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.