Sunday, 27 July 2025

Burn After Reading / Bathe After Hearing

I. The Gathering of Gods’ Ghostwriters


Once every thousand years,

three stoner-writers meet

on a forgotten bench

at the edge of collective amnesia.


Not poets.

Not prophets.

Just bored men

who once mistook hallucination for inspiration.


Their ink?

A cocktail of fermented verses

and poorly measured paranoia.


Their paper?

Whatever parchment survived

the ash of disbelief.


Their names are lost —

but you know their work as:

Old Testament. Bhagavad Gita. Quran.

Or as they call it:

Three Very Long Jokes That Got Out of Hand.




II. The First to Speak — The Old One


"In the beginning," he snorts,

“was boredom.”


I wrote Genesis on a three-day weed bender,

high enough to believe

snakes could talk

and women were ribcage origami.


Eden? A stoner's dream really.

The apple? A ridiculous joke.

Original sin?

Just the price of narcotic curiosity.


I wrote it for the laughs.

But they believed it.

They built kingdoms with it.

Used my punchlines as law,

my sarcasm as sanctity.


I made a flood a metaphor —

they made it a genocide.

I made commandments for house pets —

they carved them in stone,

killed over commas.




III. The Brown One Grins


I lit up under a fig tree

and imagined a war,

so dramatic

it needed a thousand verses

and seventeen different gods.


Krishna?

Just a celestial life coach

with boundary issues.


Arjuna?

A metaphor for that friend

who asks you for career advice

during your existential crisis.


And yet —

they memorized it.

Worshipped it.

Tattooed my punchlines on their souls

and called it moksha.


I gave them my joke book,

they turned it into caste.

I gave them poetry,

they turned it into massacres.


I laughed.

They folded hands.

Now temples drip with blood

while statues smirk in marble silence.




IV. The Desert Scribe Speaks


They say I wrote the Quran.

Truth be told, I was hallucinating

on desert solitude

and leftover wine

from a camel trader’s wedding.


Every verse was a fever,

every revelation

a badly translated dream.


Jibril?

Might’ve been indigestion.

Jannat?

A fairytale.


I thought they would get the idea 

when I gave them faceless for a face

I mean, I thought the joke was obvious

And yet now they've made me unquotable 

without consequences.


I wrote fire as fiction —

they lit a thousand real ones.

I said submit to the mystery,

they heard slaughter the questioners.




V. They Laugh. And Then They Cry.


“Imagine,” says the old one,

“jokes taken so seriously

they outlive the punchline.”


“Imagine,” says the brown one,

“wars fought

over spelling mistakes I never corrected.”


“Imagine,” says the desert scribe,

“beheading the metaphor

because the metaphor made you feel seen.”


They light one more joint,

roll it in old scripture.

The ashes look like prayer.

The smoke smells like genocide.




VI. And Then… A Warning


Here’s the truth:

Your gods were drunk drafts.

Your holy books,

the side effects of insomnia, unadulterated drugs, and, a lot of time to kill.


---


VII. Final Lines (Mic Drop)


So when you quote them

with trembling lips

and bloodied hands,


ask yourself —


Were you enlightened?

Or just high on secondhand fiction

written by men

who mistook madness for meaning?


Because satire, my friend,

doesn’t need a statutory warning —

unless you plan

to decimate the author.

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