Bonehouse

The house crawls on his back.

Not timber, not brick;

veins, roots, nerves, a heart that refuses burial.

Its windows blink like dying eyes.

The doors shiver with accusation.

It whispers debts, failures, names he swore he'd forget.

It hums with hunger.

It remembers.

It mocks.

He bends beneath it.

Shoulders pressed into the spines of ghosts.

Every step cracks the earth.

Dust rises in clouds of memory,

smelling of ash, unpaid promises, yesterday’s lies.

Inside, rodents gnaw at corners of his mind,

filing away sweetness, chewing marrow into echoes.

The house pulses, alive, sentient, cruel.

It leans into him like lover, arbiter, executioner.

It laughs when he swears.

Behind him, figures drift, spectral, carrying fragments

chimneys, walls, doorframes, whispers of legacy.

Faces fade into ochre dust.

Bones etched with blueprints of invisible architects.

They march without pause,

march into dust, wind, monotony.

Time bends, stretches, collapses.

Roots bite ribs.

Roofs press into skulls.

The wind screams in languages of laws forgotten.

Sky and soil have abandoned mercy.

He collapses. Twice.

He swears. Walls answer in silence.

He screams. Smoke returns twisted, accusing, ashamed.

Every nail is a thorn.

Every beam, a rib broken.

Every floorboard, a spine snapped.

The house devours endurance, marrow, memory.

Inheritance is a parasite; he is its host.

We watch, comfortably distant,

folding the weight into paperwork,

stuffing it into polite words,

forgetting it is ours too.

He rises.

He walks.

The house pulses against his bones,

older than law, older than blood.

It reminds him of unspoken expectation,

debts unpaid by the living,

silences left by the dead.

It sneers when he stumbles.

The sky bleeds ochre.

Stars hang like dust trapped in webs of memory.

Roots writhe into horizons like serpents.

He does not sleep.

The house does not forgive.

Each day is carved on the spine of time.

Each breath weighs like eternity.

He is priest, penitent, exile.

The house is altar, tribunal, specter, and trickster,.

He rises again.

Though roots bite deeper,

though the roof presses harder.

He carries not home,

but sins, silences, unfinished business of generations.

The line behind him shuffles forward.

Some stumble. Some vanish. Some rise again, bent but unbroken.

Fragments of houses that remember cling to shoulders, bones, marrow.

And still he walks.

And still the house pulses.

Alive, relentless, unforgiving.

One day, roots will claim him.

Beams will pierce flesh and sky alike.

Doors will snap shut on memory and marrow.

The house will move on

searching for the next bearer,

the next spine, the next flesh.

But not today.

Today he carries.

Today the house is flesh,

and flesh is debt.

Today the world watches,

and sees nothing.

He carries.

He carries.

He carries.

And the house laughs.

Etched In Blood, Carved In Stone

They say justice is blind.

But I have seen her.

Her eyes are wide open,

bloodshot, unblinking,

pupils cracked like burnt suns,

fixated not on truth,

but on coin and crown.

She is no saint of fairness,

no goddess of balance.

She is a charlatan in marble robes,

scales tilting toward whoever feeds her hungry appetites.

Oligarchs buy her silence.

Bureaucrats rent her gaze.

Faiths crown her corruption with worship.

Blindness cannot betray; only sight can.

It is not the dark that deceives,

but the eyes that watch and choose what to ignore.

We worshipped the lie that seeing meant fairness,

while her gaze, bought and rented, sold nations like cattle into chains.

She drinks from skulls cracked open with verdicts,

feeds on the marrow of the voiceless,

her banquet laid with broken oaths and

tongues torn from those who dared to speak.

Every gavel is a hammer on the anvil of her hunger,

every law a vein she drains dry,

until the people themselves are parchment;

their blood the ink of decrees

no one ever consented to sign.

And so we worship a hoax;

an idol carved in stone,

a promise etched into law,

an optical illusion painted as eternity.

We call her blindness a virtue

because the truth is unbearable:

Justice is an optical illusion,

a mirage painted on parchment,

a statue we convinced ourselves to be a god.

Her scales are rusted.

Her sword is dull.

Her vigilance eclipses statutes and skylines.

And when you plead for mercy,

it is not blindness you face, 

but convenience sharpened into indifference.

Justice is no natural force.

Justice is an apocalypse 

we fashioned, 

carved in stone, 

and

worshipped into being.

In Remembrance

I spend my days among the dead.

Stone tables for ceremonies,

steel knives for whispers.

Men, women, children,

split open like ripe pomegranates,

their flesh curling back in sheets,

ribs collapsing like scaffolds

from temples abandoned by gods who forgot their names.

Organs gleam like counterfeit treasures,

worthless coins for dead gods long forgotten,

blood clots into hieroglyphs across the floor,

each stain a language only silence reads,

each drip a punctuation mark

in a scripture no one will ever decipher.

The dead are merciful.

They do not scream when I unhouse their hearts,

do not recoil when I sever their secrets.

They offer endings in clean cuts,

like lips sewed shut,

like pages torn from a book the world will never read.

But home is not as kind.

There, my wife

once a woman, once a mirror to my marrow, 

moves like a vessel hollowed of spirit,

a ghost performing a life she no longer owns.

Her eyes are fogged lanterns,

flickering with storms no prophet dares name.

She calls me by strangers’ names,

by gods I do not recognize,

sometimes by no name at all,

and each syllable drives a wedge

deeper into the spine of our shared past.

Fifteen years of vows hang between us

like chains rusted onto bone,

like tombstones marking a grave

we have already begun digging ourselves.

Love is a relic buried under moss. 

To abandon her is treason;

to remain is to rot beside her.

I envy the cadavers.

At least they find closure.

They end.

I endure.

Each night, I walk the corridor of two abysses:

from morgue to home,

from corpses that lie still

to the one that still breathes.

I see her reflection in every shadow,

hear her whisper in every gust of air,

taste her absence in every meal.

The living, I have learned,

can haunt far more efficiently than the dead.

And every night, the truth pierces sharper,

carved deeper than any scalpel could reach.

Death is not the horror.

Decay is not the horror.

The horror is the corpse

that keeps breathing,

that remembers love as obligation,

that drags the living into graves

no stone, no prayer, no history can mark.

The world does not stop.

It does not pause for grief,

does not kneel at pain.

It watches, patient, indifferent,

while we stumble.

And I walk among it all;

the corpses, the living, the ruined, the hollow

and understand, at last,

some horrors never die.

They simply learn to breathe in a stranger manner every sunrise.

A Catacomb Country

They called it a nation,

but it was really a catacomb of matchsticks, 

a temple of embers,

millions of heads lacquered in red obedience,

lined shoulder to shoulder,

kneeling not in prayer,

but in expectation and anticipation of fire.

And when one flame burst at the edge,

it was not condemned.

No.

It was weaponized.

Suddenly it was not arson, 

it was destiny.

Not combustion, 

but covenant.

Not death, 

but deliverance.

Because once fire is labelled holy,

it no longer requires apology.

It only requires fuel.

The crowd bent forward as one,

every head tilted like pilgrims at an altar,

yearning to be consumed.

For in the Republic of Ashes,

citizenship is measured in dust,

and democracy means

all throats choke equally.

They sang in silence,

a choir of sulfur,

each head dreaming of its own immolation, 

for nothing unites like being burned the same way.

And so the Republic thrived,

not on justice,

not on freedom,

but on the promise

that every body would one day glow red,

before collapsing into grey.

Among them sat a boy,

a shadowchild of innocence,

smuggled past the border of belief.

In his hands

a paper dove,

creased wings folded from trembling hours,

a fragile scripture,

a forbidden gospel of truce.

The dove stirred,

as though memory itself longed for air,

but in this land, flight was treason.

Peace was banned literature.

Mercy was outlawed vocabulary.

And innocence was contraband,

smuggled only through children

who had not yet been taught to strike.

The matchsticks hissed at him:

“Peace is what we strike first.

Doves are for monuments,

and monuments are for ruins.

Keep your origami at the border, child;

here, we only deal in flame.”

The fire advanced,

chanting its eternal liturgy, 

“Unity.

Tradition.

Sacrifice.”

Holy words,

repeated so often they lost their weight,

and gained only smoke.

The boy listened,

and in their anthems he heard the truth:

that nations are kindling disguised as kingdoms,

that mobs are matches with voting rights,

that rulers sell fire as freedom,

and history is written

not in ink,

but in the memories of ash.

He clutched his dove tighter,

knowing it would never fly.

For in the Republic of Ashes,

birds are not set free.

They are clipped, folded,

and fed to the flames;

a ritual sacrifice to prove

that the fire still believes.

And the boy glimpsed, 

through smoke older than history itself, 

and it dawned at the dusk of his innocence

that this had always been the way of nations.

That every empire is a torch passed hand to hand,

until hands are gone.

That every anthem is smolder sung aloud.

That every monument is only stone,

waiting to be blackened by smoke.

The flame crept closer.

The matches leaned in, eager.

And the boy,

with his trembling paper dove,

realized the oldest prophecy of all:

That in the end,

every nation is a republic of ashes,

every people a parliament of fire,

every child a castaway of innocence

holding a bird

that no one ever lets fly.

Watching From The Hollows

There is no purpose.

Only borrowed lives.

Stolen ideas.

Debt-ridden breaths

we pretend are ours.

You think eighty years 

is a worthy lifetime?

It is but a flicker, at best.

A sneeze.

A pixel.

We crawl like insects

across dog years of amusement.

