Common Sense Can Be Injurious To Health

For most of growing up

people thought I had a sense of humour

and I thought, fair enough,

humans are idiots.

Years of assurances later,

when I was finally ready to believe

I might just be funny,

I discovered Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code.

Do you know what it says?

No? Don’t worry.

I’ll read it to you:

“Question a god, and law will slaughter you. Religion will sanction it.”

Because omnipotent beings

clearly need a third-world judiciary,

neck-deep in debt,

to preserve their dignity,

while humans choke on reality.

So what if millions died?

So what if hundreds of thousands were lynched, raped, erased?

God had a plan,

and apparently, that plan

did not include human survival.

But those same gods

forget their plans at home,

every year, leaving a handful of humans

to whisper dangerously:

“Wait… maybe your miracle was just a story?”

Say that aloud, and congratulations:

your neurons are now in handcuffs,

your curiosity is a fugitive,

your common sense has been summoned to court,

and your cerebrum has been detained for questioning.

Because the law, in its infinite wisdom,

has come to realise

the gods are fragile, feeble in ego and anatomy.

Which means either the gods are stories,

or at the very least, their infallibility is.

And in all honesty,

that —

right there —

is exactly what waking up sounds like.

Check and mate?

Durga: A Conception Of Betrayals

Listen. Really listen.

Not like your aunt telling you a festival story sugar coated in sweets and incense.

Not like the stories recited with folded hands and polished voices, pretending the earth did not bleed. 

This is soil scraped from brothels, hands blackened by labor, buffalo horns dripping rage, blood uncounted.

Conches choke on it.

Incense stutters.

Pandals cannot contain it.

Brahma hiccups boons across the cosmos, puking destiny like a god too drunk on his own hubris.

“Immortality? Sure. May no man touch him,” he slurs.

Mahishasura — buffalo-bodied, brown as wet earth, horns sharp as betrayal—laughs.

Problem solved? Except… there is always an except in Hindu mythology. Always.

Before temples. Before incense. Before ritual.

The Asurs thrived.

Brown, alive, singing, dancing, building rivers with their bare hands, shaping the world they owned.

Not demons. Not villains. Just humans who refused to genuflect.

Pandals clap over their graves.

Vermilion smears their skin.

Chants drown their songs.

They are erased, rewritten as monsters

so the gods can sip nectar and call it “order.”

And we cheer.

Because we’ve been taught that fear dressed as ritual is devotion.

Here’s a tip: it isn’t.

Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva — the cosmic circus on permanent acid.

Brahma: spits boons like a toddler on fire.

Vishnu: rearranges avatars like deck chairs on a burning ship.

Shiva: meditates, bored, letting the universe writhe like a snake in acid rain.

They do not bleed.

They do not fight.

They outsource death.

Durga is not empowerment.

She is male incompetence crystallized into a goddess.

Brahma: “I fucked up. No man can touch him.”

Vishnu: “Borrow someone else’s sword. Lazy.”

Shiva: “Meditate. Maybe existential despair kills him.”

And so, she is stitched.

Frankenstein goddess.

Born from fear, ego, and cosmic laziness.

Arms grafted with borrowed weapons: sword, trident, bow — every god too lazy to lift a finger.

Eyes painted by blackened, invisible hands.

Feet molded from brothel soil.

Women erased, forbidden inside the pandal.

Sacred soil. Profane bodies.

Not empowerment.

A weapon forged to solve male panic.

She smiles.

Calm before carnage.

Every weapon a confession of cowardice.

Every step a reflection of male terror in silk and gold.

Lean closer, devout fools. You’re part of this theater too.

The applause? Complicity.

The chants? Compliance.

The buying of trinkets? Denial on sale.

Pandals rise like mausoleums of deceit.

Skinned drums hammer ribs like jackhammers.

Conches blare lies.

Crowd flocks. Claps. Chants. Pretends.

Not courage. Not virtue. Not empowerment.

Control. History rewritten.

Men solving their math problems by making monsters.

Brothel soil. Invisible hands. Women forbidden.

Every chant a knife in memory’s back.

We worship the goddess and spit on the very earth she was molded from.

Horn meets sword.

Claw meets buffalo hide.

Mahishasura fights. Brown. Alive. Proud. Not villain.

Every swing, every roar: “You cannot erase me.”

Durga strikes. Lion roars. Earth shakes.

Blood mixes with rivers, soil with tears, myth with memory.

