Scavenger Hunt

“Voices like him don’t deserve to be heard,” she said,

her larynx quivering, her epiglottis choking on blank air, 

and yet somehow,

her voice, firmly unwavered, domineering.

Paradox is generous that way;

it lets censorship masquerade as courage

as long as it borrows the right vocabulary.

You’d think that sounds fascist

for someone who spells liberal

in all capital letters across their chest,

but then, 

what’s the point of a revolution

if it can’t be rented out?

It’s a capitalist world,

and even outrage needs commerce.

Bile doesn’t gurgle well

on an empty stomach.

So here she was,

not alone, never alone, 

her fingers nibbling for vengeance

on a man she had already put on trial

months ago.

Because “guilty or not”

is an administrative inconvenience

when the verdict

has already found its audience.

And audiences, 

they don’t come for truth.

They come for theatre.

He had questions.

That was his first mistake.

The second

was assuming questions

require answers.

He had a spine.

That was unforgivable.

The rest

was just process.

Shame doesn’t need logic.

It doesn’t wait for reason,

doesn’t queue up behind grammar

or knock on the door of math.

Shame is parasitic.

It enters quietly;

a passing whisper,

a casual insinuation, 

and by the time you locate its origin,

it has already rewritten your hypothalamus.

You are still you —

technically.

Skin. Bone.

A functioning silhouette.

But gather enough whispers

and you begin to resemble

a graveyard

that forgot to die properly.

And what better sight for eyes

that have grown contempt for eyelashes?

Dress it up.

Black mascara.

Call it reclamation.

Call it resistance.

Call it whatever helps you

sleep through the echo.

And if anyone dares question

the appetite, 

you don’t answer.

You multiply.

Because vultures don’t hunt alone.

They gather.

They circle.

They inherit altitude

and call it perspective.

Stand still long enough

and they will mistake

your refusal

for surrender.

Peck.

Probe.

Persist.

Not out of hunger, 

but certainty.

Certainty is the sharpest beak.

Every once in a while, though,

a man refuses to rot on cue.

Ashen,

but not stained.

Silent,

but not submissive.

A spine

that does not recognise

the authority of noise.

The man on trial

was one of them.

Not trial by fire.

Not trial by fact.

Not even trial by conflict.

Trial by humiliation.

Because humiliation scales.

It travels faster than evidence.

And it leaves no fingerprints

on the hands that distribute it.

She gathered her voices;

not sisters, not allies, 

voices.

Because plurality

is the easiest way

to counterfeit truth.

Repeat a wound often enough,

and it stops needing a body.

Repeat an accusation often enough,

and it starts resembling memory.

They moved:

door to door,

tongue to tongue;

telling stories

of his disrespect,

his defiance,

his disobedience.

Misogyny, they named it.

Because words,

once emptied of definition,

and hollowed of meaning, 

become containers.

And containers, 

you can fill with anything.

Disgust.

Hatred.

Rage.

All of it fits.

And once it fits, 

it convicts.

In a land allergic to evidence,

volume becomes virtue.

The loudest wail

earns the cleanest halo.

And halos, 

like everything else, 

are easier to manufacture

than to deserve.

Death, after all,

is food for vultures.

But shame, 

shame is cultivation.

You don’t kill the body.

You salt the soil.

Make sure nothing grows again;

not doubt,

not dissent,

and most importantly, 

never the audacity

to ask “why.”

A Beginner's Guide To Gardening

There stands an orchard

somewhere amidst nowhere,

that believes in fairness.

Not the old kind;

no blindfolds, no scales,

nor the inconvenience of being consistent.

No.

This one has evolved.

It remembers selectively.

It feels strategically.

It has gardeners:

trained, articulate,

excellent at explaining weather

to people who have never been wet.

Fruits don’t fall here.

Let’s not insult intelligence.

They are assigned gravity.

A ripe one?

Heavier;

if its lineage reads well on paper.

A rotten one?

Lighter;

if its fall makes things awkward.

Balance, they say,

isn’t about weight.

It is about relevance, 

and relevance, 

let’s not pretend, 

is just a leaky gland with a better dictionary.

There came a storm once,

upon this orchard.

Not cinematic.

Quiet. Contagious.

The inherited kind.

Branches snapped.

Roots drowned.

Fruits fell like overdue honesty.