We breed.

We kill.

We hoard.

We claim dominion over worms.

Over birds.

Over civilizations.

All of it placed before us.

All of it pre-borrowed, pre-decided.

We grab it.

Name it.

Worship it.

Call it invention.

We are not creators.

We are inheritors.

Actors, 

reading lines

in a script

we cannot comprehend.

We are the dice

on someone’s cosmic chessboard.

Rolled.

Moved.

Sacrificed.

Never ours to command.

We stack meaning like blind architects.

Towers crumble mid-thought.

Religions.

Wars.

Love.

Fragile dreams.

All collapse.

And they, unseen,

drift beyond comprehension,

watching the cycle repeat

with patience older than stars.

Even the unknown suffers.

Even they drown in storms.

Burn in fires.

Glitch in their own matrix.

Chaos is impartial.

Entropy does not pause.

We die.

We fight.

We reproduce.

We suffer.

And somewhere, beyond vision,

a species

unknowable, untraceable

counts our misery like currency.

Observes the loops.

Places the next moves.

We mistake them as ours.

We are tiny, grotesque, screaming pixels.

Vomiting ourselves into eternity.

Nothing we call ours has ever been ours.

Everything we touch is rented.

Stolen.

Played.

Replayed.

And death 

is the pause 

we never get to play.

We are timelessly insignificant.

We are pointlessly alive.

And they,

lurking in the hollows,

prepare to roll the dice again.

Coins Of Blood

War is not a fresh idea.

It is older than the oldest fermentation

you’ve raised to your lips in the name of vintage whiskey.

It is as constant as physics claims energy to be, 

never ceasing, only shifting form.

War is older than the whole of humanity,

and yet every time it slithers back

we pretend it is the first,

because pro-bono empathy costs less

than sponsored violence,

and humans still need to prove

they are better than anything else that breathes.

But violence is the only thing truly democratic.

It does not distinguish

between mother, father, or child.

It arrives like a hungry tide,

sweeping entire families whole.

Bullets cannot tell the rich from the poor. 

Grenades do not ask for caste, creed or gender.

When death becomes religion, blood becomes worship,

and every breathing skin is lamb for the altar.

And if gods have taught us anything,

it is that they can never have enough.

What was once Auschwitz

became Syria,

became Afghanistan,

became Palestine.

What was once the ash of cities,

the rubble of villages,

the exile of countless souls,

has only changed names over time.

And still, the earth spins indifferently,

a billion lives circling the sun

as if corpses were not orbiting too.

War has become slogan and headline,

debate and performance,

and worst of all:

metaphor for the linguistic elites.

The hunter and the hunted

reduced to language,

because words are all the world ever spares,

while corpses pay debts in flesh.

The soil of old graves

is tilled to grow new ones.

Every silence between wars

is not peace,

only the inhale before

another detonation.

Even music learns this rhythm:

pause, then requiem.

We carve halos and horns

on whichever corpses suit the story,

but stone tablets crumble faster

than fresh gunpowder.

The air itself

negotiates the borders daily,

as easily as a finger through dust.

And when the coin is flipped,

both faces drip the same red.

Only the lettering changes.

And coins, after all,

were meant to be spent

until nothing remains

but their weight in bone.

The Roots Of Rot

We are a kind that worships cures.

Cures for hunger.

Cures for loneliness.

Cures for meaning.

As if plaster could fix the fracture of the world,

as if a smile could silence the bleeding sky.

We measure hope in prescriptions,

dose despair in milligrams,

and call it science

though it is nothing more than a prayer recited in laboratories

instead of temples.

We’ve always been obsessed with endings,

never origins.

Cures soothe the fever,

but never the infection.

They stitch bandages onto bullet holes,

call it peace.

They erect statues to bury history,

call it progress.

They post condolences on timelines,

call it empathy.

The cause is an old ghost,

a shadow we refuse to look at

because the cause is us.

Our hunger for invention that devours restraint.

Our greed carved into bone like inheritance.

Our habit of naming poisons as progress.

We are the infection we cannot disinfect,

the chaos too intimate to evade.

We romanticize cures,

write elegies for miracles,

sell salvation in plastic bottles,

and kneel before healers

as if they were new-age prophets.

But the body knows what the mind denies:

the cure is a camouflage,

a brief negotiation with inevitability.

Because the end was never meant to be postponed.

It was always meant to arrive.

And so we patch, we mend, we medicate,

while the root festers in silence.

Call it science, call it faith, call it denial, 

names are but syntaxes to distract from the actualities.

Cures treat the symptom.

The cause remains untouched.

The cause, unlike us

doesn’t just survive.

It waits.

It remembers.

It owns us.

In the end

we are but slaves to cures

so we don't have to admit

being the cancer of the causes.

How Do You Heal Ails When Words Fail

Etymologically speaking,

tumour is a derivative of the Latin verb tumēre,

which means “a swelling.”

Swelling is a rather harmless word, 

a soft punishment for stumping your toe,

for carelessly hitting your forehead against a wall.

It comes, it goes,

like a minor sermon on fragility,

a bruise you’re permitted to forget.

Biologically speaking,

a tumour is an abnormal tissue mass,

cells that multiply when they should rest,

or refuse to die when their time has come.

A clinical diagnosis, yes

though it sounds suspiciously like

the architecture of generational wealth.

Practically speaking,

a tumour is the prelude to dread,

the countdown disguised as silence,

the unscripted pause before tragedy.

It is binary, unmerciful,

a coin with only two faces:

benign or malignant.

One is reprieve.

The other is the sermon of a prophet

who takes his offerings in blood and bone.

Malignant.

Such a fragile word

for a reptile nesting in marrow,

for a god without scripture

who measures worship in chemotherapy bags,

and only leaves

when there is nothing left to leave behind.

Trade words, bend grammar,

gild metaphors in gold;

none of it has ever cured a tumour.

Because tumours do not listen.

They do not bargain.

They only write their scripture

in scar tissue,

until silence is the only language left.

Echoes Of Eden

In the beginning, there was only dust

and a tent stitched from hunger.

A family planted their shadows there,

believing roots could be spun out of cloth.

Then came a rich man,

a man of gold and gospel,

laying bricks like commandments,

cementing laws where none had been spoken.

He carved floors as if carving destiny,

gifted one to the family,

then sold them their own breath back

as rent.

But gods are cruel,

and mortals crueller.

From the alleys rose a tyrant,

a child of conquest,

who seized the keys with fists of thunder

and declared even silence his servant.

The tyrant, too, grew weary.

He left;

yet the locks still sang his name,

the rivers bent to his thirst,

the fires burned only when he permitted flame.

Absence is sometimes

just another form of presence.

Generations passed.

Until one day, 

a cult dressed as descendants 

rose and screamed:

“Before there were bricks, there was dust.

Before dust, there was us.”

So they struck fire,

believing fury could reclaim Eden.

But fury is a serpent that coils back,

and the after-bite was theirs to suffer.

Every wound a question,

every scar an echo of their own hand.

The tyrant returned,

his armies marching like eclipses,

and soon the house became a battlefield of echoes;

every wall a prophet of ruin,

every stair a grave,

every door a lament sung to deaf gods.

Who’s right, who’s wrong, 

what does it matter

when every skin

already smells of grenades and bullets?

Borders are inventions,

histories are rehearsed,

and convenience sells itself

to the highest bidder.

So tell me

who owns the house?

And now ask yourself,

would your answer still be the same

if I told you

the house was Palestine.

Camouflage

I have never felt happiness.

Not like the texture of a silkworm on your fingers,

not like the sudden anger when your favourite part of a book dies mid-page.

I have seen happiness from a distance

on acquainted and stranger faces

like a doctor in an emergency ward

full of patients under observation.

I have known when I am supposed to, expected to, feel happy. 

Because children and pet animals are more often raised on Pavlovian reflexes than affection

And so, I have mimicked being happy

without ever knowing what it feels like.

Most days, I feel rather disappointed. 

Sometimes outraged by it. 

Sometimes numbed by it. 

The feeling lingers,

like the aftertaste of a bitter pill 

swirling around your epiglottis

Some days, I feel a sudden gush of momentary relief

and as I begin to wonder if this could be happiness

and as I try to tell myself, maybe this is what happiness feels like

the feeling evaporates, 

like a volatile fossil fuel 

left out to die in the sun. 

I do not forget my facade though.

And so, I camouflage happiness

wondering if I'm diseased

or is the world in denial.

Razor's Edge

They say trust is the most important thing in love.

Cute. Simple. Wrong! 

Look at the wreckage it leaves;

more scars than the people in it could ever carry.

They made love soft, flawless, eternal

left us bruised, on the floor.

Trust is not a cushion for your heart.

It is not infallibility.

It is not a vow that you will never bruise each other,

or fracture in the collision of perspectives, baggages, spines.

Trust is taking each other as you take life:

the goods, the bads, the hurt, the healing, 

the toxic, the magic, the unbearable, and the surreal.

Hurt is inevitable.

Two bodies, two minds, two histories

crash like storm-tossed ships

in a night without stars.

And here, 

between the fractures,

love begins.

Not gentle.

Not forgiving.

A predator that lurks in the wreckage,

breathing in the pauses,

carrying every bruise, every betrayal.

Real trust

is acknowledging it all

and choosing it anyway.

Even when escape is easier.

Even when survival feels uncertain.

Because you can run,

but you can never quite escape

the inevitability of things.

Repair is no soft act.

It is a dance on the edge of ruin,

a conversation with chaos itself.

