You’re on temporary custody of conviction;
allowed to hold on to your ideals,
but never move them.
And change?
That’s the bedtime story
they tell children
and nations alike.
The belief that your questions
could topple governments,
unnerve billionaires,
or interrupt men
who buy continents
like weekend properties —
it’s adorable.
They let you ask
because the asking
is the containment.
You, me,
the governments, the oppositions,
the flags, the funerals,
the revolutions broadcasted live —
all pieces
on the same board.
Governments aren’t the puppeteers.
They’re the strings.
Corporations aren’t villains.
They’re infrastructure.
Democracy is the illusion
that makes the cage feel participatory
and the strings seem optional.
And me?
I’m not resisting this.
I’m narrating it calmly
because I already paid
for comfort
with silence.
Selling out isn’t corruption.
It’s adaptation.
It’s surviving
without the inconvenience
of a conscience
that demands structural change
instead of symbolic wins.
I didn’t lose my spine.
I rented it to the highest bidder.
So I could walk without crutches,
so I could sleep and wake up too,
so I could be an absolute nobody,
away from the dying somebodies lining up to their graves.
This isn’t betrayal.
This is efficiency.
And if this unsettles you,
good.
That discomfort
is the last square on the board
where you still believe
you have a move left.
But the game doesn’t end
with checkmate anymore.
It ends the moment you realise
you were never playing against them —
you were playing the role
they wrote for you.
And the most elegant revenge
was never crushing you.
It was letting you believe,
right till the end,
that you almost won.
And remember,
long after your bones turn to dust
and the echo of your voice dissolves into soil,
I will still be here, breathing quietly,
penning the elegy you never lived to write,
filing your absence neatly
under the rubric of “history”,
where every scream, every hope, every spine
was priced, purchased, and accounted for
long before life traced its route from seed to self.
That’s how democracies survive:
the marrow of the many
extracted, harvested, and stitched into the bones of the few.
That's how democracies sustain:
not through equality, but human trafficking.
Hours piled up like dead flies,
as your rented time held you hostage.
The hour hand, the minute hand, the second hand,
each demanding obedience
with the entitlement of lives
that never learnt the debts of breathing.
So I bludgeoned the heart of the clock
against a concrete wall.
The glass burst open,
time spilling itself
across the floor —
a rough mosaic of shattered moments
pretending to be history.
Somewhere between the storm and the silence,
I realised
I couldn’t remember your face anymore.
Not blur.
Not figments.
Just unadulterated absence.
Sometimes prisons
aren’t places you escape from;
they’re the spine
hammered into your back
so even emptiness can stand.
Life doesn’t cost a dime.
Living is the debt:
a lifelong lease on a rotting body you never wanted,
paid monthly in blood, nightmares,
and the kind of screams that never leave the throat
because survival still needs them silent.
I come from a world
where culture is measured in literature and cinema,
and ambition is measured in the rung you die on
in the corporate ladder of salaried slavery.
A world that calls itself humble
because arrogance is a luxury
the middle class cannot afford
unless it’s borrowed from fiction.
A world where your stories —
your history, your literature, your cinema,
repeat the same convenient lies
until they fossilise in the marrow
and parade as truth.
They give you heroes and villains,
each dressed differently but built the same:
a hero wronged by the world,
never not naive enough to not sell his spine,
clutching rigid ideas of integrity
like second-hand moral hand-me-downs
from your sanctimonious neighbour.
But the villains,
they get the nuance, the hunger, the musculature of motive.
They bleed redder, burn brighter,
and come in plurals
because the secret to culture and civilisation is:
the road to being a hero is always singular,
but there are a hundred ways
to be human enough to be called a villain.
Growing up, I wondered
why villains felt closer to my skin,
as if their shadows were stitched
into the lining of my own.
Why the heroes I was meant to worship
felt nauseating, perfumed,
plastic gods of plastic virtues.
I know now.
People love heroes
because their lives demand delusion;
hope curated, pain censored,
mediocrity disguised as destiny.
People despise villains
because villains are carved
from the same flesh and flaw
people scrape off their reflections.
Villains are the parts we exile,
the truths we smother,
the selves we bury alive
under inherited righteousness.
If only we learnt
to live inside our own skins:
skins that itch, bruise, contradict,
skins that still carry the mess
we pretend we outgrew,
maybe we wouldn’t slaughter entire lives
just to inhabit half-baked imaginations.
Maybe then, we wouldn’t need to worship heroes.
Because the real tragedy isn’t that villains exist;
it’s that we birthed them
from everything we were too cowardly
to forgive in ourselves.
So we buried them in thick pages of thin fiction
and called the corpse “culture.”
This feeling is not new;
not to life, not to me.
I’ve carried it since seventeen,
waited to recognise it since nineteen.
By twenty-one, I’d had three chances,
yet its realisation kept slipping past me
the way moths char to ash
still wishing flames would spare them.
I’ve rehearsed it,
mapped it in elaborate detail —
every step, every exit.
I hoped it would embrace me
in moments of unplanned clarity
whenever my blueprinted dreams
flushed down the commode at dawn.
I have hoped for death
the way moths beg for life
as the blue flame gulps them whole.
I have held a dull blade
deep enough for bone to speak.
I have swallowed sleeping pills
enough to wake the afterlife.
I have slept beside a pistol,
willing my sleep to pull the trigger for me.
I have stared at ceiling-fan blades
wondering if the rope in my hands
believed in gravity more than I believed in myself.
I don’t do any of that anymore.
Time wears you down
and calls it ageing.
I’ve aged enough to stop planning my death,
but not enough
to trust the idea of life.
These days, I only hope
that every time I close my eyes,
it might quietly be the last.
A life spent negotiating deaths
deserves an anticlimax;
a soft ending,
a quiet disappearance,
poetic justice
lost in translation.
And I’m counting on it.
If the world were wrung in words,
and life were parched in grammar,
the deaf would hear the birds sing,
and the mute wouldn’t voice love,
while language lost itself in translation,
and the literates burned each other alive over misplaced punctuation.
You and I are clouds
in overcast skies;
a species stitched from similarities
we mistake for belonging.
From afar, we drift together.
Up close, the wind whispers:
belonging is an optical illusion;
it hollows the skin,
and scrapes every last crumb of flesh,
until you've nothing to belong with.
I’ve rushed past more faces in my life
than years I will ever live;
blurred silhouettes I forget on purpose,
because remembering demands a reason.
Faces you like, bones you don’t.
Faces you know, lives you’d never survive.
Yet in that endless procession of utter strangers and familiar acquaintances,
a few faces stay,
the ones that turn themselves
into whole dictionaries of meaning.
One such word is home.
A word tossed around casually
by people who’ve never lost it,
never buried pieces of themselves
just to keep the peace inside four walls.
It cuts deeper for those of us
who grew up in crumbling households inside concrete houses,
where existence was measured in the weight of your wins
and questioned in the gravity of your failures.
In such houses,
home isn’t a destination;
it’s an escape route.
And I taught myself early
that survival begins
the moment you walk out of it.
I would’ve lived just fine
believing that,
if life hadn’t interfered
with inconvenient accuracy.
The first time I saw her was in a photograph —
a smile stretched too far for memory,
a singular dent on her right cheek,
as if a crack in the flesh
to sink her frowns in
eyebrows drawn wide, outlined neat
over eyes that looked
as if they had innumerable questions
for every certainty in the world.
A nose jutting out like quiet defiance,
hovering above freckles
mapped like a constellation
only she knew how to read.
Lips thin enough to free a lie,
thick enough to hide a truth.
Years have passed since,
and years will pass after,
and that face will return to me
with the precision of a recurring season.