Every blow rewrites history.

Every kill silences voices.

The Asurs die in myth but live in soil and song.

Durga, weaponized by male fear, moves like cosmic fury.

Brahma sips fermented nectar. Vishnu reclines. Shiva hums.

“Victory,” they mumble.

“Good over evil.”

“Courage. Virtue. Empowerment.”

The gods outsource murder.

The gods never bleed.

Men solve problems by creating monsters.

Clay returns to rivers.

Hands unseen. Women erased. Asurs whisper:

“We were here. We still are.”

We walk home. Drunk on illusion.

Complicit in cosmic farce.

Durga smiles. Mahishasura roars.

The soil, the blood, the bodies erased?

They do not forgive.

Pandals rise again next year. Skinned drums. Conches. Incense.

Cycle repeats.

We clap. Chant. Buy trinkets.

Pretending. Forgetting. Erasing ourselves.

Durga: stitched, smiling, unstoppable.

Mahishasura: horned, roaring, immortal in memory.

The gods: drunk, cowardly, adjusting crowns.

Women: erased, unbowed, enduring.

Soil: sacred, profane, eternal.

Every lion she rides. Every demon she impales.

Every strike. Every roar:

A reflection of male fear, cowardice, and cosmic laziness.

This is the conception of betrayals.

Goddess born not of choice, but necessity.

Myth written not by her, but for her.

Survival, erasure, power, complicity.

We are all performers.

We clap. We chant. We dance.

We say: “Good over evil.”

The soil, blood, bodies erased?

They do not forgive.

Durga smiles.

Mahishasura roars.

The earth remembers.

And so do we, if we dare to see.

Because nothing says ‘good over evil’ like ignoring bodies, soil, caste, blood… and buying into a god stitched from fear, silence, and our own cowardice.

Bound In Blood (Alternate Version)

I do not wonder what runs through you.

I know.

Rot seldom has variations.

Your arteries are excuses.

Your bones, unannounced declarations.

Your skin, a treaty you signed with silence.

To consume you is devotion.

Measured, deliberate, intimate.

Each sinew a sentence, each pulse a confession,

read and savored,

until nothing remains but the essence I carry with me.

You were never yours.

You are mine.

Bound.

In blood, forever.

Festered In Filth

Filth is an interesting word.

The ones averse to it

lay it across streets

and across the skeletons of the demons they hide within,

and we call them civilized.

The ones born into it,

because cleaning up is their inheritance,

cannot afford filth

inside or out,

and yet we call them uncouth.

Imagine a world 

where the uncouth graduated in civilization;

the civilized would drown

in clogged commodes and swarming sewage,

hands soft, conscience corroded,

lungs choking on the rot they refuse to touch.

Filth is not just a word.

It is the taste of privilege,

bitter and slick on your tongue.

It is the marrow of shame,

gnawed at and hollowed,

every bite leaving a scar deeper than humanity.

It is a life sentence,

etched into the cracks of streets,

stamped on the foreheads of the living,

pulsing in their veins like a sin they cannot wash away.

And yet, we call this civilization.

Bound In Blood

I’ve often wondered

what you keep closeted

beneath those tufts of hair,

stretching from scalp to cheeks;

is it memory, is it shame,

is it a language you never spoke aloud?

I’ve often wondered

what you hide in your arteries,

throbbing blood and bone

from head to toe;

do they ferry guilt,

or are they tunnels of silence

lined with rusting echoes?

I’ve often wondered

what you bury inside your femur,

what you scorch on your fingertips,

what you forget in your entrails;

muscle memories too fragile for light,

too stubborn for decay?

But what I’ve wondered most of all

is how you would taste:

your secrets, your silences, your marrow,

as sides of an elaborate buffet,

laid carefully on a porcelain plate.

Because to know you is never enough

I must eat you whole,

drink you in through every pulse,

until the last drop of you

flows into me,

your spine dissolving into my tongue,

your syntax spliced into my veins.

No grave, no god, no mouth

to ever separate you,

for you are mine to belong to

bound in blood.

Parasite

I don’t wake in the middle of the night

breaking into cold sweats and hot flashes,

wondering if I’ve been misconstrued

by faces I can and can’t recall.

To be or not to be

isn’t quite the question,

and even if it were

I’d rather be than not.