And sometimes, 

if terror or tenderness permits,

we survive.

Not healed. Not whole.

Just two damaged goods

still standing in the wreckage,

still daring

to call it love.

Knowing it could in cold blood kill us.

Silhouettes In Asphalt & Clay

Sun spills over clay rooftops,

dust curling into alleys scented with mangoes, wet earth, forgotten spices.

Children scale banyans, barefoot,

laughing as if gravity were a rumor.

Old men chew afternoons like dry leaves,

arguing over clouds, ambition, and who really matters

while the universe observes, unconcerned.

Women fold spice-stained cloths, stacking them like invisible monuments,

counting each crease as if defiance were measurable.

The river hums, tossing leaves and petals,

stones skipping across water in tiny rebellions

that matter to no one, yet everything.

A woman sits on the porch,

hands arranging bowls of lentils with meticulous obsession,

apologizing to ghosts or pigeons; impossible to tell.

The town forgets her face,

she forgets whether she shapes the world

or merely holds it upright,

while the cosmos smirks quietly,

because the joke was never meant for us to get.

Miles away, the city waits,

its concrete towers stabbing the sky

where mango trees once whispered.

Steel glints under a ruthless sun,

neon slicing through exhaust haze.

Children weave scooters through traffic,

paper planes slicing reflections in glass,

horns punctuating missteps like cruel commentary on human focus.

Women perch on fire escapes, adjusting scarves, balancing bags,

while commuters stride past puddles of oil and rain,

briefcases swinging like metronomes to a rhythm the city pretends to understand.

The river narrowed, browning, defiant, 

slides between concrete walls, spitting plastic and bottles,

yet a stray cat leaps anyway,

mocking the city’s illusion of control.

Beneath rooftops, dust, mango trees, alleys, glass towers,

everything persists stubbornly, like rumors refusing to die.

Kites snag wires;

crows carve arcs across gray sky or neon reflections.

All life’s absurdities: triumphs, failures, petty mischiefs, 

exist in a single, unremarkable breath,

and we call some of it meaningful only to fool ourselves.

Time moves relentless and uncaring.

Towns pulse slowly,

cities thrust impatiently forward.

Windows rattle with wind and gossip;

doors open to arguments, fleeting victories, minor defeats,

the quiet persistence of absurdity.

Children grow into adults who forget mangoes, traffic jams, school bells,

but remember exactly how it felt

to climb, to fall, to scrape a knee,

and get back up,

because memory unlike most humans is stubbornly honest.

Afternoon stretches, lazy in the town,

taut and electric in the city.

Evening creeps in like a patient thief,

painting shadows across streets, glass, alleys,

tracing life’s contours that will never be measured by monuments or fame.

It is measured in subtleties:

a cat pausing mid-leap,

a window catching sunlight,

the echo of children bouncing off walls,

as if daring the city to contain them,

and the irony that humans

so clever, so frantic, 

cannot perceive the poetry of their own absurdities.

I walk both worlds:

absurdity, chaos, persistence, 

and understand, immortality lives everywhere.

Not in monuments, not in heroes, not in grand deeds,

but in gestures that persist anyway:

stones skipped across a river,

paper planes slicing neon air,

a woman adjusting bowls, balancing bags,

children running, falling, running again.

Life mocks us, teaches us, leaves us gasping,

and continues regardless of our comprehension.

Memory carries it all

cold, stubborn, unrepentant, 

a god waiting in alleys, rooftops, traffic lanes, mango trees, and concrete streets,

in every fleeting gesture

that refuses to vanish completely,

reminding us that significance is whatever we choose to perceive,

and human effort is mostly absurd theater.

Night arrives, sharp and inevitable.

The town exhales; the city hums.

Windows close. Doors latch.

The river whispers to itself.

Cats, visible in town, invisible in city

continue their debates.

I walk through both worlds one last time,

dust on my shoes, the smell of rain, fried snacks, asphalt, mangoes,

the stubborn echo of every moment I have observed,

and I realize, 

this is immortality.

All that persists.

All I can do is laugh softly,

because to mourn too loudly

would be to forget,

and memory:

town gods, urban gods,

will not forgive that.

The universe doesn’t care. 

It watches, patient and indifferent, while we stumble.

Chain Reaction

Once you realise life isn’t the answer,

you see through the facade of questions.

And once you strip away questions and answers,

life returns to what it always was:

the blind accident of biology,

the coincidence of flesh

convincing itself it was destiny.

No art. No magic. No purpose. 

Only a chain reaction of consequences.

The Demography Of Blur

The older I get,

the blurrier the lines become

between meaning

and the absence of it.

I keep running against time,

thin on patience,

starved of hope,

chasing answers like oases, 

and yet, mirages

are all I ever find.

Once the ground beneath you

shifts from the spine of concrete

to the intestines of reptilian sand,

it becomes impossible to tell

if there was ever a line at all,

if there was ever

a here and a there,

an ours and a theirs.

Meanwhile, the ones who found meaning,

the ones who drew the lines,

stand tall in pride,

jaws locked in self-righteousness.

They look at me 

half-confused,

half-bewildered, 

wondering if I am

a raging lunatic,

or a nuisance of pointless existence.

And I look right back 

straight into their eyes,

like an obstinate reflection in the mirror.

When opposite poles start looking alike,

how do you tell where the equator is, 

or if there ever was one?

The Spine Of Shadows

When my father, seventy three summers old, was hospitalized

because his kidneys weren’t behaving themselves,

apprehensions turned into assumptions in no time.

Especially after the doctors delivered a verdict rather discerning, 

"An intensely enhancing mass lesion

at the lower pole of the right kidney."

I never knew hurt could be so geographically accurate.

I never knew diagnosis could bleed verses in its veins.

I never knew an obnoxious lump of unnecessary flesh

could speak in anything but obscenity.

Dads and daughters are a world of their own, 

I had been told time and again.

Watching my sister and father growing up

never convinced me of a truth otherwise.

His fondness and affection,

her admiration and worship.

It was symbiosis by blood.

I was told I am to be a son to my father:

a shadow to fill in what was missing in the flesh,

a man to live up to the name of another.

Because that is legacy,

and patriarchy demands sons

to be slaughtered at the altars of inheritance.

But how do you become a son

to a father that wasn’t there?

How do you become the silhouette

when the flesh and spine are missing?

The ones who grow up on love

and the ones who are raised by survival

age different, perceive unalike.

So when my sister called in a fit of frenzy,

I couldn’t tell if it was a daughter

concerned for her father,

or an overgrown baby spine

so brittle it could not bear daylight truth

without overdosing on panic.

I was unacceptably calm.

And composure doesn’t suit blood well, I’ve been told.

Maybe I am a bad son — unworthy, ungrateful.

I told myself so,

as if repeating the accusation

might summon the wound,

might scrape a single tear off the edge of my eyelid.

And yet nothing.

All I could ever think was, 

is the panic warranted?

My sister imagined the worst of the worst.

And though I can be outrageously imaginative

in metaphor and in viscerality,

I am stubbornly bland,

mundane to the marrow

when it comes to conjuring crises.

A boy who once hoped to end the man

long before the man in him began

only ever buys imagination

when it is bound in paper and sold as fiction.

But guilt sold to you as a child

can never be sold back.

What breaks in the bone

can never be repaired by blood.

And what begins as a lesion on a kidney

becomes the map of an inheritance;

a geography of absences,

a diagnosis that pens its poetry

straight into the marrow.

Vermin Verdicts

Do moths leap into fire

dreaming of heaven, or dreading hell?

Do cockroaches whisper inheritance

while lying on their backs,

pleading for a turnover, or death?

Do fishes hunger for words,

spitting curses

as you wrench them from their homes?

Do birds feel above it all,

gliding in arrogance,

looking down on every life

from borrowed skies?

Tell me, 

are they incapable of philosophy,

or do they simply see through 

the fragile skin of human unnecessities?

Blood & Bome, Glass & Stone

Helping each other isn’t kindness.

It’s a transaction in camouflage;

a barter written in invisible ink.

Your need aligned with mine.

Your fire cooking my food.

My shelter covering your sleep.

That is not kindness.

That is common convenience.

And convenience

is far nobler than kindness.

Because kindness wears debt like perfume;

smells sweet when sprayed,

but always stings the lungs.

Every “favour” is owed back.

Every “gesture” becomes a receipt.

Humans demand interest on their halos,

gratitude as tax

for moments they fondly call generosity.

No kindness is ever felt.

It is either

cold arithmetic in the skull,

or warm self-worship

on the altar of the moral high ground.

That is why cavemen

were more evolved than us.

Not in language.

Not in monuments that scrape skies.

But in the naked honesty of survival.

They didn’t pretend.

They didn’t stretch out hands to say, 

"I saved you, brother

now carve my name in stone."

They helped because wolves hunted in packs.

Because without you, the mammoth would have trampled me.

Because survival is not a sermon.

It is blood-and-bone mathematics.

And yes, they could trap, bait,

outwit the land itself.

We? We cannot last a season

without inventions we no longer understand.

Let fire vanish.

Let steel corrode.

Let the sun withdraw its warmth.

Seventy percent of us collapse

like clay without water.

The caveman had no ego.

He had hunger.

He had cold.

He had death at his throat

each time the wind howled.

We? We have nothing but ego.

We fight not to survive, 

but to prove superiority.

Over neighbors.

Over nations.

Over gods.

Over tongues.

As if survival itself were

too cheap a victory.