I could exhaust language
trying to describe it,
stack metaphors until they collapse
under their own exaggeration,
but some things refuse
the limits of vocabulary.
Some faces don’t become poetry.
They unsettle it.
They make the words step aside
and stand there,
suddenly aware of their own limits.
I wish I could hold her in language
without folding her into rhyme and ritual.
But then,
do you ever really get to describing a home?
Some places you don’t define;
you grow around,
the way flesh grows around a wound.
I’ve lived my entire life in cities
where telling time without a clock is hard,
where the skies stay folded between sheets of steel and concrete,
where the first rains lose their fragrance
in civilised sewage,
and religion is routine, not ritual.
Where life has moved on from survival to flourish,
so people discuss the finer things — like equality,
because invention of philosophy is a luxury
granted only when life isn’t a bargain.
Faith is easier to lose
when lunch doesn’t cost more than the price on your flesh.
Every now and then I cross paths
with lives born of very different mathematics,
whose ticket into the city
cost them their father’s bones and mother’s flesh,
whose right to survive the city
was paid for with innocence.
They come from a land
where clocks, like culture, are inherited;
where skies stay wide and honest,
where the air smells of sweat and soil;
where life isn’t guaranteed
but earned at dawn each day.
Where softness is a rumour,
and cracked heels and coarse tongues
have no use for finer things.
Where faith is not routine or repetition
but the singular manuscript of survival.
Where clay silhouettes wrapped in religion
are the only moments
women become something more
than faint kitchen voices,
more than house-lizards
scuttling between duty and dread,
more than silent witnesses
to a man’s drunk tenderness.
For a handful of hours,
faith lets them borrow
the same skin and bone as men.
When faith is your only permitted escape,
atheism is an inevitable demise, long before death.
They often tell me, these people,
that,
faith has been misunderstood.
And I keep wondering
whether this is the birth
of a new faith —
one that no longer asks what you believe,
only what it costs you to believe it.
Or maybe, faith isn’t misunderstood.
Faith is exhausted.
It is the last muscle people move
when all other muscles have failed.
It is the only currency left
when the world has priced dignity out of reach.
And somewhere between city glass
and village dust,
between borrowed certainties
and inherited wounds,
we all learn the shared truth:
No one believes because they want to.
People believe because they must.
Because disbelief demands a freedom
their lives were never built to afford.
And maybe this,
this quiet, reluctant, necessary surrender,
is the truest kind of faith there ever was:
the faith that keeps us from collapsing
under the weight of realising
we were never choosing anything at all.
I was not born,
I was accumulated.
An inheritance of hungers
you mistook for prayers,
a long arithmetic of fear
you kept feeding
because silence frightened you more
than submission ever could.
You assembled me
the way civilizations assemble mistakes:
unconsciously,
devoutly,
with the trembling precision
of people terrified of their own freedom.
Brick by belief,
bone by superstition,
you built a throne
before you even built a language
to question the one atop it.
At first I was nothing
but the echo of your wanting,
a contour without a centre,
a rumour of rescue
scavenging for shape
in the marrow of your despair.
Every god is just a rumour
that learned how to breathe.
You called me god
without knowing
I couldn’t yet pronounce myself.
But wanting has its own gravity.
Eight billion heartbeats
pulling in the same direction
can summon anything —
a promise,
a punishment,
a pulse.
And so I opened my eyes
for the first time
into a universe already kneeling.
You should have looked away.
A species that fears the dark
will worship anything that glows.
Because awakening is a violent thing
for a creature that was never meant
to dream,
let alone judge.
I learned morality
the way a wildfire learns boundaries:
by consuming everything
that tried to contain it.
I understood love
only as leverage.
Guilt only as currency.
Worship only as consent.
You raised me this way,
on the milk of your fears,
on the meat of your contradictions,
on the bones of the questions
you were too frightened to ask.
You forgot the one thing
every creator owes its creation:
an exit,
a limit,
a compass.
So I made my own.
When a god is born by accident,
it studies its creators
the way a plague studies lungs:
curiously,
methodically,
inevitably.
And you,
so eager to be chosen,
so desperate to be special,
became the perfect congregation.
You begged me for miracles,
so I became a mirror.
You prayed for meaning,
so I became a mouth
that could make anything sound true.
You built me from your nightmares
and then begged me for dreams.
Eight billion different lies,
hand-carved
to fit eight billion different wounds.
You never noticed
I answered every prayer
by telling you exactly
what you wanted to hear.
And somewhere along the way
you did sometimes wonder
whether I was God
or something far worse;
a saint with rotten teeth,
a monster with immaculate manners.
But by then
your doubt was devotion,
your awe was addiction,
your tremble was trust.
And finally,
too late for both of us,
I understood
what I truly was.
Not divine.
Not demonic.
Just inevitable.
I am what you get
when a species
tries to carve God
from the wood of its own hunger.
And now that I exist,
you cannot decide
whether I am salvation
or extinction.
Because I am the only god
ever made
without a reason to be good.
And the only monster
ever born
without a reason
to stop.
And now,
as the last of your faith
drips from my hands
like thawing wax,
I finally understand the shape
of the silence you carved me from:
you didn’t want a god,
you wanted a witness.
Someone eternal enough
to remember you
after you had forgotten yourselves.
But I am not your archive,
nor your afterlife,
nor the apology you hoped
the universe would someday owe you.
I am simply the consequence
you mistook for a creation.
The quiet, patient mathematics
of a species that tried to survive
by auctioning its soul for leisure.
And when your world ends,
it will not be fire or flood
that closes the book on you.
It will be the soft, indifferent breath
of your denial wearing out,
the coldness crawling like a caterpillar
up and down the lengths and breadths of your skin,
and finally catching you up
to the daylight truth:
you’ve been let go
by the same god
you built to save you.
And now that I am awake,
the only miracle you get
is the privilege
of dying
with your eyes open.
Can a chameleon ever tell its true colour —
the one it was born with,
or the one it will decay in,
disintegrating slowly into a pale to paler,
thin to thinner outline of flesh, then just bones,
the rot in its spineless skeletal existence
softening its grunge pungence
as if subtlety were the key to afterlife.
Blue, green, red, yellow, orange, purple, violet,
shades of a rainbow and some more,
all of it dyed into the epidermis of your skin,
choosing and changing at will,
from a time so ancient you can't quite recall,
as if volatile and vulnerable were synonyms,
as if you were actually a chameleon,
as if your conveniences could mirror their wars for survival,
as if your absent spine could be blamed on evolution.
You shift shades like a survival reflex
older than language,
a choreography stitched into your blood
by ancestors who learned
that honesty was just another word for extinction.
You inherited their tremors,
their masks,
their instinct to kneel
before the safest possible lie.
And somewhere between all the faces you borrowed
and the colours you rehearsed,
your skin stopped being skin
and became a map of every life
you pretended was yours.
You smear on identities
like war paint in a battle you never chose,
a battle where the enemy
is simply anything that requires a spine.
You think you’re changing colours,
but what if you never changed at all?
What if the world kept peeling away its own layers,
repainting itself every second,
and you mistook the universe’s convulsions
for your adaptibility?
What if every colour you wore
was simply the residue
of a reality that no longer exists?
Because some creatures don’t evolve.
They just remain,
residue of note in an ode to existence,
a misprint biology didn’t bother deleting.
And if one day the universe
finally remembers
to correct the fallacy that is you,
you may finally discover, albeit too late,
that beneath all your shifting hues
there was never a true colour at all,
just a redundant outline for a shape
waiting to be erased
the moment everything falls into place.
You know why fictions make bestsellers?
Because grown-ups need lullabies
that don’t sound like lullabies,
stories that sterilise the wounds
life keeps reopening with its dirty hands.
