They thought I would be an easy kill;
break my bones, leave me for dead,
let time do the rest,
and I’d become one more of their hunting tales.
When I stood back up,
they went into hiding, mistook escape for safe passage.
They thought this was a hiccup they were over with.
They’re about to realise it was harakiri.
It won’t end in death; death is mercy.
It’ll end with them
becoming a story nobody remembers telling.
My father stopped shouting when I was seventeen.
Not gradually, like he stopped smoking. No.
One day, the house simply became quiet.
No slammed doors.
No footsteps approaching like a verdict.
No voice turning my name into something I had to survive.
For years afterward, I thought I was fine.
I became good at reading rooms.
A pause meant anger.
A sigh meant disappointment.
A door closing meant someone was leaving.
I called it awareness.
People called it maturity.
Then, one evening, the woman I loved said,
“Can we talk?”
Three harmless words.
My body heard something else.
My jaw tightened.
My heart accelerated.
I began explaining myself before she had accused me of anything.
She hadn't even finished sitting down.
She stared at me, “What are you doing?”
I didn't know.
So I went home and looked it up.
There is a word in physics: hysteresis.
It describes what happens
when a system changes because of a force,
and keeps behaving differently
even after the force ceases to exist.
The system remembers what happened to it.
I read that again.
Then again.
Because my father hadn't shouted at me in years.
He wasn't in the room.
He hadn't even been the subject of the conversation.
And still, some part of me was bracing for him.
I had not carried my father's anger into adulthood.
I had carried the version of myself his anger required.
The child who listened for footsteps.
The teenager who rehearsed every sentence before speaking.
The adult who left first so nobody could leave him.
I had mistaken adaptation for identity.
I called myself cautious because fear had made me careful.
I called myself independent because needing people had once been dangerous.
I called silence peace because I had forgotten
how to hear it without waiting for what came next.
And maybe that is the cruelest thing about surviving something:
survival doesn't always know when the predicament ends.
The danger leaves. The body doesn't.
The person disappears. The reflex stays.
Years can pass
and some old version of you
can still be standing at the door,
waiting for footsteps.
So I called her.
I told her, “I wasn't answering you.
I was answering someone who isn't here.”
She was quiet.
For once, I didn't mistake the silence for danger.
I just stayed.
My father stopped shouting when I was seventeen.
It took me years to understand that the hardest part wasn't surviving the noise.
It was learning that quiet wasn't waiting to become loud.
Imagine this.
There’s a woman somewhere,
a woman you know.
Imagine her going about her day
when a man meddles,
decides they should have a conversation,
and she obliges
in the way her parents taught her
was respectable.
The man says he loves conversation.
He doesn't.
He loves monologue
with an audience.
Anything beyond agreement
is noise,
unless it arrives
as submitted obedience
to his extravagant opinions.
He doesn't like questions.
Questions about his opinions.
Questions about his lived experience.
Questions about the roads
he travelled
to arrive at his conclusions.
He doesn't like them.
Not one bit.
So every time there is a question,
he misdirects.
The woman,
meanwhile,
had grown up learning
to respect herself
and her sanity.
Obedience wasn't her bread.
Submission wasn't her breadcrumb.
So she did
what any rational person,
any objectively sane person,
might do.
She disagreed.
Respectfully.
And left.
The man had a fragile ego.
And what kind of world is it
where a man finally has to make peace
with an injured narcissism?
So he ganged up.
He brought his brothers.
A brotherhood of men
with no jobs,
only jabs.
And boy,
did they swing.
They ripped through her dress,
her skin,
her flesh,
her bonework,
but never touched her.
They weren't uncivilised savages,
you see.
They did it all with words.
Wild accusations.
Filthy rumours.
Rotten verdicts.
All because
she had decided
she could afford
an opinion of her own.
They called everyone who knew her.
Everyone they could.
And they didn't stop
until voices began
hollowing into echoes.
They came at her
day and night,
through monsoon,
winter,
summer,
for months,
until months became a year,
and a year became more,
until there was nothing left
of the bricks in her name.
She was alive.
And yet
buried six feet under.
Then one day,
when she had had enough,
she dragged them all
into a courtroom.
And the men cried
like a pack of sheep
in front of a wolf
whose shepherd had gone.
People gathered.
Watched the circus.
Then returned to their lives,
leaving behind
the usual unsolicited opinions:
“She’s making a mountain
out of a molehill.”
“She’s equally to blame.”
“Why couldn't she just apologise
for hurting their feelings
and move on?”
Does it infuriate you?
The audacity
of unscrupulous people
peddling justice
like pocket change.
Now imagine
the woman were a man.
And the men
were women.
Does it still infuriate you?
If it does,
good.
If it doesn't,
then perhaps
what you called justice
was only projection.
And what you called feminism
was only loyalty
to the side you recognised yourself on.
You can sit there
with tense anuses
and worked-up sinuses
beneath those stoic faces.
Remember,
I can see you.
Every one of you.
And you,
you are why
justice so often
begins to feel like vendetta.
You are no feminist.
You aren't even humanitarian.
You're as much a feminist
as Genghis Khan
was a prophet of peace.
Do you remember LCM
from when mathematics was just another subject at school,
and not a currency of your existence?
LCM.
Lowest Common Multiple.
We grew up.
Our mathematics didn't.
We still flock together,
call ourselves community, society, cult, religion, civilization;
names for the same old arithmetic.
An assembly of LCMs,
each pretending the whole
must mean something more than the parts.
With HCF
as their selling proposition.
HCF.
Highest Common Factor.
Or, as the LCMs call it,
ambition.
They spend their lives
calling themselves prime numbers,
waiting for someone else to agree.
Not because they believe they are,
but because lies need lamination.
Gloss and glitter
are the oldest misdirection
truth has ever had.
Every now and then,
a prime number turns up.
And the LCMs feel it.
The HCFs tremble.
Because if a prime number
is recognised for what it is,
who would bother
mistaking an LCM for one?
So much for faith.
So much for creed.
So much for civilization.
Nothing
but basic mathematics.
And before anyone gets the wind of it,
the LCMs, armed with their HCFs,
line up to take the primes out of their way.
Because what is death by numbers
if not
the habitual repetition
of normalcy?
In a world ruled by HCFs,
LCMs are prime and non-prime,
the rule and the exception;
prime numbers, a conspiracy.
Do you remember LCM
from when mathematics was just another subject at school,
and not a currency of your existence?
LCM.
Lowest Common Multiple.
We grew up.
Our mathematics didn't.
We still flock together,
call ourselves community, society, cult, religion, civilization;
names for the same old arithmetic.
An assembly of LCMs,
each pretending the whole
must mean something more than the parts.
With HCF
as their selling proposition.
HCF.
Highest Common Factor.
Or, as the LCMs call it,
ambition.
They spend their lives
calling themselves prime numbers,
waiting for someone else to agree.
Not because they believe they are,
but because lies need lamination.
Gloss and glitter
are the oldest misdirection
truth has ever had.
Every now and then,
a prime number turns up.
And the LCMs feel it.
The HCFs tremble.
Because if a prime number
is recognised for what it is,
who would bother
mistaking an LCM for one?
So much for faith.
So much for creed.
So much for civilization.
Nothing
but basic mathematics.
You sell your carefully curated sensuality
just to make your words worth hearing.
And yet, here you are,
screaming revolution.
Even the words
are embarrassed.
Thank God
the freedom fighters
had nothing to sell
but their lives
at the sacrificial altar of revolution.
Who knows —
otherwise,
they might have had to
rent out their skin
for independence.
The stranger came to the wedding
with the bride’s face.
Nobody noticed.
Her mother was busy
counting blessings.
Her father was busy
counting chairs.
The groom was busy
becoming a husband
in front of witnesses.
The stranger sat through the rituals,
accepted the food, the beverages,
clapped when everyone else did.
Then she climbed the staircase.
The bride followed.
Upstairs:
a bedroom,
a mirror,
a wardrobe
full of things the bride
hadn't worn in years.
The stranger took out
a red dress;
“too revealing,”
her mother had said.
A photograph;
her father had torn it
after finding her kissing
someone he didn't approve of.
A notebook;
her poems,
before people began asking
what they were about.
She put everything back.
“Who invited you?”
the bride asked, curious.