But if the cavemen appeared today, 

raw from stone,

stripped of mercy,

dropped into this world of softened spines, 

who do you think would wake up 

to the next sunrise? 

You will say, 

the era is ours

as are the terrains

the time is ours

as are the weapons. 

They don't stand a chance. 

But, hear me out. 

Give them one month.

One month to smell the rot of comfort.

To watch our hands tremble

at the thought of splitting wood.

And before you blink for your next breath, 

they would decimate us.

Hunt us in the ruins of our monuments.

Skin us beneath our painted flags.

Because walls don’t keep out cold

when fire has fled.

Because stone outlives glass.

Eat. Sleep. Procreate. Repeat.

Those were the basics of existence.

The building blocks.

The marrow’s one command.

Everything else

purpose, career, enlightenment, God

is a fable we sold ourselves

to escape the silence of the night.

Yes, we wrote poems about sex.

Called it intimacy, art, love.

We dressed it in words

until even lust wore a crown.

But sex was never sacred.

It was never about roses or rings.

It was biology’s unbroken law.

We are the only species cursed

to be in heat all year.

Dogs and birds and fishes wait.

As do lions and monkeys.

Seasons dictate their ache.

But humans?

We’re hungry even at funerals.

So we invented purposes.

To fence inheritance,

to lock down property,

to turn desire into dynasty.

Once armory was forged,

once fire obeyed,

we were left with nothing left to fear.

So we traded body heat like rodents,

and fought like hyenas over dead meat.

Because without death chasing us,

we needed smaller deaths, 

for us to have stories and be the heroes in them. 

So, like vicious liars 

high on auctioned wisdom and borrowed whiskey, 

we invented a wish list of little deaths.

Wars, marriages, religions, kindness.

Truth be told, 

convenience is the only truth.

And if you doubt it, 

strip naked.

Step into the wild on a full moon night.

When your teeth chatter

and your stomach gnaws your spine,

you will not pray for kindness.

You will claw for convenience.

Vanishing Comets

I’d always thought tears were bricks in a house

slowly, imperceptibly, stacking over time.

And yet each time my eyes leaked like thatched roofs in monsoons,

they never found an equator.

When what you feel and what you think blur in between,

are you feeling thoughts or thinking feelings?

Is it excess or the absence of it?

What, exactly, are your tears the expense of?

Tears are wet, but they are not ripples.

They are equations with variables missing,

consequences collapsing into coincidence,

chaos disguised as cause.

And then they vanish

evaporated into nothing,

like a sunset swallowing its own darkness.

The ocean remains: tides, waves, salt, 

yet never a drop of grief, not a breath of moist.

Tears are comets burning through the skin’s sky.

They arrive without method, without madness.

Ironic, that rarity should resist extremity.

When you most need them, when you must

they elude you, baiting you like gods do faith.

Dark clouds wander the length of your eyes,

a forehead furrowed in forecast.

But the rains don’t come

not for thirsty crows,

not for tree trunks turned to bone.

Tears are audacious ornaments,

pearls no pain can purchase,

and no peace would ever wear.

The Vanity Of Forever

The more we’ve craved immortality,

the frailer our existences have grown.

We’ve found newer names to call it,

to justify it,

hoping it would make us memorable.

We’ve forgotten lives

for dead legacies of an assumed afterlife.

We’ve killed our own

to feel better about the air we breathe.

We’ve strung imaginary words

to divide tangible geographies,

praying the world we’ve built will remember us;

as if it’s not temporary,

as if it won’t crumble the moment we turn away.

Immortality isn’t ambition;

it’s denial on drugs.

I’m a poet, take it from me.

I’ve had trees killed in the name of poetry,

as if words could ever save

a convict on death row.

All For Nothing

Thousands of languages,

centuries of literatures,

millions of prophets and godmen, scientists and philosophers,

billions more who could be neither nor either.

From cerebrums to processors,

from neurons to gigabytes,

light-years of evolving intelligence

all of it,

just for a promised land

between the thighs?

And you call that survival?

Such a waste.

How dare you claim superiority

when a dog has mastered survival

better than you ever will?

The Invention Of Loving

For tens of thousands of years

men and women slept with and to each other.

Through smiles and tears,

through health and sickness, life and death.

No questions asked.

And the species was no wiser.

And then one day,

a man wrote a story

of love.

A love so pure,

so sacred,

so cinematic

that life itself could not justify it.

So he gave the world

lovers who died in love. 

And the species lost its mind.

Ever since, men and women

have been so busy chasing love,

they've upended lives and genders,

waged wars, 

marched into battlefields,

forgetting it was togetherness they were seeking.

Today the species has evolved so much

that

gender is a spectrum,

equality a grocery,

biology a myth,

and truth a hate crime.

But love, 

love is still a unicorn in the sky,

and sensibility, its wake-up call.

Eyes Wide Shut

There was once

a wide-eyed boy.

But then

an ailing sister,

an absent father,

and an autocratic mother

stitched nightmares into childhood,

weaving cobwebs

delicate as innocence,

vicious as deception, 

to ensnare the making of a broken man.

When you’ve lived an adult life so long

that childhood feels like a schizophrenic's daydream,

you start to wonder

was he your unfinished dream from a good night,

or were you his worst fear come to life?

Wide-eyed little boys are promises

born in the fever of first infatuation.

But time does not keep promises.

It crushes them,

scatters the fragments,

and buries the remnants deep

behind eyes wide shut.

Napthalenes & Nostalgia

Home has a scent.

A fragrance that transcends definition,

weaving a cloak of warmth and familiarity.

The air curls around you like a soft blanket the moment you enter,

pillowcases carry memory,

sniffed again and again

because you’ve been homesick.

It is not the scent of your grandparents.

That smelled of wrinkled laughter and naphthalene,

as if someone had tried to preserve time itself.

Nor the scent of your parents.

Somewhat damp and cold now,

as if it knows the rust in the ribs.

Generations of false and frail lineages can be inherited.

But the scent of home? That is never inherited.

Dead dreams and breathing hopes

smell differently

for fathers and sons,

for mothers and daughters.

On The Death Of My Last Fuck

Dear empaths, activists, rebels & revolutionaries,

and convenient victims of consequences, 

welcome.

You stand on hallowed ground today,

for my last fuck is dead.

And just like your ex’s drama,

this death is absolutely irrelevant,

but then, so is the summary of your rather extended existence.

And, irrelevance comes with a lot of time to kill

so be patient for you have nowhere to be.

My last fuck

or rather the corpse of it 

was found

face-down in a swamp of clichés,

clutching a half-read hymn to positivity

and whispering, “Not again…”

The autopsy revealed, 

"Death by overexposure to human stupidity

an ugly, merciful, blessedly final end."

It was carried in silence,

fatter than an oversized boulder,

followed by my ex-boss, my ex-lover,

and my ex-hope for humanity, 

each pretending grief

while counting glances.

The Anthem of Indifference rose on hollow reeds,

a choir of broken philosophers hummed in dissonance.

The bearers stumbled,

crushed beneath the overweight gravity

of fairytale expectations.

Inside the coffin lay remains

a shriveled ember of sarcasm,

pickled in resentment,

wrapped in tissues I never used

when you cried over problems

whose answers were etched into time

long before you were born.

The Grim Reaper asked if I wished to speak.

I said, 

“Fuck off.”

That was the sermon.

And yet, the rites continued.

Smoke rose from burnt promises.

Whiskey spilled on the altar of tradition, 

a bitter brew for the dead,

who deserve stronger spirits

than the living.

Widowed sympathies, robed in grief,

wailed into hollow echoes,

chanting the last cliché, 

“Sometimes, letting go is salvation.”

The after-feast was a roast.

Every lover, master, friend, and acquaintance

offered tributes

each one shredded in real time

by my apathy.

In the corner, despair slow-danced with liquor,

while anxiety sang off-key

through a broken lung.

The deceased leaves behind survivors

like a good fuck leaves behind hope

sometimes regret, popularly called children. 

My last fuck was survived by

zero patience,

a restraining order against hope,

an empty, dusty box labeled Future Plans,

and a note that read, 

“Tell them I died bored.”

At midnight, we gave it to the elements.

The pyre was built from debts,

discarded vows,

and every hollow promise of a second chance.

The flames rose so high,

even the stars whispered, “Enough.”

The ashes were divided.

Half scattered into the earth’s cracks, 

so every passerby curses with purpose.

The rest given to the wind, 

so apathy rides on every breath.

From this day,

no condolences will be accepted.

The sympathy registry is closed.

The temple of caring has been razed,

replaced by an arena for mockery.

So here I stand,

head unbowed, lungs full of profanity,

declaring with absolute clarity:

I am out of fucks to give.

The vault is empty.

The treasury looted.

The only currency left

is ridicule.

Eternal, inexhaustible, mine.

Now clap.

Or stay silent.

It makes no difference.

Because even if I dug up my last fuck

and strangled it again,

none of you would be worth the ink for an obituary.

Whispers Before Oblivion

Humans,

the species that laughed at gravity,

that tried to cage rivers,

chain volcanoes,

and bottle the wind.

You wore arrogance like armor,

vanity like a crown,

while the earth sharpened its teeth

on mountains you thought you could conquer.

Oceans swallowed continents whole,

winds shredded cities like paper dolls,

and you screamed at the storms,

thinking prayers or chants

could bribe the skies.

Forests roared in fire,

skies vomited ash,

your towers of ambition

melted into delicate confetti,

your vanity bleeding from every crack.

