Empty Marrow

You wake up wrong.

Air slips past your skin,

indifferent,

and your breath follows,

a borrowed motion

in a jigsaw that does not come with closures.

Your hands twitch.

They are not yours.

They lift, drop, graze, scratch —

gestures you never willed,

as if your nerves were conduits

for something passing through you.

You try to speak.

Your tongue twists.

The words are familiar

and alien,

at the same time,

almost as if

echoes of conversations

that never belonged to you,

yet persist anyway.

Your chest heaves.

Heart beats in resonance

with something larger,

something that does not notice

that you exist.

Pain, hunger, thought,

they flow through you,

but none of it is yours.

You touch your arm.

The ruin of a scar pulses under your fingers

like a living thing,

reminding you

that even memory is not yours.

The body scripts verses

of moments you never commanded.

You stare at the mirror.

It does not see you.

It only registers

awareness passing

through a vessel

it will soon discard.

Your skin prickles.

Your bones ache.

Your pulse stammers.

Your voice, your hands, your thoughts,

even the scar that pulsed,

all dissolve into a rhythm

that never needed you.

A weight slides through your chest,

soft, patient, inevitable.

It coils in your bones,

presses against your lungs,

a warmth that is not yours,

a presence that crawls through you and stays.

And you are not sure if you will see the end coming.

That, 

that is what makes you afraid.

Afraid.

Really afraid.

That you’ll be gone. 

Not with a bang,

but like a whimper.

Fireflies In The Dark

Have you seen fireflies ignite themselves,

each one a pulse,

a fleeting constellation humming just beyond your reach?

Your jaws draw wide.

You tell yourself it’s magic,

surrealism meant only for your eyes.

You cup your hands.

Whisper promises.

The light flickers,

trembles,

and dies.

With it dies the next miracle,

and a little of yourself along with it,

as though it borrowed your bones to vanish.

Freedom is this firefly's glow:

it tempts, it teases,

then vanishes as you lean in.

No coin, no hand, no vow can ever own it.

You keep staring.

You throw diamonds.

The fireflies do not answer.

And still, you keep staring.

Until you feel your own pulse echo in the dark,

and the shadows behind your eyes flicker like dying stars.

You wonder which is real:

the moments of light,

or the eternity of emptiness it leaves behind,

that throbs arhythmically in your veins,

a quiet, persistent accusation

you can neither catch nor escape,

wondering if it was about fireflies, or freedom, or neither — all along.

And when you finally look away,

the darkness blinds you

with the fireflies’ dead lights and decayed heartbeats,

and you know you will never stop searching.

Milk, Honey & Cyanide

I. Bloodlines and Burdens

She was born of absence, 

so they filled her with expectation.

She was born of beginnings, 

so they made her live only in ends.

Centuries rewrote her;

from goddess to ghost to grievance,

each version revised

for men to swallow:

palatable, profitable, digestible.

She became a syllabus,

a slogan,

a superstition in silk.

Every divinity a premise,

every prayer a warning.

Between pedestal and partition

lay the woman;

neither saint nor sinner,

just a body mistranslated

into metaphor.

No one archived

the women who refused translation,

who ruled by silence,

measured mercy in teaspoons,

governed households

like republics

with invisible borders.

And in those rooms, 

where jars clinked like accusations,

threads strangled ceilings and floors,

mirrors waited for confessions, 

milk dripped from spouts of quiet menace,

honey glistened on knives well done, well hidden,

and the invisible butcher

took her first breath

with a whisper only she could hear

and a shadow that unmade the walls behind her.

II. Teacups and Daggers

There were women who didn’t need swords;

they had teacups,

threads,

the weight of expectation.

They carved sons with comparison,

daughters with guilt,

husbands with hunger.

They stitched families into factions,

fed feuds like pets,

loved like debt collectors —

forgiveness always arriving

in fine print

and hidden clauses.

They didn’t kill like murderers do;

they killed like seasons:

gradual, relentless,

until incidence hardened into inheritance.

The pantry smelled of control,

the kitchen echoed with judgement.

Love fermented in closed jars.

Milk soured into venom,

honey dripped down walls, sticky, slow,

threads crawled like insects across floors,

warmth sharpened into weapon,

and incense burned but could not hide the rot.

Every bite of bread,

every sip of tea,

every whispered lullaby

carried the weight of a blade

that hummed the names of your ancestors.

Where are their stories?

The empresses of emotional famine,

poisoners of peace,

who raised dynasties on obedience

and called it virtue.

You walked past them every day —

smiled, ate, folded laundry,

never knowing

which bite carried their mercy

and which their blade, 

never knowing

if the house was watching you back.