What keeps me wide awake,

long after fatigue has kissed my eyelashes goodnight,

is the singular thought:

have I ever truly understood myself,

or am I still a shadow

caught between the fading horizon of who I am

and the faint mirage of who I wish I could be?

To have lived in yourself

having not known you

feels too selfishly succulent,

almost as if

I am my own parasite.

And when I finally close my eyes,

I wonder if I’ll dream at all

or if the parasite will wake first,

tearing through the self I never knew I had

and feast on every unclaimed heartbeat

until only the echo of me remains.

Or maybe, the parasite is all there has been

and this is all just a fever dream 

of hopes long gone, burnt and cremated

and I'm nothing more than a dead man's debt.

Hollowskin

When you metamorphosize every night,

can you still tell skin from flesh,

or is it just one faceless lump?

Do you see the line,

or have you become your own deception,

a ghost walking in borrowed mirrors?

And in the quiet of your own undoing,

do you even remember which pulse is yours,

or does every heartbeat bleed into a stranger’s shadow, hollowing you whole?

Yesterday's Fix

We're all hoping

for a world

that never was

to be

as if it once was.

And you thought

it takes cocaine to lose perspective?

The Epidemic Called Truth

Not long ago, 

not even a lifetime by human measure,

but just about a lifetime in dog years, ago

journalism had teeth.

It had a spine.

A word could carry weight,

a fact could pierce,

a half-hour on television

could tilt the world.

News was effort, sweat, dirt under fingernails,

running shoes on cracked streets,

ink-stained fingers trembling over truths too hot to hold.

The world believed in it,

or at least, it pretended well enough.

A couple of decades later, 

just about a lifetime of dog years later, 

the news has gone feral,

and journalism has gone to the dogs.

Fangs retracted, morality chewed to pulp.

Algorithms pulse where editors used to bleed once.

Stories are currency.

Subscriptions are loyalty.

Sellability is power.

Truth? Optional.

Facts? Discarded in favor of spectacle.

Poverty is profitable.

Wars are widgets.

Death is entertainment.

Every scream, every cry, measured in impressions,

every tear, weighed for virality, 

because journalism is an epidemic today.

Even protest, poetry, democracy, every destitute truth-teller

are all but commodities.

All bought, all sold,

all measured against what sells best.

No more lines etched into conscience.

Only dashboards for flesh and bones

and graphs screaming growth, for voice.

Everything becomes consumer grocery.

Everything bends over to commerce.

And dancing death trance

here comes artificial intelligence,

the last nail on the coffin,

wryly grinning at every human idiocy,

every collapse,

every greed-fed failure.

Every tragedy is but a data point,

every grief but a thumbnail.

We are exposed,

not for reckoning,

but for consumption.

We scream for justice.

We wear slogans like amulets.

We cry for the dead,

then sell the dying and the tears, for our capitalist clauses.

Everything performative.

Everything optional.

Everything measured.

And all of it counts

only if someone lusts,

only if someone buys.

Journalism once gave a damn.

Now it markets a narrative.

The rest rot in obscurity.

The world itself is a headline,

every human pulse a product,

every breath a return on investment,

every corpse a breaking news headline.

Even rage is reduced to therapy bills.

Even grief is pornography for the empath.

We call it news.

We call it journalism.

We call it progress.

When it’s really a fish market, 

a stinking pile of truths reduced to questionable memories,

where flesh, blood, protest, and poetry

are weighed in worn and torn, filthy cash,

where morality is negotiable,

and truth is an abstract

too subjective to document.

And the irony?

Technology,

our mirror, our god,

doesn’t redeem us.

It amplifies.

It magnifies how brilliantly we’ve failed,

how perfectly we’ve monetized our own collapse,

how even our screams now sell

or don’t.

And the dog years, 

they pass faster than we notice,

faster than headlines raise thier auction stakes,

faster than morality dries off in soiled bedsheets,

faster than life can outlive itself. 

And as the world rots into a singular death,

we become truth and truth becomes us,

a grotesque inseparable flesh of a pointless perpetuity.

Salt As Per Taste

Goddesses.

They call you that, hoping mythology could contain you.

Like you were,

salt in curry.

Measured. Dispensed.

Goddesses;

myths stitched around men.

Stories that fold your limbs, your voice, your rage

into the origin of some god who asked for you

only when it was too late, even in make-belief universes.

Every “you are divine”

is another fairytale etched into the enamel of your ribs.

Obsession parading as reverence.

Fear pretending to be devotion.