And the orchard, 

efficient as ever, 

did what it always does

when reality becomes unavoidable.

It agreed.

“Yes. This is real.

Yes. This matters.

Yes. We should have noticed sooner.”

Beautiful.

Timely.

Functionally useless.

And then, because irony has impeccable timing, 

a single fruit fell

on a clean afternoon.

No wind.

No warning.

No convenient backstory.

Just gravity;

temporarily unemployed.

It hit.

And where it touched, 

it didn’t bruise.

It engraved.

The tree darkened.

The air shifted.

Even silence stopped pretending it wasn't biased.

“What happened?”

you asked.

And the fruit, 

because lies love a well-lit stage, 

said:

“I chose to fall.”

Now, here's where things get uncomfortable.

Storms don’t choose.

People do.

And people

love choice

when it protects them

and context

when it excuses them.

You paused.

Not out of confusion.

Out of recognition.

Because this, 

this wasn’t rain.

It wouldn’t repeat.

Wouldn’t organise itself

into a pattern you could study

without consequence.

This was intent

wearing tragedy like a chameleon skin.

And that, 

doesn’t sit well in frameworks.

So you adjusted.

Not enough to deny the mark,

that would be indecent.

Just enough

to dilute consequence

into conversation.

You called it anomaly.

You called it nuance.

You called it complex.

You called it everything

except what it was.

Because naming it

means forfeiting control

over what comes next.

And control, 

is the only thing

your fairness has ever been fair about.

The tree stood there.

Alive, 

on a technicality.

Trusted, 

not that it mattered.

Trust is soft.

Doesn’t photograph well.

So you moved on.

And the fruit?

Gone.

Returned to the soil

like accountability always does

when the ecosystem is curated.

Seasons passed.

Storms came.

Storms went.

And you;

you got better

at recognising rain.

Stories for skeletons.

Language for flesh.

Loud microphones and anticipatory applauses for skin.

But something else grew alongside.

Quietly.

Efficiently.

Predictably.

A math.

Not of storms, 

but of choices

learning how to cosplay as them.

A sapling, 

young enough to still believe

questions aren’t punished, 

asked:

“If a storm breaks a branch,

and a fruit chooses

to break one the same way, 

why do we fix them differently?”

You didn’t answer.

Of course you didn’t.

Because answering

requires admitting

the one thing

your entire orchard is allergic to:

That fire, 

whether invited by sky

or delivered by hand, 

does not check intent

before it burns.

That the tree

doesn’t heal differently.

Only the story does.

And stories, 

you’ve industrialised those.

So you kept voting on gravity.

This fall: natural.

That fall: negotiable.

This one: tragic.

That one: circumstantial.

Until the sky filled up.

Not with storms.

With fruits.

Waiting.

Watching.

Learning

how to fall

in ways

you’d forgive.

And here’s the part

you’ll hate;

not because it’s wrong,

but because it’s familiar:

You built this orchard.

Not alone, 

relax.

But you maintain it.

Every hesitation.

Every softening.

Every better story

chosen over a harder truth.

You are there.

In the soil.

In the scale.

In the edits

you pretend are ethics.

One day,

there will be no storms left

to blame.

No history

to outsource guilt to.

No patterns

to hide behind.

Just a sky

full of things

choosing

exactly

how they fall.

And you, 

with all your nuance,

your care,

your elegantly worded restraint, 

will still not have learned

the only law

you broke first:

A fall

doesn’t become lighter

because you agreed

to understand it.

Where The Kamancheh Coughs Brick & Bone

The ceiling

resigned first.

No notice.

No apology.

Just a quiet collapse

of everything that once pretended

to be above us.

Plaster doesn’t fall;

it reveals.

Beams become bones.

Wires become veins.

And suddenly the building

is honest about what it was made of.

In the middle of that honesty,

a man sits

with a kamancheh

balanced like a spine

that refused to snap.

A bowl of wood

holding centuries

in its hollow chest,

a single spike

touching the ground

like it’s asking:

is there still something here

worth standing for?

He draws the bow,

and the sound that comes out

isn’t music.

It’s memory

with nowhere left to live

except vibration

They will call this resilience.

They always do.

Because we need pretty words

for ugly compulsions.

Survival isn’t noble.

It’s muscle memory

refusing to retire.