You carved laws to bind the wind,

whispered charms to hush the rain,

offered sacrifices to calm the sun,

all useless.

All gloriously useless.

Nuclear weapons fizzled like wet matches.

Armies with guns and grenades drowned in puddles.

Poets, kings, prophets, 

puppets dangling from the universe’s fingers,

flung into cosmic dust

for eternity’s amusement.

When the last city drowns,

the last forest burns,

the last human whispers to the moon,

nature will host a banquet

of stone, ash, and human flesh,

chewing through our monuments

while laughing in tongues no god can translate.

Your hubris, once a crown,

becomes the garnish on the feast,

your screams, seasoning for the apocalypse.

You thought you were the apex,

the masters of the play,

but forces of nature only let you

audition for the punchline.

You were never in charge.

Never special.

Merely meat in a theater of inevitability,

dancing on the strings of entropy.

And still, you build, scheme, pray, 

while the cosmos rehearses its next purge. 

Because truth be told, 

the universe doesn’t care

if you live, scream, or die.

You were never a god.

You were never the apex.

You were never anything

but an accidental coincidence.

And now

you’re just appetizers 

before lunch.

Family Business

At home

screams stack up

in a pile

behind closed doors.

A bruised child,

a silenced sister,

a valley gagged in shadows,

“family business”

best forgotten,

best hidden,

best erased

and you walk past it,

feet on floors that remember blood,

hands that touch nothing,

eyes that close too easily.

The neighbor coughs.

The neighbor bleeds.

And suddenly

you are awake

shouting to skies that do not answer.

Your voice borrowed,

your grief rented,

palms open for nothing,

your outrage echoes

in empty streets.

An outsider land

becomes a slogan to scream,

a badge stitched in foreign sorrow

while your own kin

rots in chains you refuse to see.

Mouths gagged.

Eyes beaten.

Bones broken.

Tongues ripped from loyalty.

And still you look away.

Still you whisper lies

to keep comfort close.

Still the shadows swallow truth whole.

It is easier to mourn

where mourning wins applause.

Easier to rage

where rage costs nothing.

Easier to live

with conscience rented,

with guilt outsourced,

with justice a whisper beyond your walls.

Justice is no visitor.

It does not cross seas.

It does not knock on doors.

It does not pause for staged grief

or hollow virtue.

It does not forgive cowardice.

It does not bend to convenience.

Wake.

Or do not.

The silence is yours.

The blood is yours.

The screams,

the bones,

the rot in your conscience

the god you pray to

turns its face,

leaves you alone,

with nothing,

but the stink of your cowardice

and the taste of your own silence.

At home

the walls remember.

The floors remember.

The shadows remember.

And when you gouge your eyes out,

because daylight truths are too obstinate for myopia,

your drown your own blood screams

in some distant lament,

your conscience sleeps

in loyalty-induced coma.

And still you whisper

“family business.”

And still you pretend.

And still the blur stretches on.

Religion Of Blur (Blan Verse Sonnet Version)

Political or humanitarian, who calls?

Who pulls the price when your blood is priced?

No one confesses in the auctioned silence,

as questions drown beneath their scripted noise.

Blurred are borders, scribbled in cheap ink,

where clarity's rephrased blasphemy.

Truth starves as fairytales feast on gods,

as order limps on propaganda.

Priests of policy chant hymns in suits,

prophets get silenced on breaking news.

We sell our eyes out to buy some peace,

and worship chaos as a sacred creed.

Kneel, for, fog is now your faith;

the blur’s religion doesn’t need a god.

Religion Of Blur

When do political and humanitarian

change hands?

No one asks, no one tells.

Questions dissolve in blurred lines,

because clarity is treason

to a world built on narratives.

The Etymology Of Life

True symmetry

is spelled cemetery.

Everything else

is bad grammar learning syntax.

Unabolished: Slaves Of Freed Chains

1% of the world

is responsible

for 100% of the suffering

of the other 99%.

They perch on towers of bones,

clocks wound from stolen hours,

rivers rerouted to water their gardens,

air filtered, exhaled for them alone.

They measure lives in ledgers,

heartbeats in interest rates,

dreams in debt statements.

Every breath you take

is collateral for their comfort.

Every struggle you endure

is an ink blot on their balance sheet.

Erase them.

Kill them.

Obliterate them.

Let their spines snap under the weight of their own towers.

Let their veins run empty, hours coagulating into blood.

Let rivers drown their gardens in ash and bone.

Let their gold melt into the earth, heavy, useless, forgotten.

Let every brick, every ledger, every clock, every breath

shatter into nothingness.

Let the air taste of absence, thick and choking.

The world would not weep.

Nothing would mourn.

Nothing would tremble.

Only the echo of absence would scream

a hollow, gnawing silence

where tyranny once throbbed like a heart.

The forests would reclaim their silence.

Oceans would roar without bribes.

Mountains would stand just as tall,

unmoved by vaults of bureaucracy,

power, and ownership.

The streets would remember how to breathe.

The cities, the countries, the continents

would no longer tremble

under the tyranny of invisible hands.

The sky would rise unbought,

unmeasured, unclaimed.

And the 99%?

The flock, swept along from cradle to grave

what would they do?

Some would awaken,

muscle memory clawing back thought long buried.

Some would thrive, laughing at their old chains.

Most would falter,

still mimicking commands, still seeking authority,

still tasting the air of obedience,

still shackled by habits they cannot name.

Some would scream into the silence,

clawing at their own hands for instruction,

hungry for someone to tell them what life even is.

Clarity tears open your skull,

scraping every lie from the marrow of your mind.

Freedom waits like a corpse in the dark,

its hollow eyes daring your lungs to fill with it.

Sanity returns only to those

willing to stare into the void left by tyranny,

to feel the gnawing absence of control,

and confront the raw, bloody truth:

you were never worth less than obedience

and nothing more will be handed to you.

Or perhaps we would go back.

Back to survival of the fittest,

to the days of cave men,

where pedigree and lineage,

wealth and corruption,

would be words yet to be invented.

Even in liberation,

even after the annihilation of the tyrants,

the absurd truth would prevail.

Slavery isn’t only chains and crowns.

It’s marrow, pattern, habit

the rot inside your bones

that keeps you bending.

The world could be free.

But freedom is no resurrection.

It exposes the living,

daring them to bleed through

the chains they carried inside themselves.

Even without them,

some would kneel,

some would wait in line

for a new tyrant

to carve obedience into their flesh.

Worth It? Worth Shit.

Wealth is not evolution.

Currencies, in every form, in any form,

are everything opposed to evolution, creation, survival,

and everything in the in-betweens.

And yet we hoard wealth

begged, borrowed, stolen

as if afterlives had an economy to run.

We collect it in cash, kind, and change,

across decades and generations,

and the debts follow too.

Imagine a life so pointless,

even death isn’t a biddable enough price for a clean slate.

And in just a couple of thousand years

we have not only denied millions of years of existence,

but convinced ourselves

that the significance of our lives can be summed up

by the number of commas needed

to accommodate our currency collections.

For thousands of years we’ve hallucinated

to this delusion of importance,

this imagined idea of wealth.

And as if that wasn’t enough,

we let it become the objective definition

of hundreds of thousands of lives. 

Worthy or worthless,

decided in less time than it takes to snap a finger.

Imagine a life so frugal

you could weigh it in crumpled paper notes.

Imagine countless lives measuring themselves

against such flawed gibberish.

Tell me

what do you imagine is worse,

if I told you your answer was your currency?

Art Capital

Would you create

if you knew for a fact

audience wasn’t even a concept,

let alone the definitive necessity?

You wouldn’t.

Because what you parade as art

is nothing but circus.

Take away the crowd

and you are exactly what you fear.

Alone,

with no mask to hide behind,

no applause to drown your silence.

You mistake reflection for vision,

mirrors for meaning.

Every gesture is a plea,

every word a leash,

every creation a bribe

for someone else’s gaze.

But creation does not beg.

It does not perform.

It tears itself out of nothing,

erupts without witness,

burns without applause.

Stars explode into galaxies,

oceans carve mountains,

volcanoes paint the sky in fire

and none of them wait for an audience.

Take away the crowd

and your art vanishes.

Take away the illusion

and you are only hunger

dressed as charade.

But creation, 

creation will riot in silence,

etch itself into the void,

outlive gods,

outlive you.

Audience is your religion.

Creation is the abyss

that swallows worship whole.

Anatomically Yours

Dear You,

This should’ve been written years ago.

But like everything else in my life,

it got stuck between compulsive procrastination and the excuse of perfection.

My closet is full of drafts I never sent,

my shelves are full of notebooks I never read out loud,

and my brain, 

well, my brain is basically an architectural nightmare.

Too many rooms, not enough space.

So here it is.

The one letter that survived the crash, defied the denials.

When I was four, they told me not to write with my left hand.

Apparently, the Gods don’t like left-handers.

Imagine telling a child the Creator of the Universe

who doesn't hold biases and loves all equal

is offended by which hand he holds forks with.

So they made me switch to the right.

And I’ve been writing wrong ever since.

That’s how it started.

With correction.

Everyone was busy fixing my handwriting

while ignoring my words.

The corrections were constant

like energy

always there, the only difference was in forms.

Switch your tone, it’s too sharp.

Switch your silence, it’s too rude.

Switch your dreams, they don’t pay.

Switch your truth,

because truth makes people uncomfortable.

So I switched.

Hand. Dreams. Truths. And spine.

Until one day, there wasn’t enough left to switch.

And then, one day, I found a microphone.

And strangers.