III. Mirrors of Silence

There’s a cycle written in smoke:

daughter-in-law devoured

becomes devourer,

victim rehearses vengeance

in mirrors

that applaud silently

and sometimes, crookedly, blink. 

Generations gutted in the name of order.

Sons turned into silence,

wives into wardens,

families partitioned like property deeds, 

threads of love sprouting thorns overnight.

Milk can kill,

honey can blind,

every blessing

if repeated enough,

becomes a curse

with good intentions,

and sometimes, a mirror leaks blood

while you sleep.

It waits in corners,

lurks in mirrors,

smiles while you sleep,

humming lullabies

you cannot remember

and nightmares you cannot escape,

your own hands replaying

the cruelties you inherited

in perfect, terrible loops.

We all inherit this.

You. Me. Someone.

IV. Halos and Shadows

We wrote legends of men

who killed for kingdoms,

but not of women

who killed for control.

We remembered queens who mourned,

not those who transformed mourning

into legacy.

Perhaps history isn’t biased,

perhaps it’s afraid.

Afraid to confess

that cruelty tastes sweeter

in a mother’s tongue.

Maybe the goddess was never divine, 

just better at hiding her sins.

Maybe the halo was never holy, 

just a sun tilted sideways

so it blinded only some.

And maybe,

just maybe,

it isn’t men alone who built thrones of bones,

but women

who made sitting on them comfortable, 

and sometimes, shifting.

Every empire needs a prayer,

and every prayer,

a woman willing to believe

she keeps it alive,

even when the walls whisper back,

even when the jars remember her name.

And you 

yes, you 

are standing in that empire,

breathing it in,

feeding it,

trembling beneath it,

or smiling as it feeds on you,

as the milk hisses, the honey pulses,

and the threads tick like a clock

you cannot stop.

Purple Prognosis

What you call living life

is barely a skewed perspective

of existing;

building walls of existence

as long as they serve —

functional, convenient,

until habit hardens into habitat,

and memory mistakes itself

for meaning.

We tint our truths with comfort,

blur the edges of what cuts too deep,

call the blur beauty,

and the haze hope.

But purple doesn’t exist.

What you call purple is fiction:

a clever camouflage for myopia,

for the unseen, the untold,

for truths that rot in the unversed.

It is the color of denial,

the bruise light leaves behind,

a mirage wearing grief as grace.

Purple is an optical illusion.

So is believing you are conspicuous enough

for purpose.

Orchids Of Decay

He named every creature he touched.

Knew which frog could sing underwater,

which bird forgot its way home,

which leaf healed quickest when torn.

A man of science.

Of order.

Of tenderness reserved

for everything that couldn’t answer back.

He spoke to orchids

the way he never spoke to me;

softly,

as if even his breath were benevolence.

He said plants were easier.

They didn’t bruise when disciplined.

And I believed him.

Because I was evidence

of what happened when something did.

He called it education.

I called it language.

He said it built character.

I said it broke sound.

Now his hands tremble not from anger,

but from age.

The zoologist reduced 

to the faint idea of a forgotten animal he once studied,

the body a slow extinction in progress.

He looks for pity in the eyes he once trained to flinch.

Finds only reflections.

I don't feed him soup.

Or, change his sheets.

Every now and then though, 

I document his decline with clinical precision.

A son of unsentimental biology,

unbothered by love, 

unweighted in duty bound guilt.

Upbringing was a myth that wilted a long time ago, 

somewhere between discipline and dinner.

He looks at my incapacity of empathy

and says, “You’ll miss me when I’m gone.”

I say nothing.

He mistakes that for grief and repentance.

And yet, it is neither.

When he sleeps,

I water his orchids.

They come of age

without guilt,

without gratitude,

without grammar.

Like me.

The Pyre

You wail of shackles,

but they are nowhere.

The chains you scream of

rattle only in your skull,

their echoes bouncing off empty corridors

you built yourself.

You claim wars with the world,

but the world doesn’t blink.

Not in its gaze,

not in its periphery,

not in the infinitesimal thought it grants you.

You tell stories of your struggles,

chasing freedom like a ghost

that slips through your fingers

even as you kneel in solemn ritual.

But the world isn't your prison.

You are.

Bound by convenience, by purpose,

by the quiet tyranny of self.

All your grand gestures,

all your pride-drenched theatrics,

are nothing more than ointments for raw, blistered vanity.

The universe moves on.

Always has.

Always will.

Indifference is the molecule of existence.

It stays, 

a silent witness,

as you burn yourself alive

in a world that never paused to watch the matchstick light up.