It’s the body saying,

“I don’t care what fell, 

I have to find a way to stay.”

And somewhere,

far from the dust

that hasn’t chosen a side yet,

someone will say:

“You don't fight, 

if the fight isn’t fair. 

You leave.”

Wisdom.

Utterly untouched by consequence.

Inherited like surnames and diabetes.

Passed down carefully, 

so nobody has to earn it

or survive it.

But fights, 

real ones, 

look at fairness, 

the way grown-ups look at unicorns.

Fairness is what historians

apply later

like antiseptic

on a wound

they never had to bleed through.

If it were fair,

it wouldn’t be a fight.

It would be a discussion

with upright chairs,

some tea and snacks,

and the illusion

that anyone is listening.

“Run, if need be” they say.

“That’s intelligence.”

Except it isn't.

That’s comfort

pretending it has a spine.

That’s courage

sprinkled as per taste. 

Because the truth is, 

some fights

follow you.

Into your lungs.

Into your language.

Into the way your hands

remember how to hold things

even when everything else

has forgotten how to stand.

You can leave a place.

You cannot leave

what the place

did to you.

So what is he doing here?

Not fighting the faith

that taught someone to pull the trigger.

Not resisting the idea

that decided he was collateral

before he was human.

He is refusing

to let silence

win clean.

Because destruction

isn’t satisfied

with breaking walls.

It wants the echo too.

It wants the memory

to go quiet.

Watch closely.

The kamancheh

doesn’t sing.

It mourns

in a language

older than the building,

older than the war,

older than the idea

that anything we build

will last.

Each note

is a witness statement.

Each vibration

a refusal

to let rubble

rewrite the story

as absence.

Art doesn’t fix.

Art doesn't heal. 

Art, sure as hell, 

doesn't save the world.

Art testifies.

Like the last words of the dying.

And we, 

we watch all of it

from safe distances.

Call it hope.

Call it strength.

Call it whatever

helps us go about our days

without guilt sticking

to our thumbs.

We will admire him

for staying.

We would have admired him

just as much

for leaving.

Because admiration

costs nothing

when you are not the one

deciding.

And here’s the part

nobody wants to admit:

if you put a weapon in his hand

instead of a bow,

you would understand him faster.

Violence is fluent.

Grief

needs translation.

You can run from the war, 

but you can't outrun the war.

Stay, 

and you negotiate with ruin.

Leave, 

and you negotiate with memory.

Either way,

something hunts you

without needing to run.

So don’t call him brave.

Don’t call him foolish.

He is neither a lesson

nor a metaphor.

He is a man

sitting inside the aftermath

of decisions

he didn’t make,

playing a kamancheh

not because it saves him,

not because it matters,

not because it changes anything, 

but because

when everything else

has already collapsed,

evidence

is the only thing left

that still knows

how to sound like grief.

I Love Me Some Poetry

I love it 

when people 

struggling to string sentences together

and make sense, 

let alone make feel, 

think of themselves

as poets.

I love how they think poetry is morse code.

I love it

how poetry

has descended

from stinking sweat and gushing blood

to sophisticated clothing and soft accents

and the ones who dragged it down

now call it ascension.

I love how they think poetry is the struggle of the privileged.

I love it

how men

have traversed 

from being rebels

to being romantic rejects, 

from fighting kingdoms and regimes

to battling unattended boners, 

and called it poetry

and patted each other's backs

in the name of poetry. 

I love how men have reduced poetry to porn.

I love it 

how women

while being on the right side

of caste, of creed, of culture

and most importantly

oblivious of tax brackets

have gone from upliftment of the backward

to liberation of the uplifted and the entitled

and called it poetry

because what are you going to do about it? 

Questioning poetry is anti-liberal

and questioning women, misogyny.

I love how women have mutated poetry to pretense.

What I love the most though, 

is how offended you feel by this, 

how there's this deep urge inside of you

building up and trying it's best to take control of your etiquetted mannerisms

so you can for the love of narcissism

take a wild, wild swing at me, 

how every inch of skin on you

wants to scream at me

till I submit 

to your paper propagandas

and recycled revolutions

What I love the most is, how this isn't even poetry, and it still makes more sense and feel, than the puke you peddle in the name of poetry.

I know what you're thinking. 