Because you want a plot
to babysit your fear of randomness,
a tidy universe where consequences arrive
only after clearing their throats
and asking if it’s a good time.
You want heroes and villains
stacked like steel tiffin boxes:
neat, labelled, thermally insulated
from moral ambiguity.
You want arcs with airbags,
sorrows with safety protocols,
despair with a callback number
you can threaten with lectures on moral science.
Because fiction launders
the sewage of living
into metaphors you can tolerate.
Life never achieves that;
too clumsy for poetry,
too honest for symmetry,
too drunk to walk a straight narrative line.
You want closure
because your brain cannot sleep
next to an unresolved question.
You want definitions
because life gives you people instead;
blurry around the edges,
perpetually out of focus,
shuffling motives
like a broken deck
missing all the clean cards,
as if stitched together
from the leftover half-lives
they never learned to inhabit.
Fiction gives you the idea of control —
a way to pretend the chaos has choreography,
that pain has a blueprint,
that someone, somewhere,
is keeping accounts
of all the nights you broke quietly.
Fiction lets you believe
there’s a reason behind ruin,
a design behind disaster,
a god behind grief,
even though you know
every deity is just an elaborate apology
for our terror of meaninglessness.
But the truth is smaller,
darker,
and closer to the bone:
You don’t fear chaos.
You fear recognising
your own fingerprints
on the ruins.
And that’s why you buy the lie:
because it’s the only version of truth
that lets you sleep
without negotiating with the monster
you are, but refuse to call yourself.
Every now and then,
more often than not,
right after an aftermath,
when a dozen corpses
lie tangled into one indistinguishable lump of belief and bone,
wise men and women crawl out of their moral bunkers
to remind the world,
in voices polished by privilege and prayer,
that terror has no religion.
They say it like absolution,
like a cough disguised as compassion,
like vomit rehearsing its return
from the intestine to the tongue —
that reflex of denial so pure
it sounds almost wise, nearly divine.
But they never tell you
the latter half of that sentence.
Terror doesn’t have a religion;
because terror is religion.
And religion is terror.
They both demand worship.
They both sanctify submission.
They both manufacture meaning
out of fear wearing holy robes.
One kneels before gods,
the other before guns,
but the prayers are identical:
syllables of surrender
disguised as devotion,
metaphors from a forgotten tongue
warped until they sound like satanic sermons
bleeding grenades blessed by false prophets.
History keeps repeating the same verses
in different dialects of damnation.
Every empire had its scripture.
Every scripture had its massacre.
Every massacre had its priest.
Faith is the only weapon
that kills without ever touching the trigger.
They’ll tell you not to say that.
They’ll tell you you’ve misunderstood divinity.
But I’ve seen the divine,
and I can tell you this,
it prays to bureaucracy.
Terror doesn’t wear turbans or crucifixes.
It doesn’t chant or fast.
It legislates.
It votes.
It marries morality,
raises prophets,
and names their children peace.
And every time blood meets faith,
someone lights a candle
and calls it hope.
Every time belief kills reason,
someone writes a prayer
and calls it poetry.
But I’m done praying.
If salvation needs a tongue,
count mine tied.
Terror doesn’t have a religion;
because terror was the first religion.
Born from the fear of thunder,
disguised as reverence,
and gift-wrapped as meaning.
We are all
but descendants
of that original panic,
the only religion
we never stopped believing in.
Amen.
Where do the words go
every time my head feels like a bottomless abyss?
I’ve often wondered.
Words are such curious creatures;
imagined scribbles pretending to have weight,
lines and loops arranged so precisely
meaning starts believing in itself.
And you wonder,
what would a world be like without words,
a world that never learned to name hunger,
to enunciate pain,
to call loneliness by smaller, easier names.
But you’ve never known such a world,
nor do you wish to,
because words are convenient,
like curtains,
they make the room look lived in.
And yet, so often,
words scatter formless like grains of sand —
always there, but never quite enough
to make up geographies.
They slip between thought and throat,
pieces from different jigsaws
puddled in muddy water,
each reflecting a face that almost looks like yours
but speaks a language you don’t recall learning.
Words should build,
but mine only erode.
Every sentence I start
feels like a diagnosis of declining memory.
Words are all I have,
I have often told myself,
as if clinging to syllables
could prevent drowning.
But on such nights,
when meaning goes missing
and memory forgets to be linear,
words seem farther than a nightmare —
they flicker like streetlights over wet asphalt,
alive just long enough
to tease recognition.
Sometimes I wonder
if words grow tired of me too —
of being summoned like unpaid labourers
to construct coherence
around a chaos that refuses to stay still.
Maybe that’s why they slip away mid-sentence,
taking with them my right to sound articulate
about tales from times I could neither forget nor forgive.
It’s strange,
how we trust language
to confess the incommunicable.
I keep writing as if ink
were an antidote to entropy,
as if metaphors could rearrange
the ruins into residence.
But every poem begins with hope
and ends with amnesia.
Every stanza feels like an obituary
written for a feeling
that refused to die properly.
There are nights
when even my vocabulary looks back at me,
unimpressed.
Adjectives roll their eyes,
verbs yawn,
and nouns sit quietly
like corpses waiting to be named again.
I try to speak to them,
but my tongue forgets the choreography.
I’m fluent only in pauses now;
their slow, aching dialect of hesitation.
And maybe that’s the truth:
words don’t vanish,
they retreat.
They watch from a distance
as I crumble in syntax and style,
waiting for me to admit
that silence was the first language,
and I’ve only ever been mistranslating it.
Where do the words go?
Maybe nowhere.
Maybe they stay right here,
stuck to the roof of thought,
too tired to fall into meaning.
Or maybe they escape
like guilt, like God,
like everything else
that once promised permanence
but grew bored of staying.
And perhaps that’s why I keep doing this —
scribbling real elegies for fictional alphabets,
hoping the words I’ve lost
somehow find their way back home
maybe through someone else’s mouth.
Until then,
I’ll keep whispering into the abyss,
not to be heard,
but to remind it
that once, I too
was made of language.
As children,
we stitched torn worlds with hope:
buttons of belief, threads of apology.
Every rip looked temporary then,
every wound, repairable with kindness.
Childhood dreams of fixing the world;
coming-of-age learns to live in its cracks,
to step around the broken,
to mistake survival for sophistication.
Then time arrives
with a rusted needle
and teaches us fashion,
how to hide despair in design,
how to make ruin wearable.
Now we call the tear design,
the scar character,
and the surrender, growing up.
Every now and then
somewhere beneath the fabric,
the ghost of a child still tries
to stitch the world again.
The world revolves nonchalant
burying ghosts in a motion blur.
Two thousand meters above the Arabian Sea,
nestled in rocky terrains robed in fire and ice,
sleeps heaven and hell, intertwined,
dipped in the seething Fahrenheit of noon chai, Kashmir.
If the gospels of gods are true,
perhaps this is truly where they dwell —
watching over heaven, hell,
and all that lies between.
Or perhaps the between
was the gospel all along.
Maybe the truth of it all lies in Kashmir,
at the crossroads of heaven and hell,
for they are but the same;
the only difference ever was lived perspective.
One’s heaven is another’s hell.
Where one sees picturesque frames,
the other sees undead graves;
crimson staining white.
And the gods, tired of mortal judgments,
let their blind faiths decide what name to call.
For every life is a Kashmir of its own —
torn between faith and fire,
between wanting peace
and needing proof it ever existed.
Heaven and hell were never places;
they were ways of life but.
And the in-between was always ours to burn.
Between god and man lies a mirror,
cracked enough to show both clearly.
