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.

Ceasefire

I collect paychecks like a proud capitalist

and mock them like an ashamed communist.

I drink like a poet

and preach sobriety like a monk with a minibar.

I am a hopeless romantic

and a self-aware misanthrope.

I starve like an artist

and eat like a critic at a free buffet.

I pray like a sinner in crisis

and sin like a priest on vacation.

I am a minimalist hoarder,

a pacifist who throws words like knives.

A walking ceasefire

that sleeps with the sound of gunfire.

I am not a being —

I am a literary contradiction.

Grammatically,

I am an oxymoron.

Biologically,

just a moron on oxy.

I am you, and you are I —

but you knew that

long before I accused you.

You’ve just been in denial so long,

you’ve mistaken your own reflection

for a hostage you could rescue.

But the truth?

The hostage never begged for freedom.

It begged for a sharper blade.

And you still weren’t brave enough

to press it to your own throat —

so you handed it to me.

And called it poetry.

It's A Free Man's World

They told me I was born free.

But no one asked

if I wanted to be born

in the first place.

I was “free” to cry in my mother’s arms,

as long as it was the right hour,

in the right tone,

so neighbours wouldn’t call me difficult.

“Free” to run barefoot in the fields,

but not too far —

lest I stray beyond

the unmarked fences of fear.

“Free” to dream in school,

as long as I dreamed in the syllabus.

Free to think,

as long as I thought in answers

that came in pre-approved manuals.

Adolescence came with new liberties —

the freedom to fall in love

but only with the right god,

the right gender,

the right shade of skin.

Free to rebel,

but only on weekends,

when rebellion could be washed off

before Monday morning prayers.

Adulthood arrived dressed as democracy.

Free to vote for whomever I liked,

as long as it was someone

who could afford to buy my choice.

Free to earn money,

but not enough to matter.

Free to speak,

as long as my voice stayed smaller

than the ears listening.

They said I was free to die for my country.

No one mentioned

I was also free to be forgotten by it.

And when I tried to love this idea

you call humanity so dearly,

I found out

it was a gated residence

with a dress code,

an entry fee,

and dead humans in dustbins inside.

They still tell me I am free.

But freedom, I’ve learned,

is just a leash

long enough to make you forget

you were born to be owned.

Life is a commodity

consent isn't a prerequisite to.

The Error Of Being

It’s funny

how, out of seven kinds of man,

Homo sapiens escaped extinction —

the only species that lost its shit

faster than fear could keep up.

Humans —

who know death is inevitable

yet run from it

like a prison break.

Humans —

who call a narcissist a beast

for showing true colours,

when every actual beast

shows more empathy

than humanity ever managed

in bedtime myths

and folklore’s most fevered dreams.

Humans —

who once lived as they were meant to:

surviving on demand,

the way they now consume cinema —

snack in one hand, meaning in the other,

clueless in both.

Humans —

who hoard money like it’s real,

as if it won’t burn

as beautifully

as their ideals.

But here’s what nobody told Homo sapiens:

extinction isn’t tragedy;

survival is the joke we forgot we were telling.

Alphabets From An Asylum

The Hopeless Cynic (Voices In The Head Part I):

You ever realize,

you weren’t born —

you were assembled.

Scraped together from leftover punchlines

and childhood traumas nobody laughed at.

A jigsaw of unrealized genius and juvenile decay.

A sonnet scribbled in blood and half-burnt memories.

Now you sit here —

a poet who won’t rhyme,

and a humorist who won’t smile.

You want a legacy?

Your legacy is a landfill —

of existential monologues

you passed off as spoken word

because “confession” felt too naked.

You stitched metaphors

to bandage the fact

that even your metaphors

are terrified of how honest you get.

You romanticize rot.

Taxidermy your trauma in stanzas.

Auction your shame

like cursed antiques

from a haunted museum

no one dares to visit.

You think pain is art

just because you wrapped it

in shreds of conditional love

and sepia-toned trauma?

Your “style”

is just survival

with better punctuation.

You didn’t write poems.