How can you generalise and summarise genders into boxes? 

Well, sirs and madams, the very same way, you have trivialised and randomized everything that's not agreed to your conveniences and your pedagogies, into a singular blackhole.

You thought your poetry was the ointment, 

and I think, it is about time, you used some.

I would love me some poetry some more, wouldn't you?

I would have encouraged you to hate me, 

but then that's too potent a feeling,

and considering, all you ever gather is lukewarm smirks and kinder claps, 

my gut says, it's too expensive, for your privilege and your poetry.

You've Got Places To Be

You know what I love about cities?

You.

Yeah, you.

Don’t look behind.

Nobody there is doing better.

You wake up.

Pick up your phone.

Not even a thought in between.

You stare straight

into the soul of the screen

mostly because muscle memory

also because that's the only place

souls dwell these days. 

You look at your phone

to check if you still exist

in other people’s lives.

No notifications?

You feel you've been downsized;

in thoughts, prayers, and relevance.

You shrink a little.

And then you get ready.

Dress up.

Step out.

And for what? 

Work? 

No. That'd be too simple.

You head out

to perform stability.

You walk fast.

Everyone does.

It’s not urgency.

It’s camouflage.

Because if you slow down,

even for a second,

it might look like you have nowhere to be.

And in a city,

having nowhere to be

is worse than having nothing to be.

In a city, 

you've got places to be.

So you keep moving.

Like your life has directions.

Like there’s a destination

that isn’t just… another version of this.

Conversations are efficient.

“How are you?”

“Good.”

We’ve reduced human emotion

to a loading bar that never completes.

Because the real answer —

“I don’t know what I’m doing, I’m tired in a way sleep can’t fix, and I think I built a life I don’t want to be in” —

is not a conversation.

It’s a liability.

So you learn the script.

“I’m good.”

You say it enough times,

it becomes less of a lie

and more of a habit.

Which is worse.

And relationships?

We’ve optimized those too.

You don’t fall in love.

Falling requires faith in gravity

and gravity is too slow.

You enter a negotiation instead.

A mutually beneficial association, 

a symbiotic ecosystem, 

until a sudden realisation dawns upon, 

"How do you tell symbiotes from parasites?"

You grow romance 

like entrepreneurs scale business.

Timing.

Availability.

Terms and conditions.

“I need space.”

Take it.

There’s plenty.

That’s the problem.

You’re not competing for love.

You’re competing for attention

in a room where everyone is also competing.

It’s not rejection.

It’s just…

you weren’t the best distraction at that moment.

Sit with that.

No actually, 

don’t.

That’s how people spiral.

So you move on.

New chat.

New person.

Same pattern.

Different name.

Same conversation.

Same ending.

And you call this experience.

Growth.

Clarity.

It’s not.

It’s repetition

with a foreign accent.

And then there’s ambition.

You’re building something.

Of course you are.

Everyone here is building something.

A company. 

A career.

A brand.

A version of yourself

that sounds convincing

when you say it out loud.

Nobody asks

“Can I live with this?”

Because that’s not the goal.

The goal is, 

“Can I keep going?”

And you can.

That’s the tragedy.

You can keep going

in a life that doesn’t fit

for a very long time.

Years.

Decades.

Entire identities.

Until one day,

you get everything you worked for.

The job.

The money.

The version of you

that once felt impossible.

And it’s quiet.

Not peaceful.

Not satisfying.

Just…

quiet.

And in that quiet,

for the first time,

nothing is chasing you.

No deadlines.

No urgency.

No next thing.

Just you.

And your brain finally asks, 

“Was this the plan, 

or just what happened

while you were too busy to question it?”

That’s the moment.

That’s the one moment

the city cannot protect you from.

And you will try.

Oh, you will try.

You’ll pick up your phone.

Open something.

Scroll.

Refresh.

But it won’t hit the same.

Because once you see it, 

you don’t unsee it.

That your entire life

has been a series of well-timed distractions

keeping you from a question

you were always supposed to answer.

Not because you couldn’t answer it, 

but because you already knew you wouldn’t like the answer.

And now it’s here.

No notifications.

No noise.

No escape routes.

Just one simple, stupid, terrifying question:

“If none of this was necessary, 

then what was?”

Anyway.

Alarm’s set for tomorrow?

Good.