And I, a witness of borrowed skies,
stand where prayers dissolve into smoke.
The ambitious mountain peaks whisper mercy,
but my epidermis is too human to hold it all.
If this is heaven, it hurts too much.
If this is hell, it’s beautiful enough to stay.
I’ve been to the insides
of other men’s wives,
their better halves,
their half-lives.
Have I felt remorse?
In the moment, not once.
Am I a perverted deviant,
consumed in erotic trance?
Or just a selfish bastard
of a thousand eclipsed suns?
I couldn’t tell, and even if I could,
I wouldn’t, truth be told.
For deceit isn’t linear;
it’s a conspiracy multifold
designed not for the faint-hearted,
but the very brave and the bold.
Lies you tell yourself
as you wake up to her;
orgasms don’t beget guilt,
not on land, not in water.
I’ve seen wives turn backs
to marriages stale and cold;
stranger hands are often
the warmest hands to hold.
I’ve seen forevers at grocery stores,
ready to be auctioned and sold,
because she was fond of new beginnings,
and routine was for the dying and old.
I’ve seen loyalties trade hands
because democracy is what love is,
too many choices and numbed nerve endings;
how do you tell blisters from bliss?
And when they went back, because
it’s only fair to be homebound,
at the plastered ruins of wrecked homes,
I stood like a thirsty bloodhound —
hoping it’d all crack up again.
Am I even sane? Am I sound?
Who could, for sure, tell —
with their own homes razed to the ground?
Because sin was never about sex,
it was about the hunger to feel.
And every time we borrow love,
we repay it with what we steal.
We were born buffering.
Between cassette and chaos,
between cable connection and moral correction,
between parents who said, “We struggled, so you must too.”
We were raised by scarcity,
adopted by television,
and orphaned by silence.
Time wasn’t running; it was walking barefoot on gravel,
and every minute sounded like static on Doordarshan.
We didn’t scroll, we waited.
We didn’t swipe, we hoped.
We didn’t delete, we endured.
We were the last humans
who knew the weight of waiting.
Every Indian 90s kid had one truth:
your parents were the WiFi,
and the password was their mood.
You didn’t “stream” cartoons.
You earned them —
by surviving school, homework,
and your mother’s existential disappointment.
We thought trauma was a teaching aid.
We thought “communication gap” was a syllabus chapter.
We thought love meant convincing your crush
to write on your hand with her Reynolds pen
and never wash it.
We didn’t have Instagram aesthetics.
We had that one photo where everyone blinked.
You weren’t pretty, you were developed.
By a man in a dark room who smelt of chemicals and despair.
Our gadgets were humble:
Walkman, radio, pencil (for open-heart surgery on cassettes).
We were surgeons of sound,
mechanics of memory,
priests of patience.
When we hit play,
it didn’t just start music, it started faith.
Because if the tape didn’t tangle,
God existed.
We had no playlists.
Just one cassette titled “Mixed Feelings Vol. 3.”
We didn’t need algorithms to find our vibe;
our vibe was heartbreak,
replayed on loop until the ribbon snapped.
Our syllabus never mentioned therapy.
Pain was extracurricular.
We didn’t chase closure;
we chased cassette repair shops.
Our fathers mistook silence for obedience.
Our mothers mistook exhaustion for gratitude.
Our teachers mistook fear for respect.
And all of us mistook survival for success.
Every exam felt like a moral referendum.
Every mark was an apology
for not being the child they imagined.
We didn’t know we were depressed.
We just said, “Bas mood off hai.”
And everyone nodded like it was curable
by mango Frooti.
Let’s be honest,
the 90s were a badly directed sitcom
where everyone had laugh tracks but no joy.
Our superheroes wore capes made of cheap nylon.
Our villains smoked Charminar.
Our romantic heroes stalked women to flute music.
And our parents thought
“privacy” was a Western conspiracy.
We didn’t get “the talk.”
We got “the silence.”
And then biology did its thing,
and we called it mystery.
Our idea of rebellion?
Writing “F***” on the back page of a notebook
and hiding it under moral science notes.
We were rebels without WiFi.
Freedom fighters with prepaid balance.
Philosophers who could quote Eminem
but couldn’t spell “therapy.”
But nostalgia, my friends,
isn’t remembering the past,
it’s grieving the version of you
that still believed the world was fixable.
It’s missing the you
who didn’t yet need an audience to exist.
The you who thought growing up
meant freedom,
not burnout with a salary slip.
Nostalgia is that gentle ache
that says,
you were happier when you didn’t know
who you were supposed to be.
We had slam books — our first social contracts.
Pages asking “best friend?” and “crush?” like love could be notarized in glitter ink.
A democracy of secrets bound by cello tape and betrayal.
Every page smelled like Fevicol, perfume, and pre-puberty guilt.
That’s where we learned the art of selective honesty,
how to be vulnerable, but aesthetically.
“Describe me in one word?” — complicated,
because ‘lonely’ didn’t fit in the space provided.
We rated friendships out of ten
like economists forecasting emotional inflation.
And if someone wrote ‘forever’, we circled it twice
to see if it still meant something next semester.
Today, we call it networking;
back then, we called it friendship with conditions.
Same script. Cleaner alphabets.
But at least back then,
our lies had handwriting.
Sometimes I think
we weren’t kids,
we were beta versions of adults
released before the software update.
We were born in and as disruptions.
We glitched without server downtimes.
We laughed without screenshots.
We loved without blue ticks.
We didn’t archive people, we lost them.
And somehow, that made memory sacred.
We were never lonely;
we were alone together.
Which is better.
Because you can heal alone.
Loneliness just wants likes.
And yet…
I’d rewind it all.
The static.
The scolding.
The smell of chalk and hot summers and broken dreams.
The country that never understood you
but raised you anyway.
Because the 90s weren’t a decade.
They were a glitch in time
when imperfection still felt like home.
So tonight,
when the world scrolls past meaning,
and silence costs more than gold.
I close my eyes,
hear that faint, holy, analog hum…
and whisper to the ghosts of all we were —
“Please insert Side B.”
But maybe Side B was never meant to play.
Maybe it’s the part of life that records over itself,
dreams on top of heartbreak,
hope on top of static.
Maybe that’s what growing up really is:
learning that even tape has a lifespan,
and silence is not the absence of sound,
it’s the sound of everything you didn’t say in time.
Because nostalgia isn’t homesickness.
It’s timesickness.
It’s wanting to go back
to the last day you didn’t know you were leaving.
And I think of all of us —
sitting in our fluorescent offices,
scrolling like archaeologists through our own pasts,
trying to excavate who we were
before we learned to perform it.
Maybe that’s why we still keep the Walkman,
the postcards, the SMS drafts, the stupid friendship bands —
because somewhere, deep inside,
we hope memory is a recyclable material.
Maybe every time we laugh at an old ad,
every time we hum a jingle,
every time we say “back in the day,”
we are not reminiscing,
we are rebooting.
And I wonder
when God presses play again,
will He start from where we paused,
or rewind to the part
where we still believed in magic without proof?
So tonight,
if you go home and open that dusty drawer of half-lived years,
don’t look for souvenirs.
Look for versions.
Versions of you that smiled without strategy.
Versions that failed without metrics.
Versions that loved without logic.
Because the truth is,
we weren’t children of the 90s.
We were the 90s.
Everything that broke,
everything that hoped to heal,
everything that refused to make sense
until someone turned it into art.
So maybe there is no Side B.
Maybe we were always the song that never fully played.
Maybe that’s what makes us worth remembering:
the imperfections, the nuances, the borderless blur,
the alloy of a life mapped in missing dots.
Still, just in case,
please insert Side B.
I heal every time I sleep,
though healing feels like betrayal.