Shadows In The Mirror

The meat mask of a man you see, 

waking off his measured serendipity like it were a ritual, 

spending time like daily allowances:

seconds, minutes, hours

blemishing into the haze of days, 

lying awake for what feels like forevers embalmed in seasonal flowers, 

swirling eyeballs that refuse to give in to the borderless skins of shut out eyelids, 

Do you recognize him like reflections do

or is he a distant howl overwhelmed in the decibels of concrete?

Do you think he watches you watch him

as you measure his trepid insecurities and timid greed?

Do you think he knows you know

all the filth he hides beneath his manhole of a navel

of all the discreet pasts he holds on to

like memories from the ominous remains of a severed umbilical cord?

Do you think he hears your shallow breaths

gasp in the suffocated air over his watchful shoulders,

as he wages imaginary wars in his lungs and his guts

trying hard to believe there's purpose after all

although you know better

although you know he's just a dreamy lost boy

hoping he wouldn't have to grow up

to the glaring grotesque; no meaning, no matter?

Do you think he knows mirrors don't converge?

Do you think he knows you wait

where the glasses are tinted charcoal black

at the beginning of the end?

Barter

Mist hung low that morning.

Fields slick with dew, earth and cow dung curling into my nose.

Seven mouths leaned over the table, shadows bending my life into pieces.

My mother’s hands cracked like old clay, trembling.

My father’s eyes, rimmed with toddy haze, weighed me.

Three bottles of toddy.

Two days’ meals for seven hungry bodies.

And me.

Me, promised a city I would never see.

They whispered it like a ritual.

Seven faces, some hopeful, some already breaking.

My older brother flinched.

My cousins’ eyes darted, wild with hunger and fear.

My mother’s lips pressed tight as if swallowing me whole could make it right.

And I, fifteen, became a parcel,

folded into hands that were not my own,

sold in quiet, deliberate silence.

The man who came smelled of smoke and oil,

his teeth sharper than knives, promises slick as wet floors.

I should have screamed. I did not.

Flesh pressed into flesh,

warm hand into colder hand,

and the city swallowed me,

a tide of streets and shadows,

a whorehouse that pulsed like veins,

corridors narrow as throats,

windows dead eyes blinking at nothing,

air thick with perfume, sweat, and longing.

Twenty years now.

Twenty years of nights given to survive,

lunches and dinners measured in what I carried into his bed each night,

every thread of skin, every trembling laugh, every piece of warmth offered

so another day might exist.

The girl I once was — small, hungry, pliant —

has drifted away, slipping like smoke through my fingers,

leaving only shadows stitched into the hollow of my chest.

I had always heard of love,

a word whispered like a prayer, a fairytale in fish markets and meat shops.

But I never found it in the drunken eyes of fragile men,

hands shaking, patience thin as ash,

eager only to smell my bare skin,

to take what I had to give and call it possession.

The first night returns to me, every night: 

hands, voices, sweat, the smell of oil and fear,

pressing until my skin was no longer mine,

each year a survival, each year my gods slipping farther away, 

fading into shadows I cannot reach.

And the one I was named for,

the goddess who stayed the farthest from me,

the one of wealth, of fortune, of blessings—

I am nothing but her absence,

her hollowed echo,

trading pieces of myself for bread, for water,

for rooms that never learn the warmth of life,

for a life I will never touch again.

I drift,

through corridors stitched from memory and darkness,

walls leaking years I was sold,

floors slick with hands that counted me,

breath tasting survival,

steps dragging vanished bodies,

fingers brushing ghosts of flesh I once was,

shadows folding into shadows,

village and city bleeding together.

I am Lachhmi.

I am blessing bled into corridors,

threads of skin and hunger unraveling,

echo of promises never paid,

ghost of the girl I cannot reach.

I am everything they bartered for,

and nothing left to claim.

I am ghost. I am absence.

I am Lachhmi

in a country where gods are bartered

for a few lunches,

and prayers are cheaper than bread.

Dreams Of An Eclipse

What are dreams really?

Mirrors of a brain hollowed out whole,

foetuses of possibility strangled in their umbilical cords,

or parallel worlds where I am whole,

and my shadow doesn’t metamorphose into a faceless lump of flesh?

Why aren’t my dreams simple?

Of light, of humanity, of hope?

Why do they crawl instead,

through the cracks of my skull,

whispering that I’ve been nothing but fragments

since before I learned my own name.

Why do I exist in them in shreds, 

threads of myself unraveling,

suffocating in corridors sutured shut, 

a corpse of thought staring back,

mocking, grinning, bleeding into me.

Or have I lived in darkness so long

that my mind lashes its own eyes,

and I am but blind,

naked,

an unsaid prayer, 

to godless ghosts of god fearing men

while I rot inside myself?

Do Apples Dream?

Apples don't fall from the tree

because science doesn't indulge in the absurd

quite like fiction does in the name of romance.