You bled on a page

because stabbing yourself

was the only way

to feel alive

without dying.

The Disillusioned Realist (Voices In The Head II):

And yet…

Despite the gore,

you still fucking hope.

Hope that someone —

some unshaved stranger in a bookstore —

will find your bones

and call them blueprints.

You wrote like a man

trying to map meaning

in a language he invented

but forgot mid-sentence.

You never performed —

you confessed.

Not with flair,

but with a kind of nakedness

no spotlight could sanitize.

Your punchlines?

An autopsy.

You dissected society —

and made the corpse laugh

while pulling out its organs.

You broke yourself

to make strangers feel whole.

And every time they clapped,

you wondered

if they heard the cracking inside you, too.

You weren’t after legacy —

you were after exorcism.

And maybe, just maybe,

this chaos will count for something.

Maybe your deranged verse

will become scripture

for another broken fuck

too smart for therapy,

too tired for prayer,

and too proud to ask for help.

Oninthough (In Being And Bones):

So it’s true then.

I’m not mad —

I just speak the language of ruin fluently.

You —

my beloved monsters.

The cynic in warpaint.

The realist in retreat.

You've been scripting my encore

since before I touched a microphone.

You think I perform?

This is the asylum.

You are the walls.

And I?

I’m just the echo.

And yet —

between your violence and my verse,

a third voice lingers.

Not hope.

Not healing.

Hunger.

To matter.

To scar the silence

in a way that outlives the flesh.

You call it delusion.

I call it defiance.

If I must burn —

let me burn loud enough

to be mistaken for a sermon.

You think I’m healing?

I’m rehearsing.

You think I’m honest?

I’m hallucinating.

You think this is therapy?

No. This is theatre.

You think you’re the audience?

You’re the symptom.

You paid to witness

a man disintegrate beautifully.

And I let you.

Not because I trust you —

but because I don’t exist

unless someone’s watching.

I’m not here to be understood.

I’m here to make you question

why you ever wanted to.

And if you walk out

thinking I was brilliant —

then the real tragedy

isn’t that I’m mad.

It’s that you are.

The Suicide Gene

Humans got evolution right.

For a while.

Like every other species —

eat, fuck, survive, repeat.

No memoirs. No meaning.

Just biology doing what it does best:

persist.

But boredom —

boredom was our original sin.

We ran out of predators

and made each other the prey.

Built fires. Built fences.

Built flags to die for,

and names to kill in.

We invented God

to answer silence —

then silence became unbearable,

so we invented noise.

We learned to think,

then turned thought into trade.

Learned to speak,

then weaponized it with grammar,

accent, pedigree,

and theatre.

We made love a contract.

Turned touch into transaction.

Wrote rules for attraction

and still got abandoned.

We drew lines on maps

and taught children to hate colors.

Painted freedom in vivid symbols —

then sold it at the marketplace.

We carved machines

to carry our laziness.

Invented roads to nowhere

so we could chase meaning faster.

We birthed numbers,

and then let numbers birth

worth.

Now, net worth

is self-worth,

and death

needs validation.

We taught empathy to stone

because we unlearned it ourselves.

We cured the fever

but not the fracture.

We replaced instinct

with identity,

and now spend years

trying to remember

what we were

before we learned

to be human.

And still,

we call this empowerment.

Still,

we call this growth.

No other species

made their own extinction

a design.

But we?

We made downfall

a ritual.

Lit the match.

Clapped the flames.

And called the ashes

civilization.

The Idiot's Manifesto

I've been writing —

putting words together,

stitching them whimsically

into rather disjointed strings,

piling them atop one another

and pretending it’s art

and revolution in the same sentence —

since I was a freshly realized teenager.

A decade and another ten years later,

I’ve hopped from one form to another,

genres to the lack thereof,

with words as both palette and pellets.

From hopeful, heartbroken rodeos

to full-fledged misanthropic arson,

I’ve travelled words at length and in breadth —

across tongues, grammars, and skins.

Hundreds and hundreds of unnecessary poems

I’ve often contemplated undoing.