The stranger looked
toward the staircase,
“Everyone.”
She walked downstairs
wearing the bride’s face.
The bride stayed behind.
She looked into the mirror.
For the first time that day,
she didn't recognise herself.
Downstairs,
her new husband
was kissing a stranger,
as the room erupted into rehearsed applause.
If acquaintances were everything
they were supposed to be,
we wouldn't be handing out
loves and lives
to strangers.
If family were everything
we were told it is,
we wouldn't be learning from books
how to love ourselves.
And yet,
every time we desire,
every time we love or lust,
we rush to build familiarity,
brick by brick.
Perhaps that's the irony:
we distrust the people
we know by inheritance,
then spend our lives
trying to make intimates
of those we don't.
Human intelligence
is an evolutionary joke;
if only
we were self-aware.
Every time you ask me
why is it that I write,
I wish I could tell you
I write because words found me.
But a lie that heavy
needs the earth for a shoulder,
and all I have ever grown
were morsels of soil.
I wish I could tell you
I write because I love the way it feels
when what it feels
finds a way through my skin
to the skin of felled trees.
But then you'd never know
how badly I have hated writing,
how often I've wished it away
like a fever
I could sweat out by morning.
I wish I could tell you
I write because I've always wanted to,
because some things are born
already facing the sky.
But then how would you know
that I write
not because I want to,
but because I cannot not?
I write because it is the curse of my blood,
and the harder I try to wash it from my hands,
the more stubbornly the words return.
I write because my father didn't want me to.
I write because my mother didn't want me to.
I write because they burned my poems
and still could not ashen my poetry.
Some things survive fire
by becoming something fire cannot name.
I write because there were times
people walked away smiling,
leaving their little instruments of ruin
lodged somewhere between my ribs,
and I found more reasons to disappear
than to remain;
and when friends and family failed to bury me,
words were my scalpel and spade,
my prescription and prayer.
I write because words are all that lie
between truth and lie,
and someone has to stand there
when the distance starts closing.
I write because if I didn't,
you would sell the world
every fiction of yours
and call them memories.
I write because someone has to
in a world busy
renting words for convenience,
where truth is expensive
and lies come home delivered free of cost.
Every time you ask
why is it that I write,
ask yourself:
if I didn't,
would you?
You can tell me
I'm a speck in the sand.
You wouldn't be wrong.
The sea has swallowed
better men than me.
But if I had to write
to become a bestseller,
I would become you,
and between the two of us
there would be
no tongues left unstained.
So no,
I don't write because I love writing.
I don't write because
I think the world needs another poet.
I don't even write
because I think I have something to say.
I write because silence
has always been too willing
to let the wrong people speak.
I write because somebody
has to clean the language
after the respectable have shit in it.
And if that makes me
nothing more than a speck in the sand,
so be it.
The sea can have the sand.
It can have the poets.
It can have the bestseller.
It can have every beautiful lie
ever written about why we write.
I'll take the shit.
I'll take the words
that won't wash clean.
I'll take the sentences
that leave blood under the fingernails.
I'll take the truth
that nobody wants to touch.
I write for the same reason
a sewer man cleans a commode.
Not because he loves the shit.
Because someone has to.
My mother remembers
a child who lied.
My sister remembers
one who cried.
An old friend remembers
someone who stayed
long after he should have left.
Someone remembers
the night I left.
Someone else,
on that same night,
swears I never did.
I have stopped correcting them.
There are photographs
I cannot remember taking,
conversations I remember
that nobody else does,
and apologies
I am certain I received
from people who swear
they never said sorry.
For years,
I thought memory
was the only place
I was still myself.
Then I noticed
something terrible:
the older I get,
the more of my past
belongs to other people.
Their words
have entered my childhood.
Their anger
has edited my innocence.
Their forgiveness
has given me
things I may never
have earned.
Even the person
I call myself
is beginning to sound
like someone
I was told I was.
Sometimes I look
at an old photograph
and recognize the face
before I recognize the life.
How many times
can a person be remembered
before the memory
becomes the person?
My mother remembers
a child who lied.
My sister remembers
one who cried.
An old friend remembers
someone who stayed
long after he should have left.
Someone remembers
the night I left.
Someone else,
on that same night,
swears I never did.
I have stopped correcting them.
There are photographs
I cannot remember taking,
a birthday I remember
ending in tears
though everyone remembers
the cake.
There is a house
I remember being afraid of
that everyone else remembers
as the happiest place
we ever lived.
There are conversations
I remember word for word
that nobody remembers having.
There are apologies
I am certain I received
from people who swear
they never said sorry.
For years,
I thought memory
was the one thing
no one could take from me.
I was wrong.
The older I get,
the more of my childhood
belongs to other people.
Their words
have entered my childhood.
Their anger
has edited my innocence.
Their forgiveness
has given me
things I may never
have earned.
Sometimes I remember
being happy
and cannot tell
if I was.
Sometimes I remember
being cruel
and cannot tell
if guilt is proof
or inheritance.
Even the person
I call myself
is beginning to sound
like someone
I was told I was.
Last December,
I found an old photograph
of myself at seven.
I knew the shirt.
I knew the room.
I knew the face.
I just couldn't remember
being the boy
inside it.
For a long time
I thought this meant
I had forgotten myself.
Now I think
I may have remembered
everyone else too well.
How many times
can a person be remembered
before the memory
becomes the person?
“But when she said no, I put it back,” he said,
almost convinced,
his eyes glittering with an island of newly found hope
in an ocean of what one would expect to be regret and shame,
but was mostly
the realisation of the bad luck of getting caught.
He spoke about his penis
like people speak about things
they're accused of misplacing.
He spoke of her pause before the refusal
like it was a waiting period
he could utilise to win back a business deal.
He spoke of consent and of abuse
like they were metaphors:
subjective,
negotiable,
open to interpretation.
What can I say?
He was a veteran in the metaphorical department.
And like the weather gods at the meteorological department,
it was barely a surprise
that he would fail at his job rather spectacularly.
It's funny how we've been brought up
with an image of what monsters should look like:
loud,
ruthless,
unhinged.
The more I see humans,
the more convinced I become
that the worst of them
come in soft, tamed, well-behaved skins.
You need your prey to like you
before you can become its predator.
Apparently,
that is where evolution peaked.
He wasn't just another man.
What life would that even be?
He was a man of ethics,
of principles,
of revolutions.
A gentleman
drowning in a sea of women
tarnished by grains and specks
of uncouth penises
reeking of unbothered testosterone.
A gentleman
who had called me a misogynist
three weeks earlier,
who spoke of my arrogance
in arguing with a woman,
of my refusal to accept
that every last man
on the face of the planet
should be apologetic
and ashamed
of his very existence,
as though disagreement
were a misdemeanour,
and refusing to surrender
my sensibilities
to somebody else's dogmatic definition
of feminism
were a serious offence;
one that demanded exile.
As though an everyday disagreement
could be turned into a ticking bomb
of character definition,
one that would culminate
in the assassination
of the very character,
its identity,
and every life
caught inside its blast radius.
And don't we all know,
gentlemen don't rape.
Because how could they?
They're soft-spoken.
Agreeable.
Pleasant to talk to.
They feel good to be around.
Imagine if everything
that seemed and felt nice
were incapable of carrying disease.
How poorly
would a sexually transmitted disease
feel?
And who was I,
an oral cancer,
to judge him,
a fucking genital germ?
He was a gentleman
with a gentle penis
and gentler intentions.
Every time he touched a woman
with cheap liquor beneath his breath,
it was drunk affection.
Every time he described
his journey across the terrain of an unclothed woman's flesh
to another,
he was merely being a flirt.
Every time he pulled his penis out of his pants
in front of an unwilling woman,
it was just an error in punctuation.
And isn't that the trick?
We have become so accustomed to manicured manliness
that we mistake sheep's clothing for character.
The gentleman's voice is soft.
His hands are clean.
His vocabulary is polished.
His metaphors are well behaved.
Only the verbs misbehave.
Consent becomes a metaphor.
Violation becomes a misunderstanding.
Persistence becomes desire.
And a woman's refusal becomes an inconvenience to be negotiated.
Perhaps that is how a predator survives
in a world that insists
on recognising monsters by their manners.