Your body, a blueprint for their inadequacy,

their hunger, their need to feel bigger than their bones.

Indian goddesses?

Salt. Spice. Flavour.

Use when convenient.

No arcs of their own. No fire untethered.

Every legend begins with a man:

a god, a sage, a king, a poet.

You exist to complete him.

To adorn him. To justify him.

Every whispered, “You are a goddess,”

a measurement tape around your chest,

a cage disguised as worship.

Flattery is betrayal in a snake’s skin.

Smooth. Polished. Venom lined.

It waits.

Every compliment a prelude to possession,

every praise a quiet injunction to obey.

They tell you you are revered,

and in that reverence lies your shackles,

lukewarm, rationed, disposable.

But the mask rips.

The serpent sheds its skin.

The mythology cracks.

Temples burn. Ash rains.

You are not salt.

You are the flood that wipes them bare,

the fire that liquefies their rituals,

the gravity they cannot cage.

Goddesses?

No.

You are chaos.

You are the aftertaste of myths written around your absence.

You are the pulse they could not measure.

The story they never finished.

The scream they tried to silence.

The storm they were never ready for.

Worshipping goddesses is just another tale lost in translation,

another myth folded, measured, and auctioned.

Flesh and bones defeat clay,

every day in and every day out

outlast marble, myth, and gods of men.

The Untaming

The wildling moved barefoot through streets that had no names,

baskets of unwrapped words swinging at his side.

They smelled of mangoes, ink, and rebellion pressed into a fist.

The city watched, silent.

Cages lined alleys, balconies, rooftops, and courtyards.

Tigers recited phrases they barely understood, pacing in dizzying circles,

their stripes flickering like fractured sentences.

Monkeys clapped mechanically, chattering rehearsed lines,

then flung typewriters at one another.

Parrots squawked compliments that meant nothing,

flapping into rain puddles and splashing coins into gutters.

Dogs barked approved narratives,

tripping over their own collars and wagging tails in odd rhythm.

Cats lounged on velvet cushions, purring polite lies,

then leapt into collapsing gutters, tails like lightning rods.

A fox, painted gold, broke into flips that bent gravity itself,

landing on a balcony railing that folded into a slide.

The wildling smiled.

He dropped a basket of words.

They scattered through streets, sparks and knives alike.

Tigers yawned, teeth dull behind bars,

then tried to roar in Morse code.

Monkeys screeched, rhythm broken,

and began juggling bricks with alarming precision.

Parrots repeated too late, squawking insults meant for humans into cats’ ears.

Dogs barked in confusion, circling puddles that reflected impossible skies.

Cats twitched, hissed, and vanished into shadows that weren’t there.

Rain poured gray and unrepentant,

washing the city’s polite lies into gutters.

The wildling leapt barefoot over cobblestones, across balconies, through alleys.

Bricks cracked.

Cages rattled.

He remembered what the city had almost forgotten:

wildlings had always shaped what wildlife could encompass,

how sparks, teeth, and claws had once defined freedom.

Ghosts of wildlings from centuries past

peeked from cracks in walls, gutters, rooftops,

laughing at the endless cycle;

cages built, animals tamed, petted into applauses,

as the next wildling stepped barefoot,

reminding the world that freedom could not be staged.

Then the city shifted violently.

Cages bent and twisted like molten wire.

Glass shattered into prisms of rage.

Tiles cracked, rooftops buckled, balconies twisted.

Monkeys flung typewriters through the sky.

Parrots screeched in fractal choruses,

their echoes slicing through rain into impossible geometry.

Tigers roared, bars bending beneath their claws,

eyes gleaming with fragmented syllables.

Dogs barked in sync with collapsing bricks, howling coded messages to no one.

Cats darted through collapsing corridors, tails like banners of defiance,

leaving trails of velvet smoke.

The gold fox somersaulted over puddles that turned to mirrors,

landing atop a lamppost that bowed beneath it.

The wildling leapt across the chaos, barefoot, unstoppable.

Baskets of words spilled sparks and knives that etched themselves into stone.

Cobblestones rose like jagged spines.

Alleyways twisted into impossible geometry.

Balconies collapsed into the void.

Rooftops split, spitting dust and echoes of civility.

Rain cut through the chaos, slicing lies from the city like knives through cloth.

The animals tried to return to their acts.

The tigers paced, then toppled cages onto themselves.