Millions of dead, decayed, and dwindling revolutions

bled off pens onto pages

and into paperbacks few have read,

fewer still remembered,

and nearly none have lived —

save for a handful of rebellious idiots

who thought words could cure malign

and carve a benign world —

but forgot that people’s worlds

begin and end with people.

And people don’t change — only revise.

And revolution is uncouth

to a species obsessed with cosmetic quick-fixes.

Nothing has changed.

Nothing will.

You and I will waste

a few thousand more words

out of the millions of trees

already fallen to our need to be enough.

Some will fall to the fallacy —

yours and mine —

of a world built and rebuilt in words.

Words spoken,

words penned —

lost and found

and lost again,

in translation.

High Functioning, Low Compliance

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

has to be the single most reductive,

misleading label ever slapped

on something far too complex

for the permutations and combinations

of a brain you so fondly call normal.

You call it attention deficit —

but it’s quite the opposite.

Imagine this:

a tanker with seventeen holes,

leaking at equal intensity.

Tell me — which leak should it fix first?

Better yet — does it even make sense

to fix just one?

That tanker is my brain.

I don’t lack attention.

I have too much demand

and too little supply.

Multiverses bloom inside my skull

every fucking second.

I don’t have an attention deficit, bitches —

I have an attention economy in collapse.

And unlike made-up currencies

or secondhand intellect,

you can’t buy focus at a store,

can’t lease it from the monk by the sea.

And you are telling me it's a me-problem?

The only thing hyperactive

at least on most days

is the overworked union of my brain cells,

clocking overtime

like they’re gunning for promotions

in the fascist regime my head’s become.

You know how absurd it is

to crave a lazy, nothing day

and have your neurons reply,

“Sorry brother, we’ve got a deadline!”

Now I’m the one

pleading with my brain for a break —

like an addict justifying sobriety,

or a broke parent

explaining why the toy isn’t coming home.

So I bait it with caffeine,

bribe it with cringe —

thinking it’ll surrender.

But then?

Caffeine becomes a drill sergeant.

Cringe becomes a cult.

And suddenly I’m the intern —

doing ten jobs, no breaks,

no sleep till my skull throbs

or I collapse into a coma

masquerading as sleep.

You mourn creative blocks —

I romanticize them.

I’m leaking more ideas

than I’ve ever had the time to save.

But this isn’t just mindstorm poetry.

This is life.

Time is elastic.

Alarms ring like friendly threats.

Everything’s either urgent,

or forgotten like a dream you almost wrote down.

I live in the now

and the never.

Keys vanish into wormholes.

Conversations evaporate mid-sentence.

My tabs have tabs,

and my to-do list is a graveyard of best intentions.

If it’s out of sight,

it never existed.

Don’t talk to me about consistency.

You think I’m flaky?

Try living in a brain

that starts ten things

and finishes none

because it wants all of them

to matter equally.

Try texting someone you love —

and forgetting mid-message

what you were about to say

because a crow flew past

and your brain built it a tragic backstory.

I ghost because I glitch,

not because I don’t love.

And when I do forget —

an appointment, a birthday, a name —

your tone shifts

and my stomach caves.

A sigh across the room

becomes a referendum on my worth.

You say “It’s nothing.”

I start re-imagining our entire relationship.

Then I mask.

And I mimic.

And I merge.

I become the person

you won’t diagnose,

won’t doubt,

won’t dismiss.

I’m an accumulation of borrowed personas —

the right smile,

the casual nod,

the pause long enough to sound interested.

At work, I’m the aptly enthusiastic peer.

At weddings, I’m the charming misfit.

At dinners, I parrot small talk

like a student bluffing through oral exams.

I read people like scripts —

and play myself like a method actor

who forgot where the stage ends.

But inside,

I’m buffering

while on the outside

I'm bluffing.

Behind every “yeah totally,”

I’m looking for context clues.

Behind every joke that lands,

I’m checking:

Was that too much? Too fast? Too weird?

I laugh in their rhythm.