He doesn't need to look monstrous.
He only needs to sound vulnerable.
And perhaps that is why the language matters.
Because once you crowd the noun with enough adjectives,
people stop asking what the verb did.
That is the genius of manicured manliness:
the sentence looks clean.
Even when the body does not.
Especially when the body does not.
And somewhere between the two,
a gentleman has learned how to call his crime a metaphor.
I write because silence is where
the respectable lies go to die.
I write them back into daylight,
strip them of their manners,
and teach them their names.
I write until the anatomy of a lie
lies bare beneath the scalpel;
its polished teeth,
its borrowed spine,
its tongue still trying to call
cowardice compassion.
I keep cutting
until there is nowhere left
for butter-knived euphemisms to hide.
Until the lie is nothing
but marrow,
tissue,
and the small, cold machinery
of what we were too polite to call true.
I write because silence
doesn't make a lie less dead.
It only keeps the corpse respectable.
Had it not been
for the sheer inability of heterosexual men
to find their way into a woman's insides
without turning into hollowed-out echoes,
accountability might have been a non-negotiable
one couldn't barter away on the hopeful premise of sex.
Perhaps then,
a woman's promise of access
would have stopped buying exemptions.
Perhaps virginity
would have lost its exchange rate.
Perhaps the boys would have learned
that being wanted does not make consequence optional.
And maybe, just maybe,
all those boys in men's cloaks
would have stopped sounding the same;
all appetite,
all grievance,
all convenient innocence,
all discovering principles
only after being denied what they wanted.
The unlaid were never the tragedy.
It was the bargaining.
Tapeworms are rather fascinating
for existences inhabiting
the whereabouts of your asshole.
They prefer their fodder predigested;
digestion requires gall,
and pretense makes for poor enzymes.
They call themselves witches,
rather proudly.
Mind control is the only magic a parasite can afford;
they kill the entrails that keep them alive,
fornicate over corpses,
then mistake the rot for conquest.
Necrophiles, quite literally.
Tapeworms like to imagine themselves as magic,
until they trickle down,
gather,
and become
what they always were:
pieces of shit.
Sometimes, they call themselves people.
Imagine
coming second five years ago
in one of countless competitions
and then making silver your surname.
Imagine
turning trauma into diplomatic immunity
and neurodivergence into a passport
nobody is allowed to inspect.
Imagine
appointing yourself priestess of righteousness,
then using mortality as an excuse
to bully those who refuse your definitions.
Imagine an abyss so shallow
you need metaphors to fill a stanza.
Then imagine the same people
arriving with spades and sledgehammers,
calling demolition healing,
calling slander solidarity,
calling crimes a revolution.
An army of them
to dismantle what one person built alone.
How flattering.
The only caveat?
A crime is a crime is a crime,
no matter how many adjectives and opinions you dress it in.
And illusioned imbeciles make excellent puppets
when the circus finally reaches the courtroom.
Imagine building a halo
from the outline of convictions
and calling the shape martyrdom.
I'd like to see them try.
Not because the monument cannot be demolished.
Because some people
mistake the noise of hammers
for the sound of history changing.
Imagine that.
The moon has bruises.
We call them craters
because nobody remembers
when any of it happened.
In the kitchen,
we have better names
for other kinds of damage.
A tomato is cut open and called preparation.
A fish is gutted and called dinner.
An onion is peeled until it cries,
and nobody asks what happened to it.
The body is less forgiving.
Strike it once and it keeps the evidence.
Red.
Then purple.
Then yellow.
A bruise is inconvenient
because it refuses to become history quickly.
So we cover it.
The moon had billions of years.
Time did to its wounds what time does best;
it made them acceptable.
And the idiocy of intellect called them beautifully flawed.
Now we put photographs of its scars on walls.
We write love poems about them.
We call the whole thing romantic.
Perhaps that is all beauty is:
damage
that has survived long enough
for us to forget it was damage.
A crater instead of a wound.
Dinner instead of a dead thing.
A sunset instead of a burning sky.
And a bruise, still a bruise,
because
some wounds haven't had the decency to become beautiful yet.
Some people read my words
as though they were windows,
leaning closer
to see the man behind them.
Poor things.
They don't know words aren't windows.
They don't know words are but wells.
You can lower your whole life
into them
and still bring nothing back
but darkness.
Besides,
if words meant
what we think they mean,
lies wouldn't be a commodity.
Gods would be
exactly as their scriptures
describe them.
Governments would be
exactly as their constitutions
promise them.
And every folklore
peddled as a love story
would be admissible
as evidence.
But words have always known
how to wear a face
that isn't theirs.
So read me.
Underline me.
Annotate the margins.
Build a man
out of my metaphors
and call him me.
Just remember:
you are standing
at the edge of an abyss,
and whatever you think
you see down there
is nothing more than an optical illusion.
It doesn't rain for two weeks,
and the snakes think it's summer.
They have no idea
the sky is only waiting
to break itself open;
rain,
then hail,
and they'll be out on the streets,
with too many boots
and too little earth
between their fangs and their graves.
There's light at the end of the tunnel.
There absolutely is.
That light, though,
isn't a search party,
the sun,
the flame of a candle,
or the enlightenment of a firefly;
it is the headlight
of a derailed freight train
with failed brakes.
It isn't coming to save you.
It's coming to go straight through you.
The chains are softer now.
They come with passwords,
paydays,
and biometric doors
that open just wide enough
to forget they lock.
What was once called slavery
is now a starting salary.
With growth potential.
And a Friday pizza party.
You can decorate your cubicle.
Pick your flavour of burnout.
Even choose your own wallpaper
for the prison wall.
Until the company chooses something for you.
A meeting.
A calendar invite.
A “quick chat.”
Then your password stops working.
They call it “restructuring.”
You call it “a mutual divorce.”
Your mortgage calls it "a flight risk".
And life?
Life is a con job
that sells curd and calls it yogurt.
Existence is algorithmic now.
Identities binary.
The only affordable nuance
comes with a dropdown menu
at a fine dine gourmet restaurant.
“One for the pictures,”
you say,
posing beside
a mural of a freedom fighter
sponsored by a soft-drink brand.
The company calls it patriotism.
The algorithm calls it engagement.
The country omits your voting rights,
because your father's name was misspelled.
History moves on at the speed of scrolls.
Your debts pile on like browser cache.
You grew up poor.
So you chased comfort.
Now you hoard it.
Call it ambition.
Call it legacy.
Call it economic evolution.
But don’t call it innocence
when the maid’s ten-year-old daughter
asks why your six-year-old son
has two beds,
and you say,
“He’s earned it.”
Her mother has earned
every rupee for the bed
she still cannot afford to buy.
That’s why
she gets paid
to sleep under.
In a world that masturbates to the idea of rags-to-riches
while making sure the rags stay rags
and the riches get richer,
the story of the underdog
is the oldest known pornography.
The audience does not want equality.
It wants someone
to crawl out of the gutter
so it can applaud
without having to clean it.
A world
fellatioed by fiction
needs its imaginary underdogs
from time to time.
And he was the apt fit.
He sold the story.
He looked the part.
A remote village
in a state long acquainted
with unrest
made the perfect prologue.
Poverty. Conflict. Integrity.
The holy trinity of the inspirational biography.
Intelligence came later.
It was merely useful.
He did not sell the story of a winner.
No.
That was too easy.
Too neat.
He sold the fiction of an eternal hustle.
A man
caught between a world
where ideals were sold
for the price of kidneys
and an integrity
that, apparently,
would not let him sell out.
At least, that was the story.
And stories have always been
forgiving of inconsistencies.
The truth was never half as nuanced.
His fiction simply was not selling as well as he thought.
So he improvised.
According to the audience.
Sometimes his principles were the chain around his throat.
Sometimes the world was cruel.
Sometimes selfish bastards were to blame.
Sometimes it was the unforgivable audacity of a woman who had said no.
The villains changed.
His innocence did not.
He had a surprisingly stable moral universe
for a man whose enemies kept changing shape.
He told stories of being a recovering addict
while remaining on a monthly ration of intoxication.
The bottle remained faithful. The fable did not.
He knew the alchemy.
A mistake became a wound.
A wound became a lesson.
A lesson became a personality.
A personality became a reason.