Let’s not fix anything.

You’ve got places to be.

Ladybug

I might not make it, ladybug.

Wars eventually end

with piles of rotten flesh

on either side;

long dead

before oxygen

finds its way back.

And whoever ends up

with the most dead

loses the battle,

so the living

can stitch myths

of the ones

who couldn’t be killed.

All wars run the same course.

More or less.

Except

the ones you wage within.

Those wars

you keep telling yourself

are against the whims of the world.

You never really lose

a war with the world, do you

the world doesn’t bother

with a singular grain of sand

crashing into it.

To believe

you could scar its latitudes

is a dangerous delusion.

One I succumbed to early.

And once you fall

off that height,

spine broken, tendons bruised, 

you don’t quite learn

to walk straight again.

But then, 

the difference between delusion

and obsession

is only depth:

how far into your bloodstream

the daydream runs,

whether there’s still

something left

to cure.

I have always been persistent;

more often

with what should’ve been forgotten.

If only I had grown enough skin

to not feel the needle.

If only I had enough eyelids

to shut out my pupils.

You called it attention to detail, ladybug.

I think

the secret to life

is learning

to be inattentive.

I might not make it, ladybug.

It’s easy to give up on a fight

when you can’t walk straight.

But then again, 

when had I ever liked anything

that didn’t threaten

to take everything away?

The first time I charged

like a raging bull,

you thought

maybe this time

would be different.

I believed it.

When you grow up in warzones,

you learn to survive wars.

Survive long enough;

you start believing

you can win them.

I had more scars than wrinkles.

And those were just the ones

on the skin.

I had seen wars for decades —

lived them,

survived them,

outlived them.

It felt reasonable

to assume

this time too

I would make it;

scarred,

but unscathed.

The truth about those

who learn to live through wars is, 

they know

one day,

a war will end them.

There’s something almost sadistic in it:

the way they half-wish for it,

just to outlive extinction

one more time.

I fell again.

This time, harder.

Three broken ribs.

A punctured spleen.

You hoped

the gods would show mercy.

But my disbelief

was far too audacious

for forgiveness.

This time,

I healed less.

What do you heal into

when only half your body

remembers how to breathe?

I wasn’t just deluded.

I was obsessed

to the point of obsolescence.

Everything you once loved about me,

you now wish

I had, only much lesser.

I know.

You think, maybe then, 

it could all be different.

And I only ever wished, ladybug,

that one morning

we’d wake into sunlight

and call this

an elaborate nightmare.

But I’ve been out of wishes

for a long time.

You’d scold me first,

cry after,

then hold me, 

all of me, 

so tightly

I’d forget

how fragile you were.

You’d look me in the eye

and say

the most clichéd thing

known to the dying:

“It’s going to be fine.”

And the conviction

in your pupils

almost made me believe it.

Almost.

“Why do you want to leave early?”

you asked.

“Do you not like living with me?”

I could never tell you the truth:

that I was on a death wish

long before you came along.

And for a brief while,

I believed

you could save me.

I really did.

But death wishes collect.

Always.

No almosts.

No ifs.

No buts.

The truth about those

who learn to live through wars is, 

they know

one day,

a war will end them.

And sometimes,

they want it to.

Except this time, 

there is no wanting left.

No hope.

No windows.

You’ll scold me first,

hold me after.

You’ll call me a coward.

You always knew

how much I despised the becoming.

You’ll hope

I come back

to prove you wrong.

Like all those times.

But ladybug, 

look around.

The war is over.

There is no victory.

No defeat.

Just a body

that stopped fighting

before it stopped breathing.

And from here on, 

it will only ever 

be remembered

for as long as it takes 

to spell out a name.

Liar's Dice

Have you never lied

to friend, family,

or an absolute stranger?

Not the lies that bleed

like knives through the chest,

but the truths you borrowed

off lives you’ve spent

to be where you stand, 

for the theatre

of your truth-telling.

Have you never lied

to friend, family,

or an absolute stranger?

Not the lies that split atoms in two,

smudging ashen crimson

on the concrete canvases

of proud cityscapes,

but the truths you buried

in your bones

until your brain caved in, 

for the illusion

of greater good.

Have you never lied

for the love of your faith,

for the sake of your creed,

for the truths you told yourself

needed crafting with care?