Parrots squawked endless echoes, looping into madness.

Monkeys flung typewriters like weapons of dissent.

Dogs barked, collars spinning, eyes wide with confusion.

Cats hissed, disappeared, reappeared in impossible positions.

The wildling stood in the epicenter of the collapsing city.

Baskets empty, streets full, toes gripping jagged stone that reshaped with each heartbeat.

He scattered the final words.

The city trembled, alive with sparks and knives,

streets humming, balconies bending, rooftops breathing.

Cages shattered completely.

The ghosts of wildlings laughed,

echoes weaving through broken rooftops,

through puddles, through alleys that had learned to bend.

No cage could hold him.

No city could contain him.

No cycle could repeat itself.

He roared into the fractured city,

a sound older than cages, older than performance, older than fear.

The animals scattered, screaming,

limbs flailing in impossible arcs,

eyes wide with confusion, mouths forming sounds no one could hear.

Cages twisted, splintered, vomited shards of their own bars.

Rooftops cracked, dripping stone like coagulated blood.

Alleys convulsed, spitting gutters that carried fire and rain together.

Windows shattered into jagged teeth that sank into streets.

The city exhaled, choking on sparks, smoke, and dust.

The wildling leapt.

Baskets of words exploded on impact,

turning cobblestones into knives,

turning walls into screaming pulp,

turning the air into thick, acrid silence.

Tigers howled through fractured stripes.

Monkeys hurled themselves through collapsing air,

typewriters snapping like bones.

Parrots looped into endless fractal screams.

Dogs barked, collars spinning, eyes wide with terror.

Cats vanished into smoke, claws tearing invisible corridors.

The ghosts of wildlings from centuries past

shivered,

laughed,

vomited memories into the chaos.

The wildling laughed too.

His laughter wasn’t sound.

It was teeth in rain, fire in stone, claws in air.

It consumed the city.

It consumed the animals.

It consumed even the ghosts, leaving echoes of echoes.

He stood, barefoot,

bloodied stone under toes,

fists empty but the streets full of knives and sparks.

And then he whispered, 

or roared, 

or spat,

the world didn’t care.

Cages no longer existed.

Alleys no longer existed.

Rooftops bled, gutters vomited sparks,

the city itself shuddered and convulsed beneath him.

He laughed.

He bled.

He was untamed.

Unsoftened.

Unsparing.

Savage.

Alive.

Cages twisted into screaming pulp.

Alleys vomited fire and rain.

Nothing. Nothing. Could breathe beneath him. Ever again.

A Cure For Faith

The faith you dedicate

in faces you can't see, 

and skins you can't touch,

and breaths you can't hear

If only you did

in the tangible truths

etched in stone, 

calligraphed in paper

You'd know it was your mercy you were at, all along.

but then you'd have to stand in the mirror,

your face against your face,

no shadows to hide behind,

no lies to weave your lullabies into.

Divinity is ointment

for truth-blisters on lying tongues.

The Hope For Hope

Hope is a lot like money,

and yet its antonym.

The ones with none clutch it like gold,

fingers trembling over scraps.

The ones with enough to buy the world

snack on it like an exotic bird egg,

curious, careless, unbound.

The poor hope a lot for a little,

the rich hope a little for a lot.

And yet hope is all there is;

for the starving and the satiated,

for light and darkness,

for saints and sinners alike.

But is hope ever enough

for the hopelessly hopeful,

or is it just another requiem

for a dream we pray we never wake from?

Hope is all there is;

the life, the death, and the ruin of it all.

Oblivion's Narcissists

A raindrop quivers, convinced it commands the ocean,

its tremor drowned before it even touches the tide.

A shadow leans on the sun,

pressing against heat that will not yield,

its edges dissolving into nothing.

A pawn staggers toward a crown

on a board abandoned by the game itself,

sweating in theaters built for ghosts,

where applause is a memory no one carries anymore.

Walls crack like gaping teeth,

temples and thrones gape in silence they never asked to be filled.

Decimals gnaw at infinity,

cough echoes in corridors that forgot their names,

scripts abandoned mid-breath.

A fly hums against stained glass,

wings slicing light it cannot bend.

A candle flickers,

wavering like a breath that never belonged.

Every delusion strains and snaps,

every crown collapses to ash,

every paper crumbles to dust,

and dust does not mourn.

Bones ache under gravity’s indifference,

skin wilts under heat that doesn’t notice,

blood pulses to a silence that outlives life.