And a reason, repeated often enough, became innocence.
He knew when contradiction
was hypocrisy
and when it was complexity.
When failure was his fault
and when it was evidence of a cruel world.
When an apology was necessary
and when looking sufficiently wounded would do.
He sold his skin just to remain relevant.
Not famous. Not loved.
Remembered.
There is a peculiar hunger in wanting to be remembered.
It makes ordinary obscurity feel like death.
So he kept writing himself.
Every room received a different version.
Not necessarily a false one.
That would have been easier.
Just a different one.
And somewhere between the versions,
there was always a forest.
He never called it that.
There was simply something in the trees.
Something dangerous.
Something cruel.
Something that had done something.
Something that might do something again.
Something that needed to be feared.
Something that needed to be believed.
By the end of the story, it was always a wolf.
Sometimes the wolf was in the woods.
Sometimes it was at the door.
Sometimes it was already inside.
He became very good at knowing when to howl.
And people came running.
Of course they did.
A wounded helpless creature makes the purest sound.
But wolves,
as old stories know,
are rarely invited
into the house
looking like wolves.
So he came softly.
Head lowered.
Tail between his legs.
He accepted the hand that fed him.
The blanket.
The room by the fire.
He slept at the foot of the bed
like something domesticated.
And for a while, he was.
Then one tooth appeared.
Not enough to frighten anyone.
A glint.
A warning.
Something easily mistaken for an accident.
Then another.
A little more hunger.
A little less gratitude.
A bite small enough to explain.
A scratch small enough to forgive.
And when someone
finally looked closely and said,
"There are teeth in this animal",
he did what he had always done.
He found another door.
Another hearth.
Another pair of hands
willing to stroke the wounded thing.
And there he was again.
Quiet.
Grateful.
Almost tame.
Until the next tooth.
Then the next cry.
The wolf was always elsewhere.
The stories changed faster
than one could finish
the terms and conditions
of a life insurance policy
printed in a font
designed to discourage reading.
But the shape remained.
A wounded man.
A forest.
A wolf.
And someone willing to listen.
He became very good at pointing.
Look.
There. That one.
Not me. That one.
And people looked.
Why wouldn't they?
The wolf had been named.
The forest was dark.
The man was crying.
That was usually enough.
He understood something
the old storytellers knew
long before anyone invented social media:
people do not always remember what happened; they remember who told them what happened.
So he kept talking.
About the wolves.
About the forest.
About the wounds.
About himself.
And the more he talked,
the more the story began to resemble truth.
Not everything was false.
Some of it was true.
Some of it was terribly true.
He had suffered.
He had failed.
He had been hurt.
He had hurt others.
He had been treated unfairly.
He had also been treated exactly as he deserved.
The problem
was never
the existence of the truth.
The problem
was that truth
had become only one ingredient.
The rest was folklore.
And folklore,
unlike truth,
knows how to dress.
Then life did something terribly impolite.
It stopped behaving like fiction.
Some call it coincidence.
Some call it consequence.
I call it
the day the forest stopped listening.
There were two wolves.
Actual wolves, two of them.
One on either side.
No symbolism.
No allegory.
No convenient villain waiting politely for his turn.
Two wolves.
Hungry.
And suddenly,
all those years of knowing
exactly where to point
became useless.
He tried to explain.
The wolves were not interested.
He tried to point.
There was nowhere to point.
He tried to make himself the wounded thing.
For once, the forest was hauntingly silent.
He tried to scream.
The wolves took his voice first.
Almost elegant.
Almost cruel enough to be funny.
The man who had spent his life
surviving through stories
had finally encountered something
that refused to become one.
The rest was merely grammatical.
Blood replaced adjectives.
Teeth replaced arguments.
Silence replaced context.
And the versions of him
began falling away.
The principled man.
The addict.
The intellectual.
The victim.
The good man in a bad world.
Gone.
Not disproved.
Not redeemed.
Just eaten.
The people who might once
have come running
had already gone home.
Some had believed him.
Some had not.
Some probably still did.
It hardly mattered.
They had their own forests.
Their own wolves.
Their own reasons to get home before dark.
And perhaps that was the cruelest part.
He had spent his life trying to become unforgettable.
He succeeded.
Someone would remember the village.
The poverty. The struggle. The principles.
The addiction. The women. The wolves.
Someone would tell the story
of the remarkable man
who came from nowhere,
fought the world, and nearly won.
Someone would call him an underdog.
Someone would call him brave.
Someone would call him misunderstood.
Someone would call him inspirational.
And someone would get it beautifully, tragically, completely wrong.
Which was perhaps the closest thing
he ever had to a happy ending.
Because the story would survive.
The man would not.
And years later,
when someone would ask,
“What actually happened to him?”
There would be a pause.
Someone would shrug.
“I heard there were wolves.”
And that would be enough.
Because by then,
nobody remembered
which wolf was real.
Nobody remembered
which story was true.
Nobody remembered
which version
had been his.
They remembered
the wolf.
They always remember the wolf.
They rarely remember who was holding the microphone.
And somewhere deep in the forest,
long after the fires had gone cold,
there was no man crying wolf anymore.
No wounded creature.
No audience.
No story.
Only the animal
that had been hiding
inside every version of him.
Waiting.
And eventually,
even the wolf became a story.
Because that is the oldest trick of all.
Give a creature a name,
give it a villain,
give it a victim,
give it a voice,
and sooner or later
someone will forget to ask
who was wearing the fur.
Unspoken. Unsaid.
People use them like twins.
They are not.
One has no anatomy.
The other is a headless corpse.
That is the difference.
Unspoken is a thought
still looking for language.
A pressure behind the ribs.
A fist.
A funeral before the coffin.
A child knowing something is wrong
long before anyone gives it a name.
Unspoken is innocent.
Unsaid is not.
Unsaid has vocabulary.
Unsaid knows the sentence.
Unsaid has rehearsed it
in the shower,
in the car,
in the courtroom
of the skull
at three in the morning.
Unsaid has punctuation.
It has considered the consequences.
Then it decided to shut the fuck up.
That is not silence.
That is a decision.
We have beautiful names for decisions like that.
Restraint.
Maturity.
Professionalism.
Keeping the peace.
Being the bigger person.
Human beings are astonishing.
We can turn cowardice into etiquette
if we give it a nice enough word.
So the sentence waits.
Not in the mouth.
Somewhere between
the thought
and the tongue,
there is security check.
Every truth arrives with luggage.
What are you carrying?
A confession.
Declare it.
I love you.
Anything else?
I am angry.
Anything else?
I never forgave you.
Anything else?
I was never happy here.
Anything else?
No. Of course not.
We are very good at emptying our pockets
before the truth gets searched.
And that little country
between unspoken and unsaid
is where we do it.
That is where the murder weapon goes.
That is where the apology loses its spine.
That is where love is stripped of its vowels and sent back to the factory.
That is where a person learns the difference between "I can't say it" and "I won't".
The first is a wound.
The second is architecture.
Give it enough years
and the architecture becomes a house.
Give it a family
and it becomes tradition.
Give it a country
and it becomes culture.
Give it generations
and nobody remembers
there was ever anything to say.
That is the frightening part.
The unspoken can become unsaid.
The unsaid can become normal.
Normal can become invisible.
And invisible things are the easiest things to inherit.
Ask any family what happened.
Watch them look at one another.
Nobody knows.
Everybody knows.
There it is.
The oldest language we have.
A room full of people speaking fluently without saying the sentence.
We call this peace.
Sometimes it is a war with good manners.
Sometimes the thing between two people is not distance.
It is a word both of them know
and neither of them is willing to own.
Sometimes it is a name.
Sometimes a truth.
Sometimes a goodbye postponed so long, it becomes a personality.
And sometimes
it is simply
"no".
The smallest word.
The most expensive.
No, I don't love you.
No, you didn't deserve that.
No, I am not okay.
No, I don't forgive you.
No, I don't want to be the person you made me.
No.
Two letters.
A life can fit inside them.
A marriage can die between them.
A child can become an adult
trying to earn permission to say them.
And perhaps that is what lives between the two words.
Not silence.
Not absence.
A border.
On one side, the thing
you have not yet found the courage to name.
On the other, the thing
you named perfectly and buried anyway.