Have you never lied

when questions were left at your door;

questions that threaten

to crumble the spines

of your acquired taste?

Have you never lied

when lives were put to trial;

lives that never agreed

to your inheritances,

and yet you found yourself

on the jury?

Have you never lied;

the thin, flimsy ones,

the fat, morbidly obese ones, 

as you looked yourself in the mirror

and muttered in shallow breaths:

"This is my story,

and I’ll tell it

however I deem fit."

The ghosts of yesterday

haunt today’s hangmen.

The past returns

not for memory;

but for flesh.

Grammar knew this

before we did:

the past participle

always comes back

to finish the sentence.

Power, like planets,

orbits in ellipses.

Today’s revolutions

are tomorrow’s kingdoms.

Ellipses do not close.

They continue.

And so do you. 

No matter how much you lie,

none of it will ever be enough.

Because beyond us simpletons, 

lies an entire universe

unbothered

by what we call truth

and what we disguise as lies.

But that won’t stop you,

will it?

Truth is a gamble, 

and you must roll the dice.

Sapiens

When a dog dies,

it just dies.

Horizontal,

returned to the ground,

until it loosens

into the grammar of soil;

as if liberation

was always fluid.

Other dogs continue.

A life in dog years

does not permit philosophy.

When a Sapiens dies,

it is never about death.

Not even about the dead.

I could have said

man, woman, people, 

but identity

is a stove left on;

look away long enough,

and it learns your name

by burning it.

Such are the times of Sapiens.

Sapiens:

an honourable skin to wear.

What other species

pets what it perfects killing?

Feeds it, names it,

breeds obedience into survival;

because survival,

once negotiated,

begins to look like love.

When a Sapiens dies,

it refuses to be just death.

Dying is too small

for a creature

that brewed religion

out of its own reflection,

and drank

until it believed

it could not spill.

It is not about the dead;

that would require letting go.

So the Sapiens keeps them.

Opens them.

Defines them.

Thinks through them, 

until philosophy

rearranges the corpse

into something

the living

can survive.

The Sapiens call it life;

wishing the living were dead

in the quiet mildew

of unventilated rooms.

The Sapiens call it mourning;

wishing the dead were alive

in the loud theatre

of refrigerated grief.

You would think

it values death

more than life;

a species

that can make meat

of anything,

and marinate itself

to taste.

Or that it cares

for the living and the dead

equally;

nothing,

until it can be sold:

in parts,

or whole.

But what do you know

of Sapiens.

What do you know

of honour.

Sapiens

is everything

that refuses to end

when it should.

You wish, 

instead of letting the dead stay dead, 

you could exhume them,

fingernails full of soil,

half-chewed silence in your mouth,

just to prove

you can still make

meaning

bleed.

Constipation

I come from

two contrasting generations of sperm cells;

a grandfather

whose poetry and politics

were equally loud and boisterous,

and a father

who chose subtlety

when it came to both words and wings:

so subtle

he could flip sides

without twitching eyebrows.

I was twelve

when I realised

the reason my grandfather

doesn’t speak to his brothers

is that they chose

a different flavour of communism.

Same tree.

Different branches.

And yet

that was enough

to make the roots of blood tremble.

I was twelve

when I realised

politics and petrol

should never be left out in the open;

give them oxygen

and they will burn down

entire civilisations.

Two decades later,

it is compulsory

to be political.

And being it

is not enough.

You must declare it.

Perform it.

Repeat it

until your politics

becomes tinnitus

in the ears of everyone around you.

Question one side

and you are accused

of being the other, 

with assumptions

too starved

to scrape past elementary algebra.

Call yourself apolitical

and they look at you

as if they are civilisation

and you are the jungle.

You see,

I have a persistent problem.

On one side,

a faith 

that diagnoses change for cancer, 

that worships the past

in the present

as the only future.

On the other,

a faith 

that calls change the singular truth, 

even when it abandons logic,

even when they can't quite add it up.

And I keep wondering, 

why can sanity not live

on the fringes,

in the middle,

or beyond them?

Why must thought

always pick a uniform?

Why must disagreement

always declare allegiance?

In a world

that cannot stop

emptying itself

loudly, publicly, endlessly,

and every street

stinks of ideological diarrhoea,

I refuse to flow.

I choose

to be constipation.

