Inheritance Of Almosts

Growing up, I was told

following the footsteps of your elders

is the best thing you could do.

Except —

when you’ve descended

from two failed generations of poets.

Because life’s random and all that,

but patterns don’t lie.

They may be dressed in accidents,

but they’re rarely without intention.

And reasons?

Reasons are for those who survive the pattern.

My Communist grandfather

worked for the Soviet Consulate —

long before Communism split the Soviet

from its own ribs.

And long after.

He stayed a lifelong Communist, nevertheless.

Poetry was the only place he was agnostic.

He held on to Communism like it was his religion.

So what if religion wasn't allowed in Communism?

That’s what half-baked revolutionaries do right:

take what something is against

and turn it into everything.

He bled like a Marxist by day

and an anarchist by night.

But poetry never bled for him.

And as peers made headlines,

debts, and premature deaths,

he vanished —

a shadow of a poet

long before he became

the shadow of a man.

My father was different.

When you've watched a lifelong poet

and a lifelong Communist

collapse face-first

on unfurnished flooring,

rough in the edges,

you learn better.

He mastered the art of subtleties —

a closet Communist

and a closet poet.

He didn’t swear by Marx or Lenin,

but he slept to dreams of revolution —

because dreams don’t raise alarms.

Dreams get to hide

in broad daylight

under the quilt of selective amnesia.

He didn’t swear by poetry either —

poetry had failed inheritance.

So he chose rhyme —

a safer, dumber island

far away from the waves of blank verse.

He made his science his muse —

wrote rhymes

on the affordable innocence of elephants

and the fine-tuned profanity

of drongos and herons.

When you’ve blanketed your bones

with pretence for flesh,

you don’t fail.

You just never succeed.

And here I am —

more than a century

into this heirloom of almosts.

I inherited both Communism and poetry —

and like all things passed down,

some inherit wealth,

some inherit trauma,

some inherit nothing but memory

of what could’ve been.

And poetry, like politics,

is just trauma

that found a voice, 

but seldom, a spine.

And I’ve seen too many

die inside both —

long before they actually died.

So I refuse the inheritance.

I write, yes —

but I don’t seek verses.

I burn them and bleed them dry.

I don’t believe in ideologies

for they are far too ideal to be logical

in inherited systems of coerced dysfunction.

I am the anti-climax

to poetry and to politics.

Let poetry keep my sarcasm.

Let politics keep my satire.

Even I mistook poetry for redemption

until I realised rhyme doesn’t raise the dead.

I’d rather come

all over the margins

and leave the obituary blank.