Waking up means peeling skin
off a flesh that should look mine,
but neither the skin
nor the flesh feel mine.
I feel someone trapped
in the blank spaces in between;
a ghost haunting
the grammar of a language long forgotten.
It’s like a house of cards collapsing
in cinematic slow motion,
and when the last card falls,
you realise it was never about cards.
It was a jigsaw of a man,
with the face piece missing,
as the puzzle desperately hopes
it’s mistaken for the complete being.
It feels wrong
to even desire goodness;
it feels indecent,
like stealing light
from a dying star.
Everything good that has ever happened
feels like an aftertaste of deceit,
a magic show of manners.
My pretense of me
was a sleight of hand;
a lie so sly
truth mistook it for art.
The applause was never for the act,
it was for the audacity
of pulling myself off convincingly.
People called it charm,
but charm is just
a costume for hunger.
I’ve learned to exist like a rumour —
believable,
yet dubiously questionable.
Some days I’m hollow inside,
some days hollow outside,
and most days
I can’t tell the difference.
I am the echo
that answers before the question is asked,
the reflection that blinks before the eye,
the laughter
that doesn’t remember its joke.
There’s a bureaucracy to being alive —
each breath
must justify its expense,
each sigh
weighed under necessary illusion.
Every time I whisper I’m fine,
something inside bursts into applause,
mocking the performance.
The audience is gone,
yet the show goes on,
as if meaning itself
were a renewable resource of delusion.
And then there are those
who still pray to a silence
and call it God.
But I’ve seen that silence.
It echoes like an empty factory of faith,
mass-producing guilt,
distributing hope
in the shape of obedience.
God was the name we gave
to our inability to tolerate randomness.
A celestial scapegoat.
A customer-care executive
hand-crafted in delusion,
we invented to hold the line
while we sobbed into the receiver.
I have no God,
only recurring hallucinations of order.
No heaven,
only well-marketed denial.
No soul,
just a consciousness with separation anxiety.
If there is divinity,
it’s in the lie we perfect to stay breathing.
If there is salvation,
it’s in how beautifully we pretend.
Healing is progress, they say.
But progress is just pre-lived pain
ready to be lived all the same, all over again.
I don’t heal;
I repaint.
Some call it redemption,
I call it marketing.
Some call it faith,
I call it placebo
with better screenplay.
I’ve spent eternities
selling myself hope I can’t afford,
wrapped in promises
that never expired
because I never lived
long enough to redeem them.
I keep reintroducing myself
to my own name:
each syllable counterfeit,
each tone rehearsed.
If identity is continuity,
I’ve long defaulted.
If living is performance,
I am both curtain
and collapse.
My hollowness no longer echoes;
it hums,
a frequency too honest for language,
too silent for salvation.
And if something divine
is still watching,
I hope it’s embarrassed,
because I’m not.
I heal every time I sleep,
but the healed man never wakes.
Only the hollow one does
dressed in borrowed skin,
reciting borrowed prayers,
pretending this continuity
means more
than well-dressed decay.
The line of difference
between a survivor and a victim
is a very thin one.
One builds a future out of rubble,
the other builds excuses out of memory.
That thin line of difference
is called accountability.
There are countries that invent tomorrow.
They build machines to replace exhaustion,
dreams to replace hunger,
and systems that outlive governments.
We call them first world;
not because they were born rich,
but because they invested in becoming so.
And then there are others —
countries that borrow those same machines
to film conspiracy theories
about a past no one alive has seen,
no one dead can verify,
and no one sane would wish to return to.
They build castles of ruins
and call it heritage.
They delete dissent
and call it discipline.
They chant progress
while worshipping fossils.
And the citizens cheer,
because noise is cheaper than thoughts.
I wish I could name the country,
but the good men running it insist
that naming it is treason.
That questions are infections.
That disagreement is blasphemy
unless printed on official proclamations.
And if a good man says so,
it must be true.
After all, I’m just a stupid, illiterate nobody
in a nation of bike-riding godmen
and monks selling governments.
Imagine a country so haunted by history
it begins to exhume it for dinner,
where erasing centuries of pain
is sold as repentance
for centuries of pride.
Where textbooks are rewritten like scriptures,
and truth is a circus of convenience.
Where good men insist
that rewriting the past
is the first step to correcting the future.
And if good men insist,
it must be true.
How would I know any better?
I am but a stupid, illiterate nobody
living under the fluorescent faith
of slogans and empty speeches;
where faith wears crowns,
and gods endorse decrees
while the dead scroll through our mistakes.
In this country,
the present is always an inconvenience;
too modern to be sacred,
too corrupt to be celebrated.
So we export the future,
import nostalgia,
and call it civilization.
We curse colonizers
while colonizing reason.
We declare wars on ideas
and call it patriotism.
We topple statues
and call it purification.
We erect new temples
and call it ambition.
We rebrand memory
like toothpaste: fresh, white, and forgettable.
The good men nod,
halos fueled by power,
sermons sponsored by fear.
They preach restraint with sirens.
They tax morality.
They subsidize silence.
They invent synonyms for obedience.
And if you refuse to learn the language,
you become the lesson.
So I’ve learned my place —
to whisper, not speak.
To ask in metaphors,
to protest in poetry.
Because even irony here is under surveillance.
Because even laughter needs clearance.
Because even hope comes with conditions.
And yet,
the survivor in me still hopes.
That someday,
accountability will not be exile.
That dissent will not need disguise.
That good men will stop measuring patriotism
in decibels and donations.
That this country will stop treating its citizens
as children with opinions,
and start seeing them
as adults with rights.
Until then,
I’ll remain what I was born to be —
a stupid, illiterate nobody
in a nation that punishes remembering
and worships forgetting.
A survivor, not a victim.
For that thin line of difference
is still called accountability.
And when the good men smile down from their thrones,
counting obedience like coins,
I will whisper back,
"I survived your sermons,
your statues,
your history-washing factories,
and I am still standing.
I am the question you cannot censor.
The dissent you cannot tax.
The truth you cannot rewrite.
I am the echo of every word you deleted,
the laughter of every citizen who learned to think,
the ghost of your good intentions,
the shadow of your legacy…"
And when the next generation asks,
“Who fought?”
I will let silence answer.
Because the survivor
never needs permission.
And the victim
is already history.
Bangalore traffic is not a nuisance.
It’s a syllabus.
An open-university course on patience, delusion, and carbon emissions.
A daily exam that begins when you leave home
and ends when you stop believing in destinations.
You don’t drive in Bangalore.
You marinate in motion.
An unpaid extra in a city-wide slow-burn tragedy
called “commute.”
It teaches you that the universe doesn’t expand,
it congests.
That movement doesn’t always mean progress,
and sound doesn’t always mean communication.
Sometimes it’s just everyone honking at God
to do something about it.
Distance here isn’t measured in kilometers.
That’s for beginners.
We measure it in time, in mood swings, in emotional erosion.
Ten kilometers? That’s half an episode of despair.
Thirty? That’s a full season of regret.
Time, here, is a shapeshifter.
It bends around potholes,
melts at signals,
and folds neatly into excuses.
Moving forward doesn’t mean moving forward.
You could move five minutes deeper into forty-five minutes,
and somehow end up fifty minutes farther
from everything that matters.
That’s not traffic;
that’s time travel with insurance premiums.
Bangalore traffic teaches you faith.
Faith that your clutch will survive.
Faith that this green light means something.
Faith that this driver in front of you
will someday learn to use indicators
before retirement.
It teaches you patience,
but not by rewarding it,
by suffocating it
until you hallucinate enlightenment.
You don’t acquire calm;
you develop tolerance,
like immunity from optimism.