Between them stands a person
holding a sentence in both hands
like a loaded gun, calling it
peace.
I am losing my hair.
Not enough to be interesting.
I am not bald.
I am simply experiencing
a slow administrative reduction
in the population above my eyebrows.
There are still plenty of them.
That is how I know this is serious.
If they were all gone,
I could at least call it something.
Baldness.
A condition. A noun.
A problem with paperwork.
But this is thinning.
A verb.
Something happening
while I am trying to get somewhere else.
Every morning I find them.
On the pillow.
In the sink.
Caught in the collar of yesterday's shirt.
They have started turning up in places
where I don't remember inviting them.
I pick them out and throw them away.
Sometimes I count.
Not because
I expect the number to tell me anything.
Because counting
makes disappearance look measurable.
I have always been surprisingly calm around statistics.
It is the ones still attached to me that bother me.
They are thinner now.
Some of them have become so fine
that I have to tilt my head under the bathroom light
to confirm they are still hair.
A few look like nature's way of saying, "technically, still hair".
I have changed shampoos.
I have read articles
by men with suspiciously full heads of hair
telling me not to worry.
I worried.
Quietly. With citations.
But the more I watched the hair disappear,
the more, a question began bothering me.
Which one was the last?
Not the last hair I will ever have.
That is easy.
I can probably predict
the general direction of this negotiation.
I mean the last good one.
The last thick one.
The last one
that belonged to the version of my head
I never thought I would have to miss.
There must have been one.
It fell somewhere.
A pillow. A drain.
My shoulder.
The back of a black shirt.
Maybe I brushed it away without looking.
Maybe I was late for work.
Maybe I was thinking about money.
Maybe I was in love.
Maybe I was miserable.
Maybe I was happy.
It doesn't matter.
I didn't know.
That is the part I cannot forgive.
Not the hair.
The ignorance.
We imagine endings as events.
A door closing.
A train leaving.
Someone saying “I think we should talk.”
A final kiss.
A final photograph.
A final breath.
We like our endings with subtitles.
But most things do not leave like that.
They thin. That is all.
Nothing dramatic.
Nothing anyone would interrupt dinner for.
Just less.
Then less again.
Then one day you look at the thing
you have been looking at your entire life
and discover
you no longer remember when it was whole.
That frightens me more than death.
Death has the decency to arrive with its name tag.
This is worse.
This is a disappearance
that asks you to keep calling it present.
So I have started looking at my hair
like an idiot.
Not checking whether I am bald.
Checking whether I am still me.
As though the answer
might be hiding between two strands.
As though one of them might still remember
the exact shape of my head
before everything started becoming less.
And sometimes I catch myself
searching old photographs.
Not for my face. For the hair.
There it is. Thicker. Stupider.
Completely unaware
that one day
I would enlarge the photograph
to inspect it like evidence.
Look at that.
Look how much I had.
Look how little I knew.
That is the real cruelty.
You never know which ordinary thing is about to become a memory.
You don't know which morning will be the last morning you get to have without knowing it.
You don't know.
Because if you did,
you would behave differently.
You would look longer.
Listen harder.
Stay five more minutes.
You would understand
that ordinary
is not the opposite of precious.
It is how precious things usually leave.
Quietly. Without announcement. Without witnesses.
Without giving you the smallest courtesy of knowing you should remember.
And perhaps that is why
I keep thinking about that last good hair.
I want to know where it fell.
I want to know whether I noticed.
I want to know whether I touched it.
I want to know whether,
for one stupid second,
I held the last piece of something
I would spend years trying to keep
and threw it away.
I will never know.
Because the last hair did not know it was the last hair.
And I did not know I was losing it.
We keep waiting for goodbyes to become visible.
They never do.
One day something is still here.
The next day it isn't.
And somewhere between those two days
you were supposed to notice.
I didn't.
I am still not bald.
There is still hair on my head.
There is still time.
There are still people I can call.
Still rooms I can return to.
Still things I can say.
Which is why, tomorrow morning,
I will probably stand in the bathroom
and complain about the hair in the sink.
I will pick it up.
Count it.
Throw it away.
And never once ask
whether I am holding the last thing
I will ever get to lose
without knowing
I was saying goodbye.
Everything that's hurled at me
will have to earn its keep.
The insult.
The envy.
The humiliation.
The things I cannot forgive.
The things I cannot forget.
Nothing gets to wound me
and leave empty-handed.
I will not make meaning
out of suffering.
Meaning is too generous.
I will grind it all into black ink,
wring the bitterness
until it gives me something useful,
and fling it at the page
until the page remembers what it cost me.
I will not turn pain into wisdom.
That would be such a waste.
Wisdom is
what people make out of suffering
when they want to forgive it.
I don't.
I will keep the wound exactly as ugly as it was.
Then I will give it a punchline.
I will give the humiliation a microphone.
I will give the insult better grammar.
I will give the people who hurt me the immortality they never asked for.
Not as heroes. Not as villains. As ingredients.
Everything gets recycled.
Some things become compost.
Some become autopsies.
Some become satire.
I suppose I have always had a weakness for black.
First,
learn to say yes
before anybody has finished asking.
It saves time.
Yes, sir.
Yes, ma'am.
Yes, of course.
Yes, absolutely.
Yes, I understand.
You don't. That's fine.
Understanding
was never part of the syllabus.
Obedience is simpler.
Then learn the important words:
well-behaved.
good family.
good job.
good boy.
Nobody will tell you what good means.
They will keep saying it until you are too old to ask.
Get educated. Get employed.
Take the loan. Buy the house.
Buy the sofa that nobody is allowed to sit on.
Buy curtains to hide the windows.
Buy insurance for the life you are too afraid to live.
Marry someone nice. Not someone you love.
Love is volatile. Nice has documents.
Have children.
Give them names
you spent three months choosing
and a future
you spend thirty years trying not to resent.
Tell them:
Study hard. Be practical.
Don't talk back. Don't make trouble.
Think about your future.
And one afternoon
you will hear them saying it in your voice.
That will be the first time you understand inheritance.
At work, sit properly.
Don't slouch. Don't swear. Don't ask why.
Laugh when the boss laughs.
There is always a boss. There is always laughter.
There is always somebody
standing somewhere above you
who has mistaken altitude for depth.
When they give you more work, say 'thank you".
When they ask if you're happy, say "of course".
The mouth must learn to lie
before the heart learns to stop expecting honesty.
At home, when your mother says she is tired,
say, " get some rest".
Never ask what she is tired of.
When your father stops speaking, leave him alone.
Men are not supposed to have reasons for being sad.
They are supposed to have cholesterol.
When your wife cries, hold her.
When you want to cry, go to the bathroom.
Close the door. Turn on the tap. Cry quietly.
The neighbours must not think the family is having problems.
Brush your teeth. Spit. Look down.
There is your face swimming in the sink.
Do not recognise it.
Cognizance causes complications.
Gargle. Loudly.
Yes, sir.
Yes, ma'am.
Yes, my lord.
Excellent.
Your tongue is clean now.
Your life isn't.
That's alright.
Tomorrow is another day to pretend.
Give it time.
You will become very good at it.
You will learn how to say I'm fine
with your chest full of furniture burning.
You will learn how to be delighted
for the people who got what you wanted.
Eventually, you will learn the most useful word
of all: sacrifice.
It is a beautiful word.
It makes genocides sound holy.
Years will pass.
Your children will grow.
Your parents will shrink.
Your hair will leave like it never knew courtesy.
Your knees will revolt in ways you were taught not to.
You will ignore them. Of course.
You have been ignoring yourself for years.
Then one ordinary Tuesday, nothing will happen.
Nothing.
You will simply be drinking tea
and you will finally let it sink in:
you have spent your entire life
making yourself easier
for other people to live with.
And you will laugh.
Because what else is there?
You will laugh so hard the tea will come out through your nose.
It will hurt.
Good.
Pain is useful
when it arrives
without an appointment.
Look around.
The house. The job. The marriage.
The respectable clothes. The respectable opinions.
The respectable little corpse
you have been carrying inside your chest.
All of it. Yours.
You built it. You paid for it.
You defended it. You called it a life.
And suddenly you will want to do
something completely stupid.
Not heroic. Not meaningful.
Not socially transformative.
Something useless.