Speak in their volume.

Mirror their moods

until my own reflection

feels like an anomaly.

And when I unmask —

it’s never relief.

It’s recoil.

Like waking up mid-surgery

and realizing you’re the one holding the scalpel.

I don’t know who I am,

I just know who’s safe to be around you.

And yet, 

you have the guts and the bile 

and the head and the heart

you call this a disorder.

You invented gods,

governments,

and GDPs —

and I’m the one that’s disordered?

Darling —

if fuck-ups were currency,

you’d own Wall Street.

And I’d still be

a high-functioning misanthrope

with perfect recall,

dysfunctional peace,

and more open loops

than a goddamn amusement park.

How’s that for order?

Same Same But Different

Gaza and Kashmir

aren’t different.

Alike in more ways

than your gods in heaven

would dare admit.

Same boots.

Different languages.

Same bombs.

Different broadcasts.

Same blood.

Different narratives.

Yet Gaza lives

in your fragile nuances —

curated grief,

borrowed rage,

secondhand sorrow

tailored for this week’s outrage.

But Kashmir —

just binary.

Black. White.

Ours. Theirs.

A glitch in your map

you pretend not to scroll over.

You pronounce “Palestine”

with a shiver in your spine,

but “Kashmir” clots

behind your tricolour throat.

You forget it

because remembering it

might fracture the spine

of your rehearsed nationalism.

Kashmir is not yours.

Not theirs either.

Yet both flags plant it

like a colonial seed,

each digging trenches

in the name of god,

or peace,

or power.

India in Kashmir.

Israel in Gaza.

One colonised in denial.

The other colonising out loud.

Different history books.

Same erasure.

And America —

arms both ends.

Funds the silence,

and the siege.

Feeds one with patriotism,

the other with proxy wars,

buys peace in dollars

and sells it in drone strikes.

You don’t need

to scroll for proof —

Kashmir is televised too.

But patriotism

is an optic disease.

It trains you to see

what makes you proud,

and blind to what bleeds.

You nod at Palestine

to feel global.

You stay silent on Kashmir

to stay safe.

You outsource morality

to relevance,

and rent resistance

for reach.

You breathe

like a spineless reptile

wearing empathy’s skin.

Is it bigotry?

Or did you just

fail basic biology?

An Undead Dream Of The Unalive

Birth and death aren’t yours to decide —

though I’ve tried convincing myself otherwise.

Especially the latter.

I’ve flirted with endings,

danced with pills, razors, and ledges —

anything that made a persuasive point.

But here I am.

Alive? Undead?

Or just pacing purgatory in between.

Once upon a time,

what feels like lifetimes ago,

I had dreamy eyes

that thought life would be

a sun-drenched afternoon

with poetry in its palms

and purpose in its pockets.

Now my eyes are stoic.

They’ve seen enough to know:

dreams are for the dead

or the dying crowned with wishes.

When you’re born

to legacies etched in literature and legend,

and expectations hang like ancestral portraits —

you often wonder:

am I a blessing or a blasphemy?

Entitlement masquerades as tradition.

And life?

It shows up daily

with a notebook and questions:

“What have you done to prove you're worth the oxygen?”

Same query,

newer tongues.

But answers don’t evolve —

only the required proofs do.

Dimensions shift.

Destinations blur.

And every time I’ve been asked —

I’ve failed.

Failed families — blood and chosen.

Failed lovers — ephemeral and everlasting.

Failed even in silence —

and the spaces I smothered in noise.

But above all —

I’ve failed me.

No artefacts. No archives.

No memory carved into time. 

No single piece of evidence

that I ever belonged here.

So now,

as I stand

at the grave of my breathing corpse —

crowded by echoes,

yet achingly alone —

I wish my lungs would finally

stop debating with my brain,

and bury me with the argument.

As someone whose existence

drifted between too little and too much —

never just the right amount of enough —

this feels like the perfect time to be a passing thought.

Not an abstract that offered too little,

nor an obituary that spoke too much.

For once,

I would suffice

to just be enough.