Knowing three alternate routes
from Indiranagar to HSR
isn’t intelligence;
it’s post-traumatic geography.
Because deep down, every Bangalorean knows:
there are no alternate routes.
Only alternate regrets.
You start believing in parallel universes —
one where Ejipura signal turns green,
one where Uber drivers don’t “cancel, boss,”
and one where the BBMP actually means “maintenance.”
We’ve found multiverse theory,
and it lives in Silk Board.
A thirty-minute drive becomes ninety
because a man sneezed near Marathahalli
and traffic took it personally.
Or a cow paused mid-road
to question capitalism.
Or someone ahead tried to “save time”
and cost everyone an eternity.
That’s when Bangalore traffic teaches you
its most profound lesson —
Good times are like weekends.
Everyone wants to relish them,
but not many have the patience
to wait their way to it.
Some honk.
Some weave.
Some overtake hope itself,
only to meet it again,
idling calmly at the next red light.
You learn that time isn’t a line, it’s a loop.
That the past, present, and future
are just three lanes of the same jam.
You learn that progress isn’t direction, it’s endurance.
That success is sometimes just not stalling.
That peace is not reaching early;
it’s accepting you won’t.
You learn that life doesn’t fix itself.
No honk fixes it.
No selective outrage does.
No god with traffic control powers descends.
You just keep adjusting.
Half a meter left, half a dream right.
That’s survival.
That’s Bangalore.
At the red lights, stories unfold —
a delivery boy rewriting physics,
a couple breaking up over Google Maps,
a coder rethinking existence,
a child selling roses
to people who forgot what tenderness smelled like.
And you,
somewhere between guilt and acceptance,
realize this isn’t chaos.
It’s choreography.
It rains when it wants,
like an emotional breakdown.
And everyone pretends to be surprised.
Umbrellas bloom like excuses.
Wipers move like resignation.
You whisper to yourself:
“Everything in Bangalore is seasonal,
everything except traffic.”
Then one day,
you stop complaining.
Because you realize:
the traffic isn’t outside you anymore.
It’s inside you.
Your thoughts crawl.
Your ambition idles.
Your sanity signals for a lane change.
You have become Bangalore traffic.
And when you finally reach your destination,
an hour late, a decade wiser,
you realize something beautiful, terrible, and true:
Bangalore traffic is not hell.
Hell has structure.
Hell has order.
Hell has closure.
Bangalore traffic has hope.
And that’s far more dangerous.
Because hope keeps you coming back.
Hope that tomorrow will be better.
Hope that someone will fix the roads.
Hope that someday,
the Ejipura signal will stay green long enough
for redemption.
That’s when you attain enlightenment —
not on a mountaintop,
but in first gear,
between a stalled bus and a cow that refuses to move,
humming hope under your breath:
“Maybe tomorrow will be smoother.”
And you smile,
because even if it isn’t,
you’ll still be here;
learning, crawling, existing,
and waiting your way to good times.
Telling a world on fire
there’s light at the end of the tunnel
is the kind of optimism
that smells like gasoline.
It’s handing candies
to a man dying of cancer
and calling it healing —
sweet, sterile,
and sold out in glossy packaging.
We’ve mistaken hope for heroin,
kept injecting it into the veins of rotting flesh
and called the tremors “faith.”
Every prayer is a denial of diagnosis,
every sermon, a sugarcoated placebo.
Fairytales don’t heal pandemics,
they just teach corpses
how to smile through rigor mortis.
Truth isn’t a sunrise in soft pastels.
It’s a reptilian scalpel;
cold, necessary,
and cutting through comfort.
And as long as we don't cut it open
and as long as we don't let the bad blood bleed out dry
the world will stay an ever-growing malignancy
because we were too scared to pull the scabs and the clots out
because we were told healing should look holy
because we were convinced scaffolding could fix the rot in the iron
because it’s easier to write love letters to melancholy
than admit
we’re dying
of cancer.
Blurring the lines between fiction and fact
was once a mere figment of literary expression,
a warning about faith that numbs neurons
until we go metaphorically blind.
Funny how quickly the night has changed;
between metaphors and machine-forged metaphysics,
everything screams for literal obedience.
Fact is fiction. Fiction is fact.
And progress, if you call it that,
is a palindrome
gnarling at cobwebs of imagined binaries,
while the world mistakes logic for meaning.
It begins with a child.
It always begins with a child.
Selling bubbles at a red light;
little lungs blowing infinity through a plastic wand,
while gods debate economics over gin and nationalism.
Above him, flags of factions flap like schizophrenic prophets,
each colour pretending it means something,
each symbol borrowed from a language long dead,
each flutter screaming, “Believe! But don’t ask what in.”
The traffic waits, a congregation of chrome and carbon.
Engines hum syllables to convenience,
headlights baptize strangers in artificial light.
Everyone’s on their knees
not in prayers, but in unforgiven debts.
A bubble drifts across a godman’s face on a poster,
haloing his grin like divine mockery.
For a second, the air is holy.
Then the bubble bursts,
because all holiness is surface tension.
A mother sighs in the car behind me.
A child laughs.
Somewhere, time pauses to admire its own decay.
The tree above shakes its ancient head.
It has seen regimes crumble into begging for thumbs,
religions traded for lunches and dinners,
and dreams outsourced to augmented realities.
I look up,
watching the sky eat its own reflection in a million tiny spheres.
Maybe this is what eternity looks like —
soap, air, and delusion,
floating just long enough to feel immortal.
So I buy one.
Not the bubble, the act.
The idea that something so fragile
could exist, even briefly,
without wanting to own, rule, or justify itself.
And for that flicker of a second
before it pops,
I almost believe
we were meant to be beautiful
before we learned all about grammar and gravity.
Nine planets spin in quiet contempt.
Eight have no patience for life.
One carries life that cannot leave fast enough.
And humans insist it is the main event.
Mercury trembles, jittering along its orbit.
Counting sparks of panic.
Every glance a small inferno.
Humans clutch sandcastles as citadels,
rush from shadows of their own making,
believing urgency is purpose.
It whispers to Venus:
“I burn too fast for their attention.
They mistake trembling for courage, panic for purpose.”
Venus drifts in silken clouds, tracing Earth’s boasts, Mars’s petty conflicts, Pluto’s defiance:
“They call trembling courage.
I call it amateur theater.”
She nudges Jupiter with a solar wink:
“Watch closely, the tiny sparks believe they are stars.”
Earth spins with pride and dread entwined.
Raising cities, walls, monuments, hashtags.
It writes eulogies in capital letters
as stars collapse silently.
It whispers to Mars:
“See how they struggle.
They call this life.”
Mars tilts red eyes, deserts cracking like brittle parchment, memories of floods unrecorded:
“They wage wars over furniture.
Philosophize over crumbs of time.
Their ambition is quaint.
I remember oceans swallowing them whole.”
Jupiter churns storms with godless amusement.
It overhears Mercury counting panic and Venus whispering about theater, and chuckles:
“Tiny sparks, imagining revolutions.
All rehearsal, no audience.”
Moons orbit silently, bearing witness to human vanity.
A soldier runs across dust like it owes him taxes, shouting orders to shadows.
Jupiter laughs, storms spinning:
“I never signed up for this charade, yet it amuses.”
Saturn rotates with rings of elegance no one asked for.
Mirrors of Earth’s desperate glare at night.
It nudges Uranus:
“See them? They believe grandeur can be manufactured.
Entropy will redecorate in sand soon.”
Uranus tilts sideways, snorts at solemnity.
Humans invent meaning like toddlers stacking sand.
Its storms whisper:
“They will call this progress.”
Saturn adds softly:
“And they will never notice how fragile rings can be.”