To think you,

a fleck of dust

on the smallest grain

in the deserts of time,

to think you matter, 

you’d have to be clinically delusional

and anatomically god,

which is a rather polite way

of saying: you're the farce you fear,

Dear Humanity.

Mosaics Of Meaning

Life is a scattering of broken tiles,

some aligning by chance into mosaics

and you talk yourself into thinking there’s design.

You spend your days chasing new definitions,

holding on until they dissolve at your touch,

and then you find one more, and one more.

Once you’ve scraped every word from dictionaries like paint off prison walls,

once your legs ache from running on treadmills of smoke and mirrors,

chasing truths that vanish as you near them,

you whisper to the void,

hoping death will hand you meaning;

as if eternity hands out closure like candy at childhood fairs,

Ferris wheels spinning cheap adrenaline for the gullible.

Truth be told, meaning is the last standing word,

and you’ve clung to it like a ridge over an abyss,

because letting go would make you crumble to dust.

Meaninglessness demands humility, and we, proud morons, have none.

Once you're dead, your vanity dies unread;

meaning or no meaning, the world shrugs and you shrink, dots erased into oblivion: inconspicuous, futile, endlessly pointless.

Slogans Can't Eulogise The Dead

When the choice is between two sides of the same coin,

does the side ever make a difference?

When betrayal comes by blood or by water,

does it matter which one insists on being thicker?

When your house is wired with grenades, inside and out,

do you care which pins drop first?

When you’re nothing but collateral

in the negotiations of parasites bloated on your blood,

does freedom mean anything more

than a fevered figment of imagination?

When your existence only ever finds meaning in death,

does activism serve any purpose

beyond turning you into convenient propaganda for the moment?

When your lives are split from the spleen between Hamas and Israel’s death tolls,

do foreigners chanting Free Palestine

change a damn thing at all, or even mean any more than stinking pile of bullshit?

When you know slogans are all you are and all you will ever be,

do you bury your burnt children, your stabbed husband,

in the pity of strangers

or do you ask them to shut the fuck up

so you could count your measured breaths in rented silence?

Your lived truths don't reach them

for deafness and dumbfuckery are the easiest paths to delusion

and delusion is the assured pre-requisite

to being heroes in a war they would not fight if they truly had to.

More importantly, so they can pretend to be revolutionaries,

you must drop dead like flies.

The Silhouette Of Desire

You've often asked me

what is it in you

that makes me desire you

at the peak of my bloodthirst for lust

at the crossroads where lust and love and like blur boundaries

like the untamed wilderness  you expect where a river meets an ocean meets a sea

And I wish I had a definitive answer

but all of my inappropriate thoughts appropriated around you

the ones that have birthed poets and playwrights

tamed in their behaved words

because fahrenheit rising at the rub of skins isn't something to be talked out loud

all of it is but a free verse to me

Rhymes are to shallow to contain them

and parables are too autocratic

the rhythm changes meters every single time

and yet it all somehow adds up to the pages of curated anthology.

It begins abrupt because the best things in life

are but elaborate imitations of its own pattern

too random to be predictable

and yet repititive in parts to not be absurdly accidental

and not once does it ever end with the hint of a closure

because art at its most unhinged never concludes

but only ever leaves you hanging on a thread

with the lure of some more, and some again.

There's something about the dry sweat

melting into traces of an effervescent exotic perfume

two things everyone breathing in their skin could afford

and yet one that only you could ever wear like it was your flesh and bones.

There’s something about the nape of your neck

that reads like a map of forgotten temples,

a terrain where fingers become pilgrims

and the air itself grows thick with incense

no heaven, no holiness could ever summon.

Your shoulders dissociate like warm clay cusped in patient palms,

bearing the weight of every unspoken offering,

the tender rise and fall of peaks and curves

where gravity hesitates,

and every contour memorizes desire like a landscape learning its own tides.

And those wide-eyed constellations on either side of your midriff,

fix on me without apology or shame,

adoring my unashamed indecencies

the way oceans accept rivers without question,

without pretense, without morality — only pull, only flow.

A tiny universe spins quietly at your core,

as if inviting the curious geologist in me

to trace contours they cannot distinguish

from exploration or conquest.

And then there is the cave that hides a universe within, 

the axis of all gravity,

rising, insistent, an unshamed instrument of desire,

not merely flesh but the inspiration and the death of heat and intent,

the pulse that scores our private anarchy.

