Big Brother

I’m told it’s patriotic

when a billion is owned by one

and the rest of us are leased back

to ourselves

in monthly instalments.

Different flags.

Same invoice.

My elder brothers in government

call this democracy.

I believe them;

not because it makes sense,

but because disbelief

has a higher cost of living.

Doubt doesn’t get healthcare.

Scepticism isn’t invited to weddings.

Questions age poorly

around dinner tables

where silence is inheritance.

So I nod.

I vote.

I regurgitate the correct outrage

on the correct days.

Globally informed.

Locally obedient.

When people burn in my neighbourhood,

I turn up the air conditioning in my room.

When people burn elsewhere,

I peddle opinions and call it geopolitics.

Fire and ash travel better

once they cross borders.

I’m a hopeful patriot.

Hope is renewable energy;

it powers denial indefinitely.

They tell me rebellion is necessary.

They tell me revolution is inevitable.

They tell me history bends

because brave men push it.

And I almost believe that too.

Because the greatest trick

the powerful ever perfected

was convincing the powerless

that resistance

was their idea.

Every revolutionary you admire

was anticipated.

Budgeted.

Positioned on the board

long before they learned

the word freedom.

You think you chose dissent.

No.

Dissent was made available —

like a menu of exotic delicacies

with limited options

and excellent optics.

They love a good game of chess,

my real big brothers.

Old money.

Quiet surnames.

Countries mispronounced

by their own citizens.

And a good game of chess

doesn’t need resistance.

It needs opposition;

a losing side 

with its demise scripted in bold

carved off a stone's heart

that truly believes

the board can still be flipped.

Because nothing tastes sweeter

than inevitability

disguised as suspense.

They don’t fear rebels.

They curate them.

They allow your marches

because the road is already fenced.

They allow your chants

because throats give out before walls do.

They allow your anger

because anger has a shelf life,

and rage always dies before anything else does.

They give you just enough victory

to keep hope breathing,

and just enough defeat

to keep you coming back.

Revolutions aren’t crushed anymore.

They’re prolonged.

Because a rebellion convinced

it’s still winning

will never notice

when the game has already ended.

Look closely.

Your heroes are branded.

Your martyrs are merchandised.

Your slogans fit perfectly

on factory-stitched T-shirts

made by hands

too tired to scream them.

Your outrage keeps the wheels turning.

Your dissent teaches them your limits.

Your anger is harvested,

measured,

and sold back to you

as the illusion of impact.

Even your radicalism

comes with terms and conditions, 

terms and conditions that have been bought and paid for, 

long before you had woken up to the idea of revolution.

The air you breathe is sponsored.

The news you consume is curated.

The language you protest in, is pre-approved.

Even the spine you think you grew

was manufactured

from recycled myths

about courage and change.

You’re not free.

You’re on temporary custody of conviction;

allowed to hold on to your ideals,

but never move them.

And change?

That’s the bedtime story

they tell children

and nations alike.

The belief that your questions

could topple governments,

unnerve billionaires,

or interrupt men

who buy continents

like weekend properties —

it’s adorable.

They let you ask

because the asking

is the containment.

You, me,

the governments, the oppositions,

the flags, the funerals,

the revolutions broadcasted live —

all pieces

on the same board.

Governments aren’t the puppeteers.

They’re the strings.

Corporations aren’t villains.

They’re infrastructure.

Democracy is the illusion

that makes the cage feel participatory

and the strings seem optional.

And me?

I’m not resisting this.

I’m narrating it calmly

because I already paid

for comfort

with silence.

Selling out isn’t corruption.

It’s adaptation.

It’s surviving

without the inconvenience

of a conscience

that demands structural change

instead of symbolic wins.

I didn’t lose my spine.

I rented it to the highest bidder.

So I could walk without crutches, 

so I could sleep and wake up too, 

so I could be an absolute nobody, 

away from the dying somebodies lining up to their graves.

This isn’t betrayal.

This is efficiency.

And if this unsettles you, 

good.

That discomfort

is the last square on the board

where you still believe

you have a move left.

But the game doesn’t end

with checkmate anymore.

It ends the moment you realise

you were never playing against them —

you were playing the role

they wrote for you.

And the most elegant revenge

was never crushing you.

It was letting you believe,

right till the end,

that you almost won.

And remember,

long after your bones turn to dust

and the echo of your voice dissolves into soil,

I will still be here, breathing quietly,

penning the elegy you never lived to write,

filing your absence neatly

under the rubric of “history”, 

where every scream, every hope, every spine

was priced, purchased, and accounted for

long before life traced its route from seed to self.

That’s how democracies survive:

the marrow of the many

extracted, harvested, and stitched into the bones of the few.

That's how democracies sustain:

not through equality, but human trafficking.

Hourbones

Hours piled up like dead flies,

as your rented time held you hostage.

The hour hand, the minute hand, the second hand, 

each demanding obedience

with the entitlement of lives

that never learnt the debts of breathing.

So I bludgeoned the heart of the clock

against a concrete wall.

The glass burst open,

time spilling itself

across the floor —

a rough mosaic of shattered moments

pretending to be history.

Somewhere between the storm and the silence,

I realised

I couldn’t remember your face anymore.

Not blur.

Not figments.

Just unadulterated absence.