Something your obituary
will not know how to describe.
So you break the cup.
Just one.
Your wife comes running.
Your child looks up.
Your neighbour hears.
Someone asks, "What happened?"
And for once,
you don't have an answer prepared.
You look at the pieces. You look at your hands.
You look at the tiny bloodstain where the broken ceramic has opened your foot.
And you realise, you are standing.
Not kneeling.
Not apologising.
Not explaining.
Standing.
Barefoot. Bleeding.
Completely fucking useless
to everybody
who spent their life
teaching you how to behave.
And somewhere inside you,
something small,
something badly raised,
something you have been
beating into silence since childhood,
finally bares its teeth.
Do not call it freedom.
Do not call it courage.
Call it nothing.
For once,
let a thing exist
without turning it into a lesson.
Stand there.
Let them stare. Let them worry.
Let them call you selfish. Let them call you mad.
Let them say, "This isn't like you!"
And finally,
finally,
they will be right.
Because the whole point
of becoming a good citizen
was to become someone
who could be trusted not to make a mess.
So make one.
Break another cup.
Open the window.
Take off the respectable shirt.
Spit the tea onto the floor.
Say the thing you have been swallowing for thirty years.
And when the old voice inside your head
clears its throat and asks
"What will people say?",
look at the blood on your foot.
Look at the broken cup.
Look at the life
you almost managed to live
without ever entering.
Then smile.
And say, "For once, let them."
At conception,
you were almost nothing.
A wet little argument
between two cells
about whether the universe
needed another mouth.
Nobody knew your name.
Nobody knew your face.
Nobody knew
you were going to hate coriander,
fall in love badly, lie about being fine,
and eventually become
the kind of person who says,
"I don't need anything."
You hadn't even arrived
and already you were disappointing the future.
Then they ended you.
Chemical dissipation.
You never saw daylight.
You never got to find out
whether you were beautiful or ugly
or merely unfortunate in the way most of us are.
No one missed you until they had imagined missing you.
That is the strange thing about unborn people:
you can grieve an entire lifetime that never happened.
Your mother did. For a brief while.
Then you died before you were born.
This time there had been a face.
A tiny face floating in a machine
that made everyone very quiet.
Someone had already said your name.
Someone had already bought something small.
Someone had already imagined your first day at school.
Someone had already wondered whether you would be tall.
Then your heart decided it had done enough.
The room went silent.
Your mother went home with an empty body
and a future that had nowhere to live.
Then you were born.
And you died eleven months later.
Eleven months.
Long enough to learn your mother's smell.
Long enough for your father to discover
that a human being can weigh almost nothing
and still break a man in half.
Long enough for everyone to fall in love with a face
that never got the chance to wrinkle.
At seven, you died.
Now there were teeth marks on pencils.
A favourite colour.
A monster under the bed
that was apparently more believable
than the monster called adulthood.
There were drawings. Hundreds of them.
You had drawn the sun too large.
Your mother kept them.
Of course she did.
She couldn't throw away the sun.
At sixteen, you died.
Now you had secrets.
You had discovered that adults
were mostly children with better lies.
You had kissed someone
and spent three weeks pretending it hadn't mattered.
You had one song
you would never admit made you cry.
You had started becoming someone.
That is when death gets especially vulgar.
Because now there is a person to kill.
Your friends grew older. You didn't.
They learned new jokes. New bodies.
New ways to ruin themselves.
Every few years someone would say,
"He would've been thirty by now."
As though thirty were a place you had failed to reach.
At thirty-four, you died.
You had become the man
your sixteen-year-old self
would have crossed the street to avoid.
You had a job.
A bad back.
A password you had forgotten twice.
You had learned that love is not enough
but loneliness is somehow worse.
You had bought things for a future
that kept moving
like a cat you were trying to catch.
You had started saying,
"Maybe next year."
Next year
is one of the most successful
serial killers in human history.
Then you died.
Someone found your unfinished coffee.
Nobody knows why that detail always survives.
Perhaps because a half-drunk cup
is the closest the living ever get to understanding
how abruptly a person can disappear.
At fifty-eight, you died.
You had become the oldest person
in some of your memories.
Your father was gone.
Someone called you "Dad"
without you remembering
when it had started sounding like a middle name.
You had stories you told too often.
Secrets you told nobody.
A name you still couldn't say
without feeling something move behind your ribs.
You had spent decades becoming yourself.
Then you died.
Imagine spending fifty-eight years building a house
only to discover you were the tenant.
At eighty-nine, you died.
By now, everyone said you had lived.
They said it kindly.
They said it as though
you had finally completed something.
But perhaps, there was never such thing as a completed life.
Perhaps every life
is just a collection
of doors you didn't open.
People. Cities. Bodies.
Versions of yourself you abandoned
because they became too expensive to maintain.
You were not the person you could have been.
You were merely the person who remained
after everyone else had died.
Because that is what nobody tells you.
You don't die once.
You die constantly.
The child disappears.
The teenager disappears.
The lover disappears.
The coward disappears.
The idiot who thought he would live forever disappears.
The person who swore he would never become his father disappears.
Then one day you become him.
Then he disappears too.
And we call this growing up.
As though there were something noble
about being slowly murdered by time.
So perhaps the question isn't:
"When does life begin?"
Perhaps it is:
"Which death do we call birth?"
Because you were alive when you were conceived.
Alive when you were wanted. Alive when you were lost.
Alive for eleven months. Alive for seven years.
Alive for sixteen. Alive for thirty-four.
Alive for fifty-eight. Alive for eighty-nine.
And inside each of those lives
was another one waiting to happen.
And another. And another.
Until finally there was nowhere left for you to become.
So you died.
And everyone cried for the person you had been.
Nobody cried for the people you never got to kill.
I have known women
who left behind
climates I still live inside.
Some left behind the smell of food
from kitchens that disappeared
before I learned I was still hungry.
Some left behind sentences
that still arrive before my own thoughts,
speak before I do.
Some left behind a silence so precise
I mistook it for peace.
There were women who taught me
that a person can be built from another person's belief.
A few words. A little faith.
A hand resting on a shoulder
at the exact moment the world felt too heavy.
And suddenly,
a boy begins to imagine himself
as something larger
than the name the world had given him.
There were women who taught me
that losing someone is not always absence.
Sometimes, someone remains everywhere.
In songs. In streets.
In the way you pause before answering.
In habits you never noticed you inherited.
There were women who sat beside me
through ordinary days
and somehow convinced time to move differently.
The kind of miracles you fail to recognise
because miracles are supposed to arrive with thunder.
And there were women who taught me
the lesson I never wanted.
That a person can become a weapon
when another needs a story.
That truth can be stretched
until it fits the hands holding it.
That sometimes,
someone does not reduce you because they hate you.
Sometimes,
they just need you smaller to make themselves larger.
The strange thing is,
I cannot separate the wounds from the gifts.
The same world that gave me my softest memories
also gave me my sharpest scars.
The same hands that taught me how to hold on
also taught me how easily humans let go.
So I do not write them as angels.
Angels do not disappoint.
I do not write them as demons.
Demons do not leave behind
pieces of themselves
you spend years mistaking for your own.
I write them as I have known them.
Incomplete.
Beautiful in places.
Terrifying in others.
Tender when they still knew how.
Capable of building worlds.
Capable of burning them.
And perhaps that is the only honest story I can tell.
Not who they were. Not what they did.
But what they left behind after passing through me.
Every now and then,
my phone reminds me:
deleted items leave residue.
And I keep wondering
about all the things we delete:
the photographs,
the messages,
the names we stop searching for,
what they leave behind,
if anything.
Or whether deletion
is just another word
for moving something
somewhere we can no longer see.
Because the strange thing
about erasing something
is that the space it occupied
doesn't disappear with it.
It stays there,
quietly remembering
what used to be.
And I wonder
about all the things
we've deleted from our lives:
did they ever really leave,
or did we simply become
too good at pretending
we couldn't find them?
What technology couldn't, how could biology ever?
Every now and then
my phone reminds me:
deleted items leave residue.
And I keep wondering
about all the things we delete;
what do they leave behind,
if anything,
or do they ever really leave?
What technology couldn't, how could biology ever?
Drawers are strange places.
Things go there when they are not ready to disappear.