It seeks me as the tide seeks the moon,

a pulse that bends the landscape of skin and breath,

and when it houses me within, 

the world folds into a singular exhalation,

each motion a stanza, each groan a syllable

in the anthology of uncontainable want.

The scent of it is uncanny:

wet, amphibian, fish-flesh sweet with longing,

a godless perfume of dreams unmade,

where morality drowns and instinct surfaces,

and the air itself trembles with our disregard for propriety.

My fingers trace the architecture of your spine,

descend like secret rivers into hollows,

where shivers become syntax

and every nerve, every pore,

reads as a parenthesis to our own irreverent scripture.

Every collision, every friction,

is a declaration of entropy,

a calculus of heat and sinew,

where nothing is polite, nothing predictable,

yet all of it aligns

the chaos, the rhythm, the fever of want

becoming a poem too fluid for rhymes,

too wild for closure.

And after, when the crescendo subsides,

all that remains is heat clinging to skin,

the scent of amphibian desire, the echo of godless dreams,

as an epilogue that no rhyme could define,

no parable could contain.

Only the promise of some more, and some again.

Children Of Rust

They were born into corrugated sermons,

tin sheets preaching rust and voyeurism,

every ripple of metal a language’s imagination

in the art of peeling the world’s underwear.

Children apprenticed under rust,

learning anatomy through peepholes,

their curriculum a slit in the empire’s siding.

No chalk, no books,

just corrugated strands bleeding crimson fingerprints,

manuals of silhouette hips and hunger,

guides to a commerce older than memory.

Behind the curtain,

shadows stretched into currency.

Every gesture a fracture of measure,

every curve a traded shape.

Bodies became billboards,

billboards became vaults of shadow,

vaults, always exchanged,

a marketplace where innocence is rationed,

where curiosity runs in veins,

where desire is measured in whispers.

Children, scholars of slit-metal scripts,

read desire through rusted holes,

translating shadows into syllables of hunger.

But what they glimpsed

was not flesh, 

it was inheritance:

a world where longing is counted,

attention weighed,

and wonder carved into unbroken shards.

Rust peels, but nothing heals.

Tin remembers fingerprints,

children remember keyholes.

The walls remember too,

breathing, stretching, folding shadows into shapes

that shift and fracture with every glance,

that bend and fracture with every pause,

that fracture and fracture in endless echo.

When the wall finally collapses,

what spills through

is not light.

It is a cataract of silhouettes,

a flood of forms unspooling from the grammar of rust,

blinding the world with the darkness

it once taught them to read,

with the very darkness it once taught them to obey.

Children stand amid the debris,

eyes cupping shapes they cannot name,

hands tracing the remnants of a sky

that had been rationed, exchanged, repossessed.

And in that silence

the world realizes,

every slit, every shadow, every slit-metal fragment

was a blueprint of its own undoing,

every slit, every shadow, every fragment

was the world writing its own undoing.

Swansong Of The Tombstones

We are the sum of your wars.

No flags flutter here.

No gods divide us.

No borders survive the worms.

You called us martyrs,

patriots, collateral casualties.

We are none of those.

We are receipts.

Inscriptions of your edicts,

records of your dominions,

every citadel mortared with our silence.

Right, left, centre

we fed them all.

Every ideology dined on our bones,

every parliament stacked with our ashes,

every temple, every mosque,

a vault for your calculations of death.

Our names were currency.

Our faces banners.

Our silence rehearsed into anthems.

We were not sacrificed.

We were spent.

We remember the taste of gunpowder,

the stench of faith twisted into law,

the quiet screaming of children

buried under your ceremonies.

Bullets do not ask allegiance.

Blades do not check prayers.

Gas does not care for bloodlines.

Rot is bipartisan.

And then there were the ones

who raised banners in our name,

who marched with slogans,

who painted our absence into symbols.

Activists, martyrs, rebels

their mouths loud, their eyes certain.

But most sought witness, not change.

They carried our coffins

like props for their speeches,

fed on applause more than justice,

wore conviction as costume.

Some were broken in cells,

some bartered to power,

some embalmed in monuments,

but most simply performed

their vanity became our gravestone.

And then there's the rest of you, 

the silent bystanders with gouged out eyeballs

who still sip from chalices of curated hope,

as if it were not mixed with our ash.

Every statue raised in our names

is your own tombstone.