And suddenly, the same sarcasm that got me scorn and rebuke,

the same tongue that earned me slaps,

was getting applauses.

The witnesses called it humour.

I call it survival with an outrageous audio system.

But this letter isn’t about applause.

It’s about honesty.

And my honesty is this:

I don’t know if you laugh at my jokes

because they’re funny,

or because you recognise yourself in them.

Maybe that’s what loneliness really is

a virus that spreads only when you admit you’ve caught it.

The only thing that multiplies when you share it.

Happiness is just the group therapy.

So Dear You,

whoever you are, wherever you’re sitting tonight

if you’ve been carrying unsent words around your skull,

if you’ve been hoarding letters like forbidden desires,

this is your permission slip.

Because tonight, mine finally loaded.

And if you’re listening,

that means it has finally reached exactly where it was meant to.

Not with heart, not with hope

just with scar tissue, sarcasm,

and what remains of my vocal cords.

This is just a letter. 

Not a story where I am the protagonist, antagonist, or the hero's third cousin. 

A letter for a document of proof, 

because corporates have taught me, if it's not documented, it didn't happen.

So let this letter be a proof.

I lived. I bled. I wrote.

And maybe, proof that in a world obsessed with hearts,

a brain can still break louder.

- Yours, scribbling in the cracks of sanity, A Someday Somebody

Hail Gravity

People are fallen.

Gravity is just an excuse,

a scapegoat for a species

addicted to collapse.

We don’t stumble.

We choose the fall,

crown the ruins,

call them monuments.

Every headline is a suicide note

written in collective handwriting,

each letter dipped

in the ink of denial.

We tripped over shoelaces

while reaching for the stars,

then cursed the stars

for being too far, too cold, too cruel.

We shame gravity

over and over again,

as if the universe itself

were conspiring against us,

as if descent were not

our oldest instinct.

People are fallen.

Not by sin,

not by fate,

but by design.

And somewhere,

gravity sits alone,

tired of the blame,

smoking dead hopes

rolled into silence,

waiting for the day

we finally admit

we were never victims,

but architects of our own undoing.

The day we etch the epitaph

to the grave we dug ages ago.

A god-damned tombstone that reads, 

"Here rots the frauds of flesh

that penned their own demise

then dared to call it destiny."

Once Upon Happiness

She asked me if I’m ever happy.

And I laughed.

Not the loud crackling one you feel your gut losing to,

but the kind that rips out of you like a cracked rib

breaking skin,

a sound too jagged to belong to joy.

Happiness is a privilege,

a fortress with high walls

and armed henchmen for gatekeepers

who know my face by heart

only to remind me

I don’t belong there.

It is a bathtub I drowned in

before I ever learned how to swim,

my lungs still leaking silence decades later,

silence that smells of mildew and childhood.

It is the swing that snapped mid-air,

my body plummeting into gravity’s lesson

that falling is the only inheritance

passed down without paperwork.

It is the father’s shadow

that stretched across walls, ceilings, doorways,

until I mistook fear for furniture.

It is the mother’s silence,

not the kind that soothes,

but the kind that suffocates

a pillow pressed against my face

with the weight of tradition and shame.

It is a lover’s kiss

that came chained in debts I never owed,

each moan itemized,

each touch billed in arrears.

People point at my words and whisper,

"that's poetry".

They are wrong.

This is pathology.

These are scans of gangrene,

X-rays of fractures never set right,

the medical records of a body

stitched together with sarcasm and caffeine.

Happiness is not missing;

it is extinct.

A species we hunted for sport,

slaughtered in temples of ambition,

buried under inheritance,

and served as appetizers at polite dinners

where everyone smiles with ornamental teeth and pickled tongues.

I don’t chase happiness.

Not anymore. 

I don't seek it either. 

I autopsy it

or how anatomy remembers it.

I slit its belly open,

catalogue the organs,

pin the carcass to my pages

like an exhibit under bad lighting,

so the world remembers

that once, long ago,

such a creature existed.

When she asked me if I’m ever happy

I wish I could tell her, 

I am the museum of everything happiness destroyed,

its graveyard and its proof.

And every word I write

is the blood still dripping

from its teeth.

But then, a laugh was far more affordable

for her vanity and my vulnerability.

The Scum Saint

They tell me to tone it down.

To write about sunsets,

about love as if it were a bouquet of orchids and tulips

and not a boutique of scars from wars from the past and the recent past

that throb every time you try to sleep.

But the voices in my head say

fuck that.

I don’t write poems to hand them out like condoms

at a college orientation camp.

I don’t lace every wound with rose petals

just so idiots in their tinted glasses can clap back with their approvals.

I don’t believe in performing grief

in rehearsed crayon hues

so critics can sip chauffeur-driven coffees and call me "gentle."

I’m not here to sell poems wrapped in pastel ribbons,

to teenagers and overgrown children pretending to be functional adults, with assumed anxieties

who think a metaphor is a warm blanket.

I’m not here to sit at mahogany tables

with heritage poets trembling over their commas,

their sonnets stitched so tight

even their skeletons gasp for air.

I’m not here to sip overpriced wine

with poet laureates who think life's light at the end of the tunnel

who treat validation like currency,

cashing in applause like beggars with bowls.

I’m here to bleed.

Openly.

Ugly.

Arteries on the page, not

band-aids that match the curtains.

You

the politically correct poets,

who sell cuteness like it’s crack,

bundle poems in pretty ribbons,

and feed them to crowds who want lullabies,

not fire alarms.

You’ve forgotten that poetry was once

a weapon, a mirror,

a slap across the jaw of power.

And yet you sit here, writing about moonlight and manic pixie grief

like the world isn’t burning,

like your neighbours don’t whisper

slurs you’ve memorized but refuse to spell.

Your amnesia of indifference disgusts me more than silence.

You

the traditionalists,

who sweat every time I breathe.

As if my existence is a curse word

scrawled across your family scriptures.

You preach lineage and discipline,

but you’re too busy guarding graves

to notice the living are rotting.

Scarred, scared,

too attached to your little temples of language,

pretending your silence and subtlety is wisdom

when it’s only cowardice in drag

the grammar police of the graveyard,

scared of syllables that sweat,

scared of words that look you in the eye and say

“fuck you.”

You hate me because I am everything you fear—

raw, loud, spine unbent,

not a whimper in couplets but a howl in fire.

The whole lot of you

I call you the convenient denialists,

who scroll past news of lynchings,

rapes, famines, genocides

to write poems about dragonflies and mist, 

until you have an agenda to serve and preach.

I can smell the rot under your verses,

the nightmares you tuck under your borrowed metaphors.

You don’t write about the things that keep you awake

because that would mean admitting

you don’t actually sleep at all

or you're so blind, you daydream through life.

I call shit what it is.

You call it “problematic.”

I call it rot, blood, god, and capitalism.

You call it “complex nuance best left unexplored.”

But tell me,

who’s braver

the poet who stitches bullet wounds into metaphors,

or the ones who cut roses from textbooks

to hide the stench of death under “aesthetic arrangements”?

You all know what keeps you awake at night

the fathers who never hugged you,

the lovers who fucked your self-esteem raw,

the hunger that grows louder than your faiths.

But instead of writing it,

you trade insomnia for applause.

You hide trauma in haikus

like landlords hiding corpses under staircases.

I will not.

I will show the corpse.

I will name the hunger.

I will cut the father open on this page

and make you watch the organs twitch.

Because poetry is not a lullaby.

It is not dessert for the exotic.

It is not the museum where language comes to retire.

It is the morgue, the riot, the confession booth,

the bastard child scratching at the altar.

I am that bastard.

I am the uninvited.

I am the one you whisper about in anthologies,

the one your workshops warn you against.

And I am still here, spine intact,

while you try hard to not drown in the septic tanks of your curated cuteness.

Goosebumps On A Corpse

A country rises for an anthem,

penned in the pride of a poet

then floods the poet’s land like vultures,

circling a decomposing corpse,

picking shreds of skin, shards of bone,

questioning the nationality

of its very flesh and marrow.

The streets reek of communal rot.

They brand the mother tongue a foreign intruder.

Centuries of being carved by empire,

quartered by borders,

starved by famine,

drowned in rivers of blood,

erased.

History shelved as fiction

by the arrogant ignorance of legacies

that amount to nothing more

than sleeping through the slaughter.

And now

buffaloes and donkeys

debate histories they never carried.

Kill them

and suddenly,

you are the traitor.

You are

the nation’s enemy.

The very nation that goosebumps to patriotism

from the spine it disowns.

Bones Of Bureaucracy

Autopsy rooms are the only truly democratic spaces.

Everyone arrives equal.

Godmen. God’s men, women, children.

Millionaires with mansions and islands. 

Homeless beggars and pointless recluses.

Poets who think words matter; spoiler: they don’t.

Scholars whose faces haunt memory; ghosts in their own lifetime.

Merchants of honesty smiling through deceit.

All stripped. Naked. Vulnerable.

Even your fear of death looks pathetic here.

The scalpel doesn’t care.

The saw doesn’t care.

Rigor mortis waits for no one

and yet, everyone panics.

Your body is democracy’s ironic playground.

But the paper trails of your freshly exiled existence?

Democracy’s divorce lawyer, scribbling, smirking, judging

scribbling while the rats laugh.

Your organs wait for redistribution like banished scriptures.

But your grave?

Partitioned. Segregated. Assigned.

Hindu here. Muslim there. Christian somewhere else.

Even calcium obeys humans better than humans obey humans.