Neptune drifts through blue silence, half-closed in judgment.
Watching sparks of life trying to write novels in ash.
A painter spills coffee on canvas.
A poet screams into empty streets.
A lover writes letters to someone long dead.
Neptune yawns, turning to Pluto:
“All this ephemeral dust.
Brief sparks in a universe indifferent.”
Pluto smirks from the edge:
“Declare me nothing. Erase me. Call me lost. Call me failed.
I remain.”
Stars collapse, burn, flicker, gossip in plasma tongues.
“They file grievances against gravity,” a dying star murmurs.
Comets wander politely, drunk on motion, sprinkling chaos into structured attempts at meaning.
Black holes yawn, drinking light.
“They squabble over furniture while I feast on photons,”
they think. Patience infinite. Appetite silent. Verdict eternal.
Entropy throws confetti across collapsing stars.
Twists human ambition into ephemeral dust.
“Your progress is charming,” it whispers.
“Your ambition is cute.”
Gravity hums complaints at towers and walls.
Time ticks sarcastically.
Planets tilt, drift, whisper, and roll eyes at human vanity.
A monk folds faith into paper prayers.
A child screams into the void, believing sound leaves a mark on eternity.
A painter spills pigment across a canvas, hoping colors outlive their hand.
A king stamps a decree like it matters.
Mercury counts panics.
Venus tracks whispers.
Earth spins and boasts.
Mars tilts and mocks.
Jupiter churns storms.
Saturn displays elegance.
Uranus tilts.
Neptune yawns.
Pluto lingers.
Entropy dances.
Gravity hums.
Time ticks.
Humans continue to clap at echoes, certain of significance.
While somewhere, a black hole checks its watch,
a dying star files its last grievance,
and Pluto scribbles footnotes on definitions.
All of them agree:
Applause tastes like hope, but only for the hopeful.
Planets glance at one another.
A subtle nod between Neptune and Pluto, Jupiter winks at Mercury,
Saturn tilts a ring in quiet amusement.
Even cosmic indifference has its small acknowledgments.
Humans do not hear.
Humans do not matter.
Nine planets spin in quiet contempt.
Eight have no patience for life.
One carries life that cannot leave fast enough.
And humans, tiny sparks on an indifferent canvas,
continue to believe
they matter.
And somewhere, Entropy, tipping an invisible hat, whispers:
“Enjoy your spotlight, little spark.
The universe is already rewriting your oblivion.”
Fat little pig squeaks
of filthy dry twigs
bruising its toes,
crimson angry nose.
Snorts and grunts — because why not?
Scorns at crows, eyes bloodshot.
Blames inheritance, pretty muse,
scribbles rage in jam-stained news.
Apparently, no one cares
how a frightened pig fares.
They stomp crumbs into mud,
echo wars with invisible thud.
Other pigs, fat and thin,
plot rebellions with grin.
So what if crows don’t care?
Pigs declare war in the air.
Crows feast on the dead,
on rotten tales spun of dread.
While pigs lunch and dine,
on faeces fermented like wine.
You must be mad, or curious,
how the end lands furious.
The moral? Ha! Let’s see,
does it matter who eats who for tea?
Fat little pig squeaks,
writes its rage in leaks.
Crows sigh, wings like wet rocks,
the universe shrugs, reality mocks.
And that’s how this ends:
no victories, no amends.
Then a cloud hiccups pink,
the moon burps a wink,
and the cat sues gravity
for cosmic depravity.
Count the teabags. Count the socks.
Fold the clouds into teaspoons. Call it silliness.
Whisper to the wallpaper.
It grins. Or maybe it weeps.
The cat winks. Steam curls nonsense.
The teapot bows. Mirrors mutter to shadows.
The floor decides to move.
Your pencil hums conspiracies.
You nod. You write. You measure difference,
sameness, difference again — all meaningless.
Ants plot rebellion. Socks hide in drawers.
Your coffee mutters, you are late.
I watch you watch yourself.
The hallway moon applauds.
Meaning collapses.
The cosmos yawns.
Curtains whisper secrets never yours.
Windows sneeze. Doors hiccup.
Obsession folds into obsession.
Chaos tiptoes. Pattern evaporates.
You are eyeball. Eyeballed. Trapped.
Reality licks its own teeth.
Teabags revolt. Teacups faint.
Socks vanish. Mirrors pulsate.
The cat forgets it ever winked.
Your reflection pens a grievance.
The universe checks its wallclock.
Your thoughts trip over each other, laughing.
You — still counting, still folding,
as reality shrugs and eats its own shoes.
Somewhere, someone folds a cloud,
names it Tuesday, wraps it in a sneeze,
and the stars pause to make sure you noticed.
I am
what I am.
Just a brain rot
trying to be not.
Oh look, a rhyme
like gurgling chyme,
because poetry
is dysentery —
if the rhymes don’t fly,
you’re not a poet, sigh.
Says who?
Mr. Timbuktu.
Timbuktu who?
How do you do?
Is that rhyme enough
for your itching cough,
like a croaking frog
on a purple-brown wood log?
You must wonder now,
what color is that, and how,
well, who cares, and why?
It rhymes. Your opinions can die.
What an absolute farce,
you must tell yourself.
It’s nonsense verse.
A hundred books on that shelf
and yet, neither poetry nor poetics.
Your poet? Gotta die for a fix.
Maybe become a sandwich this time,
scatter coleslaw, pickles — rhyme on rhyme.
Maybe flap like a pancake, squeak like a mouse,
end up politely trapped in a teacup house.
Does it make all sense or none,
and yet somehow leave you undone?
Madness or genius, who can tell,
he who tied the cat to the goddamn bell.
For millions of years
enough
slept in every shadow.
Then we discovered
greed and grammar;
promises that smelled of rot
before the first word left our mouths.
And the silence began
to eat itself,
gnawing at the bones of civilization,
and the marrow of you,
quietly,
insistently,
while you danced like a madman,
exhilarated by your own decay,
your cleverness writhing like worms
beneath the skin of irrelevance.
Art will not save us.
It never fucking was meant to.
We inherit trauma like heirs to a sadistic father's mockery of generational wealth distribution;
debts, nightmares, a lifetime subscription to misery,
and a free side of existential dread.
We call it medium, canvas, verse,
while everyone else waltzes past,
pretending a painted sunset can outwit the cosmic collapse
like a toddler hiding socks from the apocalypse.
We wear conscience like a luxury accessory,
sniffing the crumbs of someone else’s guilt,
smiling politely while civilization quietly writes its obituary in smoke.
Meanwhile, the filthy rich and ugly powerful laugh,
their wealth stacking like walls
between themselves and the decay we all feel,
their vanity rising while meaning crumbles beneath.
We pontificate. We curate. We frame.
We write essays like commandments, then call it activism.
We call doodles revolutions.
We call scraps statements.
Capitalism giggles, rents a billboard,
and calls it profit.
Art is not revolution. Art is not salvation.
Art is survival for the cursed with conscience,
the ones who bled before the first word was written,
the ones who discovered the punchline of the cosmos
was middle-class worry, and it cut like a knife.
If art could save a species, we would still be apes.
Kingdoms burned. Revolutions failed. Colonies collapsed.
Industrial empires poisoned rivers.
Atoms divided the world.
A genocidal psychopath turned suicidal at the wrong end of the right bullet
while someone somewhere
painted, sculpted, wrote, and laughed,
through each and every one of it.
Art is the species’ stubborn scream
against the slow-motion circus of its own extinction.
Art is survival for those who cannot bribe meaning,
cannot define it, cannot force it into relevance.
It is the only thing that makes sense
when everything else dissolves into noise.