Sometimes prisons

aren’t places you escape from;

they’re the spine

hammered into your back

so even emptiness can stand.

Cost Of Living

Life doesn’t cost a dime.

Living is the debt:

a lifelong lease on a rotting body you never wanted,

paid monthly in blood, nightmares,

and the kind of screams that never leave the throat

because survival still needs them silent.

The Monster In The Margin

I come from a world

where culture is measured in literature and cinema,

and ambition is measured in the rung you die on

in the corporate ladder of salaried slavery.

A world that calls itself humble

because arrogance is a luxury

the middle class cannot afford

unless it’s borrowed from fiction.

A world where your stories —

your history, your literature, your cinema,

repeat the same convenient lies

until they fossilise in the marrow

and parade as truth.

They give you heroes and villains,

each dressed differently but built the same:

a hero wronged by the world,

never not naive enough to not sell his spine,

clutching rigid ideas of integrity

like second-hand moral hand-me-downs

from your sanctimonious neighbour.

But the villains, 

they get the nuance, the hunger, the musculature of motive.

They bleed redder, burn brighter,

and come in plurals

because the secret to culture and civilisation is:

the road to being a hero is always singular,

but there are a hundred ways

to be human enough to be called a villain.

Growing up, I wondered

why villains felt closer to my skin,

as if their shadows were stitched

into the lining of my own.

Why the heroes I was meant to worship

felt nauseating, perfumed,

plastic gods of plastic virtues.

I know now.

People love heroes

because their lives demand delusion;

hope curated, pain censored,

mediocrity disguised as destiny.

People despise villains

because villains are carved

from the same flesh and flaw

people scrape off their reflections.

Villains are the parts we exile,

the truths we smother,

the selves we bury alive

under inherited righteousness.

If only we learnt

to live inside our own skins:

skins that itch, bruise, contradict,

skins that still carry the mess

we pretend we outgrew, 

maybe we wouldn’t slaughter entire lives

just to inhabit half-baked imaginations.

Maybe then, we wouldn’t need to worship heroes.

Because the real tragedy isn’t that villains exist;

it’s that we birthed them

from everything we were too cowardly

to forgive in ourselves. 

So we buried them in thick pages of thin fiction

and called the corpse “culture.”

Lizard Skin

I wish your opinions and perspectives

were like your tattoos;

ink etched into your epidermis

pigment that survives seasons

even when the skin carrying it doesn’t.

I wish they weren’t just aesthetic statements,

like those tribal beads threaded

into oxidised, roadside jewellery;

cheap convictions you wore

the way lizards wear skin:

briefly, and only until

the weather demanded otherwise.

Because you know they aren’t you,

and you aren’t them.

You’re just a bus stop

between who you were last week

and whoever you’re auditioning to be tomorrow.

Identity, for you, was a marketplace,

and you shopped like a pickpocket:

quick hands, no conscience,

stealing anything shiny enough

to distract you from the hollow.

Years of borrowed loyalties,

rehearsed convictions,

beliefs worn only long enough

to impress a passing mirror, 

you’ve shapeshifted so often

your own shadow hesitates,

unsure which silhouette

it’s supposed to belong to.

Sometimes it doesn’t stand beside you at all.

Sometimes it waits

to see which one of you mimicries

hits the ground first.

Still, you call it victory, 

that no one caught the trick,

that you were the magic and never the misdirection.

But life has a way of watching

without ever interrupting,

the way an old audience watches a tired magician

still convinced the hat has a rabbit left.

And when the lights finally dim,

and the room refuses to applaud,

your fall won’t be a surpirse revelation,

it’ll be the only obvious, the inevitable certainty.

Because disguises aren’t armour;

they’re just countdowns in costume.

And yours has been ticking for years.

The world won’t need to expose you.

Gravity will.

Identity always collapses

exactly where the spine should’ve been.

And as you hit the ground, 

all moults cracking, all borrowed skins peeling,

you’ll finally understand

what the silence has been rehearsing for you

since the day you first lied to the mirror:

you weren’t the magic,

you weren’t even the magician;

you were the goddamn fault line, 

and collapse was never the consequence,

it was the character arc.

Remembering To Die

This feeling is not new;

not to life, not to me.

I’ve carried it since seventeen,

waited to recognise it since nineteen.

By twenty-one, I’d had three chances,

yet its realisation kept slipping past me

the way moths char to ash

still wishing flames would spare them.

I’ve rehearsed it,

mapped it in elaborate detail —

every step, every exit.

I hoped it would embrace me

in moments of unplanned clarity

whenever my blueprinted dreams

flushed down the commode at dawn.

I have hoped for death

the way moths beg for life

as the blue flame gulps them whole.

I have held a dull blade

deep enough for bone to speak.

I have swallowed sleeping pills

enough to wake the afterlife.

I have slept beside a pistol,

willing my sleep to pull the trigger for me.

I have stared at ceiling-fan blades

wondering if the rope in my hands

believed in gravity more than I believed in myself.

I don’t do any of that anymore.

Time wears you down

and calls it ageing.

I’ve aged enough to stop planning my death, 

but not enough

to trust the idea of life.

These days, I only hope

that every time I close my eyes,

it might quietly be the last.

A life spent negotiating deaths

deserves an anticlimax;

a soft ending,

a quiet disappearance,

poetic justice

lost in translation.

And I’m counting on it.