Even dust is a casteist.

Even worms have opinions.

Even eternity has deadlines.

Families arrive, blinking like startled shadows.

“Who touches which finger first?”

“Which cheek gets the lamp?”

“Does the foot need washing?”

Love smells like bureaucracy here.

Death?

Death laughs.

Death scribbles in margins.

Death rolls its eyes.

Death sighs.

Death drinks tea.

Death yawns.

Death checks a watch that doesn’t exist.

Autopsy rooms are democratic.

Until the stitches are done.

The corpse boxed.

The living arrive to reclaim their differences.

Because equality is terrifying.

Because humans can’t resist hierarchy

even if the dead is decomposing silently beneath their noses.

Even if decomposition is faster than morality.

Even if morality is a rumor.

Even if rumors bite like hungry dogs.

And somewhere, in the middle of this theatre,

the dead whisper

“Congratulations, you survived.

But society still refuses to evolve.

Enjoy your lifetime subscription to hypocrisy,

handed down, stamped in eternity,

from cradle to cremation.

Optional extras: regret, confusion, mild nausea.”

Yes. The only true democracy is where we all lie down,

silent, helpless, vulnerable.

And even then…

we’re still sorted, labeled, judged.

By the living.

By their religion.

By their greed.

By the eternal itch to divide.

By the cat that wandered in and peed on the paperwork.

By the ghosts of everything you ignored.

Because humans are allergic to fairness.

Even when it’s obvious.

Even when it’s free.

Even when the corpse in front of them screams, silently,

“Try harder, you monkeys.

Death is your only level playing field.”

And as the monkeys nod, 

You wonder what does true evolution look like

Being the lesser monkey or the greater? 

Recipe For A Family

Ingredients:

1 father (preferably silent, emotionally constipated)

1 mother (extra guilt, finely chopped dreams)

A pinch of tradition (expired, but still sold as holy)

Several cups of hypocrisy (measured loosely)

A handful of neighbors for garnish

Memories and ghosts of buried childhoods, as per taste.

Method:

Start with the Father.

Take a man who's convinced that providing equals parenting.

Add two tablespoons of rage,

let it ferment into silence.

Make sure to leave out any traces of affection;

affection ruins the bitterness.

Now add the Mother.

Marinate in moral stories of sacrifice until the batter is heavy,

stir guilt until lumps form.

Sprinkle every dish with reminders:

“I gave up my life for you.”

(That way, the aftertaste lasts decades.)

Sprinkle in curated portions of Society.

Generously dust with clichés like

“Respect your parents,” & “It’s for your own good.”

Bake until the trauma is golden brown

and indistinguishable from tradition.

For garnish:

Add neighbours, relatives, family friends, friends of families,

and anyone with unsolicited advice.

Serve the child raw.

The child will cook themselves in the filthy froth,

served burnt at the edges,

bitter in the middle.

Serving Suggestion:

Avoid exposure to therapy or healing.

Leftovers last a lifetime.

May cause insomnia, cynicism, trust issues, 

and a struggling career in art.

Meta-diagnosis:

This isn’t any cuisine.

It’s fast food for sadism.

The recipe doesn't need alterations —

only the packaging does, from time to time.

Final Note (Chef’s Secret):

If the dish turns out bitter,

don’t worry.

They’ll call it love.

They’ll call it family.

They’ll call it home.

Bone Ledger

The ones who swim in money

care only about finding the end of bottomless oceans.

The ones who thirst for it

repeat sermons to themselves:

not everything is about money,

while secretly auditing

every smile, every handshake, every body,

as if each could be counted

in a currency that might finally matter.

Both keep buying time

cheap seconds at premium interest

a pyramid scheme with the clock,

that always cashes out wholesale.

And when the ledgers are closed,

the accountants of eternity won’t bother with balance sheets;

they will pen a line, a singular one:

every empire, every beggar,

written off as dust.

Death has no receipts;

only a warehouse of bones.

Thrones Begged, Borrowed & Stolen

You grew up poor.

So you chased comfort.

Now you hoard it.

You anoint it with holy words:

ambition. legacy. stability.

As if greed were a scripture.

As if fear were a family heirloom.

But don’t call it inheritance,

when the servant’s daughter

asks if your son

truly owns two beds.

And you, with the calm of kings,

answer: “He’s worked hard for it.”

He is six.

His hardest work so far

is surviving the weight of sleep.

Her mother bends her back

against your floor.

Washes away your filth

until the water itself

begs for rest.

Merit always arrives

already blind.

You confuse inheritance

with effort.

You confuse protection

with love.

You confuse possession

with parenthood.

You claim you’ve shattered

the chains of poverty.

You haven’t.

You’ve polished them.

And locked them

on other wrists.

Every empire calls itself noble

until the walls whisper

what they’re built from. 

Not stone, not gold

but borrowed childhoods,

mortgaged dreams,

and the spines of the nameless.

Your son does not sleep

on two beds.

He sleeps on two bodies.

And one of them

still bows before you.

Love Poets, My Condolences

Ladies and gentlemen, gather round.

We are here to perform the last rites

of every “rose is red, moon in June” tragedy

promptly posing as poetry.

Love poets, my condolences.

Not for your heartbreaks, 

those are predictable. 

But for your imagination,

which clearly died before tasting puberty.

Every time you rhyme fire with desire,

Shakespeare fakes a sneeze to hide a seizure.

Every time you compare hair to the misbehaved waves of oceans,

a fish dies choking on a plastic straw.

You say her lips are cherries.

That is not love, son

that is fruit salad.

You say her skin is silk.

That is not semantics, son

that is caterpillars on vacation.

You say her voice is honey.

That is not aesthetic, son

that is bee vomit,

cooked in your audacious desperation

to cure a hard-on.

Your metaphors

aren’t metaphors.

They’re malpractice.

Your poetry is not love.

It’s acid reflux.

It’s verbal dysentery.

It drips clichés

like bad plumbing in a cheap inn, 

and you expect applause?

You dress up lust like it’s eternal.

You confuse dopamine with destiny.

You sell orgasms in rhyme and meter

and dare to call it “immortal verse.”

Love is not candles and violins.

It’s arguments over what to watch.

It’s shared scars

from baked-in trauma.

It’s one of you hogging the blanket,

and the other silently plotting murder.

It’s losing teeth and hair,

stacking inches and wrinkles

over sloppy seductions

and imperfect intercourses.

But you don’t write that.

Because honesty doesn’t sell greeting cards.

So you recycle metaphors

like a broken grinder, 

louder, dumber, blander.

And your bribed audiences applaud you

for writing the same poem

your ancestors wrote to each other,

just with a prettier pen and shinier ink.

You are not poets.

You are necrophiliacs.

You keep fucking the same dead metaphors,

expecting them to moan differently.

I am not your critic.

I am your death sentence.

And this?

This is your funeral pyre.

Let your rhymes burn.

Let your metaphors scatter.

Let your “forever loves”

dissolve like incense.

And when the ashes settle, 

let the records state the simple truth:

Love will survive you.

It always does.

But poetry,

poetry will not forgive you.

It will hunt every stanza you touch,

spit your clichés back into your throat,

and carve on your gravestone:

“Here lies another love poet.

Un-fucked and un-given-a-fuck-about.”

Let Poetry Be

Poetry isn't art

and anyone who says so

and anyone who feels so

and everyone who believes so

are but juvenile and innocent

or are too comfortable in the lie of it.

Poetry is diagnosis

of the ribs shattered by conditional affection

sold to you as parenting

of the lungs scorched charcoal black

in the need to please people, like you were entertainment

of the habitual insomnia you've convinced yourself to be a lifestyle disorder

but is really slow suicide

your being withered and wallowed in your deepest insecurities and hollowed out moralities

of the repeated breathlessness from worrying too much that you aren't living life the way it should be

because the manual kept changing and you never stopped to ask why, when, how

If your life hasn't left you damaged enough

that you've questioned if your conception was an erotic misconception

If you haven't contemplated ways to never wake up at least, if not acted on it

If being content and being happy aren't as abstract to you as communism is to self-seduced sellouts

If life hasn't challenged you to a gruelling duel to keep life alive every good morning

I'm happy for you

You've aced living

and as much as it hurts to admit

Your existence is a blister on my survival

So let poetry be

Let poetry be for the ones so broken

the idea of being put together scares the living hell out of them

Let poetry be for the ones so bruised

that healing hurts more than hurting

and hope is a drug their scars have grown resistant to

Let poetry be for the ones who need it

like surviving cancer needs chemotherapy

like amputated legs need wheelchair

Don't take away life support from the dying just because you can

You can have the world of words; let poetry be theirs.

The Autobiography Of Decadence

You give your life everything.

Every time.

Every place.

Every form.

No safety nets, no emergency exits.

Just hurling yourself headfirst into an empty pool

and pretending the concrete isn’t waiting with a grin.

And every single time, the world says, 

No.

Not the polite kind.

Not the “try again” kind.

The kind that watches you knock

so it can slam the door on your face, harder than yesterday.

The kind that leaves your knuckles bruised and cut open

and asks, silently, why you even bothered.

On paper, you’re every inch of the substance legends are made of.

A biography of wins, scars, and headlines

that could convince a stranger you’ve cracked life’s code.

But paper is a trained empath and an incredible liar.

Truth be told? 

You’re worn out steel succumbing to the slow rot of rust and resistance —

too stubborn to collapse,

too proud to hide the rot.

You let the decay show, brick by brick,

so the audience knows the price of standing.