Every anthem sung above our corpses

is genocide rehearsing itself for acclaim.

We do not rage.

We do not plead.

But, we do not forgive either.

We remain

a chorus of the dead,

your shadow of fire and fracture,

an untarnished chronicle of every lie.

We wait for your ears to split,

for your illusions to crumble,

for the quiet of your conscience

to finally scream the truth.

We wait,

because you are late,

because the dead always arrive first,

and your history will not bury us again.

Hope Doesn't Mean Shit To The Dying

I want to write about birds and bees.

Not the kind circling funeral pyres,

wings crisped into ash before they even taste nectar. 

I want to write about birds and bees, 

the mythical kind, 

the ones born from clouds, unshackled by smoke,

singing in a sky that does not choke,

their feathers unplucked by tainted yesterdays,

their songs not yet sold to the highest bidding liar.

I want to write about mountains.

Not the ones drilled hollow by hopeless miners,

or claimed by thrones counting offerings like blessings.

I want to write about mountains

where silence tastes like eternity,

and echoes have teeth that bite the adulterated hands of conquest,

where shadows rise and kneel to no crown,

where rocks remember their own names.

I want to write about seas.

Not these oil-slick bellies vomiting drowned bones,

but the tranquil kind, 

where waves rise for themselves,

not as metaphors for the damned,

where water dreams untouched,

and storms build and break, only for their own sake.

I want to write about love stories.

Not in dug up streets paved with manholes for bribes, 

government's towers of gold, I call them.

I want to write about love stories

in the hollow of caves, under trees that have watched centuries,

where boy meets girl, girl meets boy,

their mouths speak without fear,

their hands touch without permission slips,

and no shadow measures their heartbeat.

I want to write about hope.

But every skin that offers it these days

come in the flesh of impostors

who wrap it in mirrors and velvet lies,

calling it poetry.

It isn’t poetry.

It’s pornography for the gleefully ignorant,

ritualized and choreographed,

with orgasms for mandates, 

because reality is too ugly to endure,

and every cheap praise is payment for silence.

Every day

every fucking day

something else burns.

A truth, a temple, a farmer’s throat,

an inconvenient question,

a journalist’s ribs.

Each flame struck with an assumed king’s grin.

Each ash heap a carnival of forgetting.

Tyranny does not march anymore

it glides, 

varnished in colors of crowns,

and the patience of serpents coiled in gold.

And to those who write of imagined fantasies

while the world burns beneath their quills

and to those who wrote of a midnight summer's dream, 

the painted seas, the untouched mountains, the singing birds and bees, 

I promise I will write of the same,

the day they are the ones ripped apart,

torn by fire and blade, by greed and silence,

because fuck justice.

I will take the freshly spilled blood of hypocrisy and bigotry any day,

let it stain my lines, let it carve my verses,

let it scream the truth that these trembling nobodies do not want to whisper.

I wish

I could write about birds and bees,

mountains or seas,

timeless love or quiet hope.

But I can't.

Not when the air tastes of smoke and blood.

Not when laughter walks on stilts,

carrying the weight of the absent.

Not when freedom is a mannequin

dressed in ceremony,

while its throat bleeds obedience.

But someday, 

if the birds sing without choking,

if the mountains breathe without conquest,

if the seas dream without drowning,

if the lovers kiss without shadows rehearsing,

and the gods remember their own names, 

then, maybe then,

I’ll write about them.

The day they exist for themselves,

without smoke on their backs,

without debts to memory or ledger,

without a clearance certificate

from mistresses for ministers,

without the voices of charred dreams ticking like a metronome.

Until then, 

every poem I try to write about beauty

bleeds the stink of fire.

Every metaphor I birth

screams with charred wings.

Every line coughs up the black bile

of a world that refuses to be silent,

where even angels wear armor,

and silence itself has sharpened edges.

The world burns.

And you sip from goblets of curated hope,

call it poetry, call it vision,

call it anything but the slaughter it hides.

Every orphaned child, 

every scorched field, 

every silenced throat,

it is genocide in slow motion,

and your painful pointlessness 

disguised as poetry

is the knife’s handle.

I watch.

I write.

With hands scorched,

with lungs filled with smoke,

with a spine that refuses to kneel,

that would rather break than bend,

I shall continue to name

every lie, every charred truth, every act of complicity

because the sky will not forgive,

and the earth will not forget.

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.