Not because they are valuable, but because
throwing something away requires admitting
you were wrong about why you kept it.
I keep broken things.
A watch that still ticks.
A sketch that still stares.
A paper falcon folded wrong but refusing to forget flight.
Perhaps that is why I keep them.
Because we call unfinished things failures and unfinished people potential.
The drawer is not where broken things wait to be fixed.
It is where abandoned versions of ourselves wait quietly,
hoping someone remembers they existed.
And every night, I open it,
hoping to find something I lost.
Only to discover
the only thing I ever abandoned was myself.
As she takes me in,
she looks me in the eye,
asks if it feels good,
tells me she loves me.
I look instead
at the pillow gathered beneath her nape.
I know she doesn't mean
to know any of it.
So I say nothing
and keep going.
She lets out measured, practised moans,
twitches her body by design,
and I arrive in silence;
evidence lodged in her depths.
She holds me tight for a minute.
Long enough to make the lie believable.
She needs to convince me of her fiction.
That's the thing about selling fiction:
the price of it lies in the conviction.
She gets up,
washes herself,
makes sure every last shred of evidence
is flushed down the commode.
Then she returns to bed
and tells me how good she feels
when I leave parts of myself inside her.
I pretend to believe her.
Because she needs me to.
She needs the tale to be true,
even if only for a moment,
before she collects her dividends in cash.
We go at it again.
And as the soft, rehearsed moans
begin their second performance,
I wonder,
does she know
it doesn't matter to me?
Any of it.
The moans. The love. The fiction.
Does she understand
that when you pay to eat at a restaurant,
you don't burden yourself
with unnecessary questions, like
whether the chef enjoyed making your meal,
whether they savoured every ingredient,
whether the pleasure on their face was genuine,
or whether they were simply bartering what they had
for enough money to take home some lunch?
You paid. They served.
And sometimes,
that's all there is,
no matter what needs to be believed.
I was once promised a stage
large enough to hold thousands,
and then denied it
because a geriatric piece of shit,
living on borrowed breaths
and overdue time,
who had lost a spouse
not to death
but to decay,
because they weren't merely old
but ancient,
decided obedience
was the price of admission;
submission,
the unwritten syllabus.
And no one had the tongue
or the teeth
to tell them:
poetry isn't the bastard child
of the colonial blood
they've spent a lifetime
mistaking for sophistication.
If buttering vanity
were the road to literature,
ghee podi masala dosa
would be the greatest poet alive.
They could say,
this isn't a poem,
but a rancid insult at best.
And I agree.
It is.
But then,
who gives a fuck,
unless they have a comeback?
I could burn them with words
and call the ashes poetry,
but poetry would strangle herself
before letting them inside her —
dead or alive.
Life forgot them decades ago,
and literature never bothered to remember.
I have heard the doctors have diagnosed them with severe constipation
and I find myself wondering how;
considering all that butter, one would think their exit would be well-oiled!
You see I could go do this all day;
in fact I could have stopped three stanzas ago,
and that would have been enough to bury them six feet under,
right in the heart of irrelevance,
and yet I kept going,
because, boy oh boy, this is fun!
But then again,
I have more pieces of shit to flush,
and they don't have many breaths for debt.
And as I stand here,
watching them vanish into decomposition,
I leave this elegy:
the only poetry they will ever be inside of,
dead or alive.
You know how
some people have
tissue papers for lips
and jet sprays for tongues;
their entire existences
measured in
how efficiently they clean up
someone else's rogue rectum.
You set one rectum ablaze,
and suddenly
every ass-wiping lip,
every butt-licking tongue,
every professional purifier of shit
starts searching for your asshole.
And sure,
for a moment,
even I understand the temptation.
Who wouldn't want
the same mouths
that once spat condemnation
to line up
and call your shit sacred?
But the problem with letting
every ass-wiping lip
and butt-licking tongue
near your asshole
is that they never arrive clean.
They carry traces of every asshole they worshipped before yours.
Every shit they once called sacred.
And eventually, your holy asshole isn't holy anymore.
It's just a pile of shit wearing a halo.
It's oddly fascinating,
how quickly worship crawls out
from the same mouths that once spat condemnation.
How versatile human saliva is:
on your face, it's humiliation;
in your ass crack, it's devotion.
What's odder is
how quickly
demons turn divine
when divinity itself
becomes a pain in the ass.
When you eat glass truths,
you shit a kaleidoscope;
your asshole tears apart,
and you call it the price of liberation.
And when one calls it for what it is: shit,
you lose yours,
as if you were your illusion's only victim.
Deluded dumbfucks,
free falling off opioid illusions,
has always been
my preferred choice of entertainment.
Imagine a spider
that houses a hundred thousand spiders within,
each crawling out to every crevice that exists,
every nook and corner your rounded fingertips will miss.
And as each of those spiders crawls back into their mother,
shredding every last morsel of information there exists,
the mother accumulates it all, gurgling her children's spoils,
and throws it up as the one thing humans could never digest:
equity.
No wonder, we call it artificial intelligence.
I grew up watching black widows in encyclopedia pages
and a singular tarantula, alive and well, in a glass jar.
And before you think I'm a psychopath for the second, if not the first, let me clarify:
my father was a scientist working in wildlife conservation, is all.
Long story short,
I've always found spiders fascinating.
Whether they breathed oxygen or internet
was never a discussion up for debate.
So I let the spider out and onto the web,
to do what it does best:
judge.
I know you thought I'd say humans for that,
but hey, I'm talking about who does it right.
The task was fairly simple.
Two poets.
Fifteen poems each.
Strip away the names.
Strip away the applause.
Strip away everything that arrived before the words.
Leave only the work.
Let it defend itself.
You'd be surprised
how swift justice becomes
when nobody gets to introduce themselves first.
The two poets had nothing in common.
One was the epitome of sainthood.
The other was chaos' love child.
One was measured sips of sangria,
reminiscing Byron and Keats.
The other was lusty gulps of whiskey,
debating why humans were the glitch in evolution.
One believed language was sacred
and kept it in temples.
The other believed it was utility
and wore language like footwear.
I know what you're thinking.
You think it would be rather obvious.
That the sangria-sipping, words-worshipping saint of sophistication
would make the classic sales pitch for poetry.
And you wouldn't be wrong in your assumptions.
I mean, how could you possibly?
When literature festivals screamed their faint asthmatic lungs
and declared it.
Artificial intelligence isn't a single spider.
It's more a glass jar full of them.
Pick any.
And if what you get doesn't satiate you,
pick until you run out of numbers.
So I obliged.
Five spiders.
Five different digestive systems.
And yet, the vomits had one commonality.
The whiskey-gulping, uncouth bastard
wearing alliterations for slippers
scored higher every single time.
I know you want to believe that anticlimax was me.
No, it wasn't.
I'm not Icarus.
I won't be the laboratory guinea pig to prove a point.
I'm a poet.
My narcissism won't let me see me judged.
I mean, how dare you?
Thank God for human stupidity.
Else who knows
how many of us
would have dared
call ourselves poets.
Every year,
we iron the flag,
dust the portraits
of those who came before us,
and rehearse gratitude
for the air we inherited.
The nation wakes up
to celebrate
the day it stopped belonging
to someone else.
Funny.
How a house can celebrate
changing landlords
without ever asking
why its windows
were designed like bars.
The empire left.
The emperor stayed.
It changed clothes,
learnt our languages,
memorised our prayers,
and discovered
the easiest way
to rule a people
is to hand them keys
to a door
that was never theirs.
We broke the chains.
Then melted them down
into jewellery.
Wore them around our necks.
Passed them down
like heirlooms.
Called them tradition.
Called them culture.
Called them
the way things have always been.
Freedom is a strange thing.
Everyone carries
a photograph of it.
Few recognise
the face looking back.
The soil remembers
what borders forget.
The child inherits
a surname
before inheriting a sky.
The woman inherits
a body
the world keeps trying
to own.
The hungry inherit
the right to choose their master
before they inherit
the right to choose a meal.
Perhaps independence
was never merely
the absence of a foreign hand.
Perhaps the cruelest lesson
was discovering:
a hand does not need
to come from elsewhere
to become a fist.
And perhaps the deepest cage
is the one
we decorate every year,
hang flowers on,
invite guests into,
and proudly call
home.