At some point, you’re not chasing the dream anymore.

The dream is ashes in someone else’s fire.

You’re not after the cause either. 

That flag’s been trampled into mud so long

you can’t even read what it said, anymore.

You move because stopping tastes worse than swallowing glass.

You tell yourself it’s about winning.

It’s not.

It’s about refusing to be that shamless bastard

who dropped his fists first.

This isn’t hope.

Hope is for fools who still think life pays rent.

This is a dare with no audience, no applause, no reward.

One last round before the floor swallows you whole.

Not because you think you’ll land the punch,

but because you want the bastard across from you

to remember exactly who you were

when the lights died.

That’s not romance.

That’s a death wish in leather stitched from your own pride and skin.

Hope is for lovers —

the wide-eyed, the stupidly brave,

the ones who think a kiss still matters.

Resignation is for the terminally certain —

the ones who’ve read the ending a hundred times

and still walk into the story,

not to rewrite it,

but to see if maybe this time

the guillotine hesitates,

just long enough

to let them spit in its eye.

The Rain Remembers

The city forgets

how to breathe

every time it rains.

It drowns

in its own spit,

coughing up manhole ghosts

and plastic bags

that never decomposed,

only grew meaner with age.

The gutters overflow

like bad apologies

you keep making

to someone already dead.

The streets choke

on yesterday’s wrappers

and last year’s election slogans —

still soggy, still useless,

still clinging to the curb

like they’re owed another chance.

Rickshaw drivers become philosophers

with steering wheels.

This water knows where to return,

they say,

before driving straight into its mouth

like ex-lovers testing

whether the kiss still burns.

Someone lights incense

for a drowned god

whose temple is now

an aquarian apartment.

Someone else

blames the government

between gulps of cheap whiskey, 

because the rain

doesn’t fear authority,

only respects the drunk.

Children still run in it,

slapping the water into laughter,

unaware they’re wading through

the skin of everything

we couldn’t keep alive.

But the rain remembers.

It remembers names

you’ve tried to bury twice.

It does not forgive.

It just arrives —

like debt collectors,

like lovers from old dreams,

like promises whispered at midnight

and broken in daylight,

like all the things we smothered

without rites,

now clawing their way back to the surface —

plastic bags tightening at their throats,

manhole ghosts in their lungs,

wet and smiling

like they’ve finally found your address.

Plastic Patriots

It's easy to be patriotic

especially when

you can buy it at traffic signals

as it walks up to you —

tender hands soiled in the exhaust of city life,

stretched out,

selling your patriotism wrapped in plastic

as you toss out some expendable currency.

You feel good twice over —

some for the fact

that you have what it takes

to buy patriotism

every time it is auctioned,

and somewhat because

your sense of goodwill

is buying someone their lunch today.

They just smile at you,

yellowed teeth and blackened nails,

flinching at how idiotic money really is.

And as you walk away,

clutching your conscience like change

the real patriot sells your illusions back to you.

The Memory Clause

The man in the corridor

offered me a button.

“One memory,” he said.

“Gone. No echoes.

No residue. No remains.

No footprint in the sands of time.”

He smiled like a disclaimer

stamped across absence.

I chose 2009.

A hotel room.

A goodbye

without a door that locked.

It vanished.

So did

my mother’s voice

from childhood,

its lullaby dissolved

into the spaces between heartbeats.

I didn’t notice

until I tried

to hum

a tune

that no longer existed anywhere in me.

I went back.

He offered another.

I picked 2017.

The night I called someone

I shouldn’t have.

It disappeared.

So did

the scent

of monsoon on concrete,

the taste of regret

that lingered in the throat,

the tremble in my own voice.

I kept going.

Mistakes.

Lies.

Versions of myself

I wanted unmade.

Each time,

something else left quietly —

a laugh,

a scar,

a taste,

a room,

a name.

Until one morning,

I woke up

with a clean mind

and a house

that did not recognize me.

There was a photo on the wall

of a woman I didn’t love

and a child

who looked like he used to.

The corridor was gone.

The man with the button

had forgotten me too.

I touched the walls.

They were real.

I was not.

And then I saw it:

my own face,

staring back at me

from the photograph on the wall —

smiling, breathing,

a stranger who owed me nothing.

Every vanished memory

had been a blade.

Every erased self

a lock.

And in that house that did not know me,

I realized the final truth —

I had unmade myself

so completely

that even I was now a ghost

passing through the lives of others,

and the world

had moved on

without me.

The button had worked.

I was gone.

And nobody cared. 

Not more than a fly on the wall.

Except me.

But I had become a metaphor now —

buried in verses

until someone dug me out,

took me for a brief walk in sunlight,

then returned me to my life-like coffin.

All because I was their obsession,

and they, my only mercy.

Sticky Fingers

My father never said sorry.

Not once.

Instead, he brought home fruits,

as if sweetness could graft itself

onto the rot it was meant to cover.

Mangoes —

when I’d been silent long enough

to be mistaken for obedient —

their gold flesh softening in the bowl,

breathing a faint perfume of decay,

a bribe that bruised at the slightest touch,

leaving your fingers sticky with guilt.

Once,

after snapping my Walkman in half

because I’d turned the volume too high,

he came home with a new schoolbag.

Said, “It has more compartments.”

As if grief only needed

better shelving,

more hidden pockets

to keep the broken things in —

a meticulous autopsy room for the living.

He once threw away my poems.

No hesitation.

No pause to see

if they bled when crumpled.

Said, “These won’t feed you.”

He was right.

But neither did his silence.

Silence has no calories —

only weight.

The kind that settles on your chest

until breathing feels like theft.

The first time he hugged me

was at his retirement ceremony.

I was twenty-one,

dressed like I had somewhere else to be.

His arms were awkward,

as if they’d forgotten

they were allowed to close around me.

He whispered, “Proud.”

I asked, “Of what?”

He didn’t answer.

Maybe he didn’t know.

Maybe he’d rehearsed the word so long

it slipped out without a script —

a lone actor stepping onto a stage

long after the play ended.

And maybe

that was the apology —

a fruit basket,

a better bag,

a word left to rot in the throat.

Sweet, overripe,

fermenting into something

you could swallow

if you were desperate enough.

And I was.

I drank it.

It burned going down —

like swallowing the ghost of a blade

he never had the courage

to press to his own heart.

Gospel Truth

Like all fairytales you’ve been sold —

breathing nightmares in cabaret cloaks —

this one too begins at

once upon a time.

There were two of them:

a man and a demi-god.

The man had ambitions;

the demi-god dwelt in agendas.

The man believed in building a better world,

while the demi-god dreamed of one built around him.

Yet they came together as one —

as differences often do

in the wake of opportunity.

Hope is an addictive opioid.

The hope of revolution — a holy cocktail of narcotics.

Together, they sold it like a pharmacist and bureaucrat

would in times of cholera and consumerism.

Like every fresh distraction on display,

they set up shop before they knew it.

While the man held his apprehensions,

this was the demi-god’s moment of truth.

Before the man could unclench his jaws,

the demi-god filled his mouth

with false prophecies —

while addicts knelt

at the temple of false hope and decadence,

clapping at every miracle of faith

the demi-god pulled from his hat.

Men make gods.

But demi-gods?

Creatures of unhinged narcissism—

turning praise into prayers before sunset.

Once you’ve convinced yourself of this fallacy,

to the mindless manic of bewitched addicts —

you’re God.

Hope is religion.

And addicts are God’s children.

Once you’re God, you don’t need no man —

especially not the one

who’s seen you put on the façade

of a dangerous demi-god,

long before loyalties were pledged,

long before religion was forged.

So the newly crowned immortal

denounced the man,

shredding the last bit of mortality,

meandering.

His people called it God’s divine plan.

Loyalties layered —

because in a capitalist world,

divinity is on sale,

and faith is convenience.

Conveniences corrupt faster

than cancerous cells.

Once you turn a blind eye to daylight —

because divinity in daylight

is like watching a magic trick from the rear —

your loyalties aren’t yours anymore.

It’s all but God’s will.

But, like all gods,

this one too was a sucker for riches —

gods fall for human temptations

harder than humans ever do —

and not one cries out loud,

because it’s a blind man’s world.

So, he left for a land

that promised more cash and kind,

leaving his temple behind,

entrusting disciples,

naming them high priests and priestesses

at the altar of Renaissance.

Loyalties — small price to pay

when power is on offer.

Leftover faith, left to holy men and women,

is like leftover meat for a pack of hyenas—

blink, and it’s gone.

Gods and demi-gods all dwindle —

and so did he —

hoping to trace his legacy

back to the origin story.

But by the time he set foot again

on the soil he sold as revolution,

faith had changed hands,

and religion birthed cults and factions.

And just like that,

a man-made god

stood at ruins of man-made rot —

appalled at rusts of Renaissance

sold at grocery prices,

called affordable resistance.

The god had fallen,

and so had his ego —

and nothing hurts a narcissist more.

When your back’s against the wall,

and your feet have lost their ground,

you do whatever it takes to be reborn —

cry out for help

to the man

who wrote your holy gospel.

But then again —

when have the blind cared

about the fine print?

As the god watched his ruins take shape,

as priests and priestesses sold him off

in bits and bones, fractions and flesh,

the man who wrote it all

lit a cigarette

from the ashes

of the burning gospel.

And if you are wondering

where I was in all of this —

to have known it all so well —

I was the man selling the cigarettes all along,

for nicotine sells better and kills easier than narcissism,

and death is the greatest capital of them all.