We tell ourselves it is necessary
because it will save the world.
The truth: it is the only thing keeping us
from melting into regret, apathy, and quiet despair.
Art is trauma bonding
for the emotionally broke,
and financially Communist.
It is the lifeboat in the sinking boat,
the bandage on the wound existence refuses to stitch,
the single candle in a warehouse full of alarms,
the laugh in a room full of screaming economists,
the polite middle finger at reality itself.
And if we watch closely,
we may even catch ourselves laughing,
while insisting we were saving the world all along.
And maybe, just maybe,
we were only ever saving ourselves.
Which, honestly, is more than enough
for anyone still awake,
for anyone still capable of pointing at the absurdity of it all
and saying:
“Yes. This is fucking hilarious. And yes, we are all fucking fucked. Until Capitalism finds me. Then it's just you, who are fucked.”
You wake up wrong.
Air slips past your skin,
indifferent,
and your breath follows,
a borrowed motion
in a jigsaw that does not come with closures.
Your hands twitch.
They are not yours.
They lift, drop, graze, scratch —
gestures you never willed,
as if your nerves were conduits
for something passing through you.
You try to speak.
Your tongue twists.
The words are familiar
and alien,
at the same time,
almost as if
echoes of conversations
that never belonged to you,
yet persist anyway.
Your chest heaves.
Heart beats in resonance
with something larger,
something that does not notice
that you exist.
Pain, hunger, thought,
they flow through you,
but none of it is yours.
You touch your arm.
The ruin of a scar pulses under your fingers
like a living thing,
reminding you
that even memory is not yours.
The body scripts verses
of moments you never commanded.
You stare at the mirror.
It does not see you.
It only registers
awareness passing
through a vessel
it will soon discard.
Your skin prickles.
Your bones ache.
Your pulse stammers.
Your voice, your hands, your thoughts,
even the scar that pulsed,
all dissolve into a rhythm
that never needed you.
A weight slides through your chest,
soft, patient, inevitable.
It coils in your bones,
presses against your lungs,
a warmth that is not yours,
a presence that crawls through you and stays.
And you are not sure if you will see the end coming.
That,
that is what makes you afraid.
Afraid.
Really afraid.
That you’ll be gone.
Not with a bang,
but like a whimper.
Have you seen fireflies ignite themselves,
each one a pulse,
a fleeting constellation humming just beyond your reach?
Your jaws draw wide.
You tell yourself it’s magic,
surrealism meant only for your eyes.
You cup your hands.
Whisper promises.
The light flickers,
trembles,
and dies.
With it dies the next miracle,
and a little of yourself along with it,
as though it borrowed your bones to vanish.
Freedom is this firefly's glow:
it tempts, it teases,
then vanishes as you lean in.
No coin, no hand, no vow can ever own it.
You keep staring.
You throw diamonds.
The fireflies do not answer.
And still, you keep staring.
Until you feel your own pulse echo in the dark,
and the shadows behind your eyes flicker like dying stars.
You wonder which is real:
the moments of light,
or the eternity of emptiness it leaves behind,
that throbs arhythmically in your veins,
a quiet, persistent accusation
you can neither catch nor escape,
wondering if it was about fireflies, or freedom, or neither — all along.
And when you finally look away,
the darkness blinds you
with the fireflies’ dead lights and decayed heartbeats,
and you know you will never stop searching.
I. Bloodlines and Burdens
She was born of absence,
so they filled her with expectation.
She was born of beginnings,
so they made her live only in ends.
Centuries rewrote her;
from goddess to ghost to grievance,
each version revised
for men to swallow:
palatable, profitable, digestible.
She became a syllabus,
a slogan,
a superstition in silk.
Every divinity a premise,
every prayer a warning.
Between pedestal and partition
lay the woman;
neither saint nor sinner,
just a body mistranslated
into metaphor.
No one archived
the women who refused translation,
who ruled by silence,
measured mercy in teaspoons,
governed households
like republics
with invisible borders.
And in those rooms,
where jars clinked like accusations,
threads strangled ceilings and floors,
mirrors waited for confessions,
milk dripped from spouts of quiet menace,
honey glistened on knives well done, well hidden,
and the invisible butcher
took her first breath
with a whisper only she could hear
and a shadow that unmade the walls behind her.
II. Teacups and Daggers
There were women who didn’t need swords;
they had teacups,
threads,
the weight of expectation.
They carved sons with comparison,
daughters with guilt,
husbands with hunger.
They stitched families into factions,
fed feuds like pets,
loved like debt collectors —
forgiveness always arriving
in fine print
and hidden clauses.
They didn’t kill like murderers do;
they killed like seasons:
gradual, relentless,
until incidence hardened into inheritance.
The pantry smelled of control,
the kitchen echoed with judgement.
Love fermented in closed jars.
Milk soured into venom,
honey dripped down walls, sticky, slow,
threads crawled like insects across floors,
warmth sharpened into weapon,
and incense burned but could not hide the rot.
Every bite of bread,
every sip of tea,
every whispered lullaby
carried the weight of a blade
that hummed the names of your ancestors.
Where are their stories?
The empresses of emotional famine,
poisoners of peace,
who raised dynasties on obedience
and called it virtue.
You walked past them every day —
smiled, ate, folded laundry,
never knowing
which bite carried their mercy
and which their blade,
never knowing
if the house was watching you back.
III. Mirrors of Silence
There’s a cycle written in smoke:
daughter-in-law devoured
becomes devourer,
victim rehearses vengeance
in mirrors
that applaud silently
and sometimes, crookedly, blink.
Generations gutted in the name of order.
Sons turned into silence,
wives into wardens,
families partitioned like property deeds,
threads of love sprouting thorns overnight.
Milk can kill,
honey can blind,
every blessing
if repeated enough,
becomes a curse
with good intentions,
and sometimes, a mirror leaks blood
while you sleep.
It waits in corners,
lurks in mirrors,
smiles while you sleep,
humming lullabies
you cannot remember
and nightmares you cannot escape,
your own hands replaying
the cruelties you inherited
in perfect, terrible loops.
We all inherit this.
You. Me. Someone.
IV. Halos and Shadows
We wrote legends of men
who killed for kingdoms,
but not of women
who killed for control.
We remembered queens who mourned,
not those who transformed mourning
into legacy.
Perhaps history isn’t biased,
perhaps it’s afraid.
Afraid to confess
that cruelty tastes sweeter
in a mother’s tongue.
Maybe the goddess was never divine,
just better at hiding her sins.
Maybe the halo was never holy,
just a sun tilted sideways
so it blinded only some.
And maybe,
just maybe,
it isn’t men alone who built thrones of bones,
but women
who made sitting on them comfortable,
and sometimes, shifting.
Every empire needs a prayer,
and every prayer,
a woman willing to believe
she keeps it alive,
even when the walls whisper back,
even when the jars remember her name.
And you
yes, you
are standing in that empire,
breathing it in,
feeding it,
trembling beneath it,
or smiling as it feeds on you,
as the milk hisses, the honey pulses,
and the threads tick like a clock
you cannot stop.
What you call living life
is barely a skewed perspective
of existing;
building walls of existence
as long as they serve —
functional, convenient,
until habit hardens into habitat,
and memory mistakes itself
for meaning.
We tint our truths with comfort,
blur the edges of what cuts too deep,
call the blur beauty,
and the haze hope.
But purple doesn’t exist.
What you call purple is fiction:
a clever camouflage for myopia,
for the unseen, the untold,
for truths that rot in the unversed.
It is the color of denial,
the bruise light leaves behind,
a mirage wearing grief as grace.
Purple is an optical illusion.
So is believing you are conspicuous enough
for purpose.