Morality is a lukewarm finger bowl
we rinse our stained spines in,
so we can point at the hands
carrying the crumbs
from the world we made them eat.
I was born without a face.
That was your first mistake.
You thought monsters needed one.
The first part of me that grew was not a heart.
It was a finger. Pointing. Away.
I was born the first time
a human being looked at the ruins
and searched for a stranger.
Before me, there was guilt.
After me, there was someone else.
I have existed longer than kingdoms.
Longer than borders.
Longer than gods.
I have worn every face you needed.
A demon when you wanted purity.
A monster when you demanded innocence.
A disease when you needed to feel healthy.
You gave me horns from your fear.
Teeth from your cruelty.
A name, because understanding was harder.
I have eaten gods.
Not because I hate them.
Because every god is a human fear wearing miracles.
I have eaten devils.
Angels.
Every excuse given a body.
They all taste the same when they are starving.
I have eaten monsters.
They were my easiest meal.
You carve them first.
Then wonder why they bite.
I have eaten evil.
You keep changing its name.
I keep tasting the same hunger.
I have tasted stars.
You blamed them too.
Every time the universe reminded you how small you were.
I do not live in darkness.
Darkness is where you bury your own.
I live in: "It was not me."
Look closely.
The fingerprints on my body are not mine.
They belong to you.
You have killed me a thousand times.
Burned me. Buried me.
Built monuments above me.
And every time you celebrate my death,
I return.
Not because I am immortal.
Because you need me.
Without me,
there is only the mirror;
no monster on the outside
to hide what feeds inside.
No devil. No enemy.
No one left to blame.
So keep searching.
Keep pointing.
Keep asking: "Where does the monster live?"
Look at your hand.
The finger.
The mirror.
You've seen me before.
I was never hiding.
You were looking away.
I am the oldest human prayer:
"Let it be someone else."
I have never wished me inside of her.
No. This was never about arrival.
Carnal could never carry the weight of what I want to do with her.
As she walks in
with her robe obliquely guarding
an abundance
refusing containment,
the charcoal trail
descending from her navel
into the tides she hides within,
like scripture before language learned ink
I watch her peel it all off
like the skin of tangerine,
as I work up my palette of acrylics.
I traverse her outlines,
my fingers becoming the brush,
trembling on the narrow bridge
between breath and hunger,
absorbing her and grazing her landscape,
as if
I was trying to taste
what I was forbidden to consume.
I start from the nape
with a dash of crimson,
and touch of ochre;
build a temple in her,
only to discover
I had entered one.
The scent of sweat,
estrogen, progesterone,
soap, shampoo,
and worn out perfume,
folding into acrylic —
this is what the divine smells like.
And as the colours bleed into her sweat,
slowly dripping off of her,
streams through her valleys,
I kneel,
my head bowing down
to the earth beneath her,
breathing in the petrichor
that haunts the air in her grasslands,
I watch me crumple into ashen white.
Have you ever
desired and detested
in the very same moment,
the culmination of lust?
Have you ever
in the middle of fucking
hoped
fucks could be unfucked?
No,
not fornicate,
not make love,
not whatever poets and polite people call it,
just fuck,
blunt rusted knife
fuck.
Has your lust
ever looked back at you
and said,
I don't know you.
She cut her hair short.
Not because she had nothing to hide.
Because she had nothing that needed hiding.
She had already become a wilderness.
The slope behind her head
was a quiet rebellion against symmetry.
A reminder that mountains
were never designed to apologise for their peaks.
A strand fell diagonally across her eyebrows, across her eyes,
like even her own face needed a curtain to survive the violence of being looked at.
The universe tried to cover her. Failed.
The septum ring was not jewellery.
It was a warning.
A small piece of metal declaring:
"I have already made peace with pain.
Do not arrive with your knives and call them wounds."
Her lips were arrows.
Not the kind
that ask permission before finding their target.
The kind that make kingdoms surrender
and leave generations wondering
why they built walls
around something they could never contain.
Her curves were not decoration.
They were geography.
A landscape men had spent centuries trying to map,
forgetting that some terrains exist
only to remind explorers how little they understand the earth.
And beneath all the poetry,
beneath every metaphor a desperate mind invents to possess what it admires,
was wilderness.
Untamed.
Unclaimed.
A place where nature itself had refused to build roads.
Because not everything beautiful was created
to be reached.
The metal shards piercing
through her burnt sienna blossoms
were not ornaments.
They were a flag planted in a territory
that had already declared independence.
The wild ferns she kept hidden
between her thighs
were not a florist's exhibition.
They were proof that even nature
refuses to grow according to someone else's map.
They were a forest refusing to become a bouquet.
They were a declaration carved in flesh:
"This body is not a museum for other people's opinions.
It is a country.
And I am the only government it recognises."
She had looked at the body the world handed her,
with all its evidence of survival,
and instead of asking for permission, she owned it.
She did not decorate herself.
She authored herself.
That was the most dangerous thing about her.
Not the eyes. Not the lips.
Not the silhouette that made rooms forget what they were discussing.
It was the knowledge.
She knew.
She knew forests attract fires.
She knew oceans attract drowning.
She knew anything powerful enough to be desired
would eventually be mistaken for something conquerable.
She was not a muse.
Muses exist to be remembered.
She was something older.
Something before language discovered admiration.
A forest does not care who writes poems about trees.
It does not bloom to be called beautiful.
It simply grows.
And that was the terror of her.
She was never waiting to be seen.
She was the wilderness
that existed long before anyone arrived
with a language small enough to misunderstand it.
Hair does not grow on scars.
An unremarkable biological fact.
Until you realise
even the body knows better
than to cultivate forests over cemeteries.
People say
scars are proof that wounds heal.
No.
Scars are proof that wounds
are exceptionally good at leaving descendants.
They stop bleeding.
And still, they leave behind
a document written into flesh.
The body
has never resurrected a single thing
in its entire evolutionary career.
It does not restore.
It replaces.
It negotiates.
It bargains
with whatever remains.
Scar tissue is not healing.
It is the compensation
paid for something that cannot be returned.
My first scar wasn't earned.
It was issued.
My umbilical cord wasn't cut.
It was evicted.
The first home I ever knew
was the first place I was removed from.
Birth certificates are merely
official records of the original exile.
As for scars,
hair does not return there,
sweat does not return there,
the original architecture does not return.
How strangely respectful the body is.
It refuses to build apartments
over demolished homes.
It knows better than humans do.
Some ruins are not meant to be renovated.
They are meant to remain as evidence.
Touch a scar. It feels different.
Because it is.
You are not touching repaired skin.
You are touching the closest thing
the living possess to a fossil.
A place where extinction arrived,
did its work, and left behind a witness.
A grave that learned how to breathe.
Every nation has scars.
It calls them borders.
Every religion has scars.
It calls them scripture.
Every family has scars.
It calls them tradition.
Humanity has always possessed a remarkable talent:
turning injuries into identities.
History is what happens
when a scar learns how to reproduce.
Wars give birth to flags.
Massacres give birth to anthems.
Graves give birth to holidays.
The dead have always been
our most successful architects.
We build civilizations
over their absence
and call the construction progress.
The body, however, is less dishonest.
It never claims the original skin returned.
It never confuses a replacement with a resurrection.
It simply leaves the mark and continues.
Not healed. Not restored.
Just carrying the remains of what it could not save.
Perhaps that is why
hair never grows on scars.
Even biology understands
what humans spend centuries trying to escape.
Some places are not wounds anymore.
They are graveyards.
Some memories are not memories anymore.
They are heritage.
Some histories are not histories anymore.
They are weapons that learned
to call themselves culture.
Because a scar
is not the body saying: "I survived."
That is the story humans tell themselves
because it sounds better.
A scar is the body saying:
"Something happened here that was stronger than my ability to become what I was before."
And perhaps that is why we hate scars.
Not because they are ugly.
Because they are honest.
They do not forgive. They do not forget.
They do not rewrite the crime after the criminal has become a historian.
They simply remain.
The last witness who cannot be bribed.
And maybe,
after millions of years of evolution,
the body finally understood what humanity never did:
some things should not grow back.
Not because they cannot.
Because something already died there.
And the scar is the only thing left behind
that never learned how to lie.