Call it inheritance laws

or the inheritance of loss;

it doesn't matter.

Calling incident an accident doesn't change much.

Gravity doesn't care

about the fallen apple's dreams

of being a hummingbird.

Muscle memory doesn't let go

of the towering shadows of the branches,

even at the cost of sunlight.

Do you think the man who claimed gravity

wondered about the bruises on the apple,

heard the muted laments of his childhood cut open?

Nothing matters as much

as the stories,

and once your stories are theirs,

what use could you possibly be?

Apples fall like they always have,

and no one wonders;

not once, not ever.

Some sell their skins and souls,

not because they want to,

but because some voices are better forgotten as noise.

The ones who couldn’t,

mend open bruises with imagined balms,

as if healing were a placebo.

Vanity In A Fishnet

Beneath a coral sun lying like every critic ever,

the fisherman rows.

Hands steady. Eyes tracing silver threads of tide.

Counting fish. Counting breaths. Counting the stubborn tyranny of small truths.

She rises.

Scales molten, blazing glass in a world too dull to reflect her.

Voice a carving knife.

Bullet. Hurricane. Unadulterated fury incarnate.

The mermaid speaks in tongues dipped in acid,

in waves of spite,

in sirensong accusations that make gulls reconsider ambition,

clouds reconsider patience,

the ocean reconsider everything it thought it knew.

“Do you see?” she hisses.

“Do you bow? Break? Vanish into irrelevance?”

Every word a boulder.

Every glare a storm.

Every laugh a slingshot obliterating the quiet, pathetic ordinariness of his life.

Weak. Blind. Boring.

A human abacus lost in the poetry of her fury.

Gestures, a Renaissance of uncut hate.

Whims, the epitome of binary rage.

Meteors, comets, shooting stars —

why settle for a puddle when you can incinerate oceans?

Divinity, after all, is sheep’s skin for monsters.

The fisherman pauses.

Nets dripping salt. Mind uncluttered. Heart steady, metronome-perfect.

He tastes the tang of her rage, smells the scorched ocean,

but does not bite. Does not roar.

Storms are for watching. For secret notebooks.

For the quiet laughter that says: “Well, look at this idiot again.”

Days curl. Months coil. Years spiral.

And she continues —

flaming, flailing, fabulous,

a fireworks display of self-worship.

Scales ignite. Voice crescendos. Fury convinced of invincibility.

She pins invisible trophy heads on the walls of her pride-palace,

each insult a chandelier swinging above the moat of arrogance.

For no tide, no fury, no glittering rage can drown a man who rows steady through his own small truths.

Then —

mid-gloat, mid-spectacle of self-admiration,

she lunges into proving him broken.

The fishnet snaps.

Silver threads coil like accusatory fingers of a god.

Scales caught. Claws entangled.

The ocean gasps.

The cathedral of scorn collapses.

The Renaissance of hate becomes a glittering cage.

She spins, screams, recites every insult ever thrown,

trapped in the architecture of her own conceit.

The fisherman rows.

Hands steady. Eyes on horizon. Simple. Human.

Witness to absurdity, rage, and vanity so profound it should be illegal.

The tide resumes its ordinary, unbothered rhythm.

The mermaid —

still glorious, still furious,

thrashes like a failing goddess,

mid-delirious symphony of self-adoration,

caught not by skill, not by cunning,

but by gravity itself: the inexorable weight of vanity.

Glory. Fury. Hubris.

Caught in her own glittering trap.

Insults ricochet. Pride snaps. Scorn entangles.

The ocean whispers dryly:

Some tides you ride. Some tides ride you.

And the fisherman?

Still rowing. Still counting fish. Still alive. Still human.

Still absurdly, impossibly unbothered.

A slow, secret smile curls at the edge of his blemished lips.

Divine burns oceans, melts glaciers.

Mortals row on.

Leeches Keep The Dead Alive

There are fractions of days

when I swear

I could go to war with the world

in the first blink of a lazy eye.

Then comes the entirety

of the long remainder of those days

every breath

a dozen nails

hammered into lungs, ribs, intestines,

each inhale another haemorrhage.

Nights I’ve prayed

would split themselves open

and swallow me whole,

their darkness a softer death

than the hundred deaths inside my chest.

My need to die

feels sharper

than my hope of surviving life.

Yet life crawls back,

because my death

isn’t mine alone.

Because love is a lot like leeches

sycophant enough

to keep corpses breathing,

just to feel alive,

to convince itself it still lives

in the hollows of others.

These days

I can’t quite tell anymore

if I’m more helpless

in my hope of life

or in my hope of death.

Life doesn’t let me live.

Love doesn’t let me die.