I Don't Wish To Paint Like You

I’ve never really been a painter.

You see, in my head

the word "painter" sprawls

in acrylic shades of a colouring palette.

And I could never quite find inspiration in colours.

It’s hard to, 

in a colourblind world

that sees skins

as pastel shades.

I paint what I see, 

how I see, 

in tinges and hues

of monochrome.

The colourblind call it

black and white.

Binary

is a convenient illusion

for the mathematically challenged.

I, though, call it

dwelling in greys, 

and the occasional burnt sienna.

I don’t sketch outlines.

I don’t reach for erasers.

I scribble.

I splatter. 

Blank page. 

Blank canvas. 

Bending lines. 

Pushing boundaries. 

A lot like 

the becoming of life;

no rough work,

no undo button,

no emergency exits.

But, 

what about 

getting it right

you ask. 

Right

isn’t the absence of wrong.

It is arriving

in spite of it.

In a world

that wants canvases

to look like photographs,

and photographs

to look like augmented realities, 

I am only

scribbling flawed faiths

and idiosyncratic incongruities

with absolute disrespect

for grammar.

How dare I call myself a painter?

When all I’ve done

is refuse

your colours, 

and still

paint.

The Syntax Of Survival

Life isn’t the story

you tell

after brushing lips with death.

That is spectacle.

A bullet.

A blade.

A bus. 

A bulldozer. 

A moment

loud enough

to be remembered.

Sudden.

Overwhelming.

Singular.

And singulars

are easy.

They arrive complete.

They leave behind

a clean sentence.

Life

is not written

in singular.

It stutters.

It repeats.

It refuses

completion.

Life is plural.

Not just

not dying once;

but surviving

again

and again

and again.

It is

not breaking the nib

when the hand trembles.

Not tearing the page

when the ink

thickens

into something

that feels like blood.

Because unlike death, 

surviving life

is not an event.

It has no witnesses.

No applause.

No language

that stays.

It is the discipline

of continuation.

And continuation

is not heroic.

It is mechanical.

A body

choosing

not to stop

without knowing why.

You are not alive

because you chose to be.

You are alive

because you have not

stopped.

And that's as hopeful

as hope ever gets. 

Hope

is not light.

Hope

is repetition.

And repetition

does not ask

if it means anything.

It continues.

So do you.

The Grammar Of Sinking

Grief ushers in

like rivers at the break of monsoon;

no warnings,

no lifeboats.

No rain checks either.

It comes all at once.

Before you blink

it has you in a chokehold.

You try to put it to words.

But grief is not the loss of words;

it is the loss

of the meaning of them.

Your throat knots.

Your tongue dries.

You drink water.

It feels no different.

You wish you could erupt

into laments,

into screams,

into torrential downpours.

But the forecast says

overcast skies.

No chance of rain.

So you perspire instead.

Earlobes warm.

Insides parched.

A season

changing inside the body.

The kind that keeps you awake

through the night,

bedsheets damp,

as if the skin erupted

because the eyes could not.

Grief has definitions.

Definitions have boundaries.

And what is bound

eventually runs out

of breadth

and breath.

But what do you call it

when miserable indifference

becomes your primordial instinct?

Not feeling.

Instinct.

Feeling belongs to language.

Instinct belongs to survival.

What do you call it

when sleep each night

feels like sinking

another inch

into an unfathomable abyss,

and morning feels like swimming

towards a shore

in the middle of an ocean

that refuses to move closer?

Every night

the inches add up.

Every morning

you are exactly where you began:

dead centre

of a bottomless sea.

There is rage.

There is pity.

There is loathing.

There is pathos.

And beyond all of it,

hope.

But hope is light.

And when you have lived

with the lights out

for days

and weeks

and months,

sunlight

feels like assault.

Hope is different

for the floating

and the sinking.

Not drowning.

Sinking.

Drowning is sudden.

Sinking

is patient.

Measured.

As if time itself

has decided

to take its time with you.

For the sinking ones,

drowning

is hope.

It refuses

the slow-burning road

to a conclusion.

Befitting or not

is irrelevant.

Some semicolons

are kinder

as full stops.

You wish you could act on it.

The terrain is familiar.

You have been here before.

You have tried before.

But this time

you cannot gather yourself

even for that.

Even when the water

is already at your ears.

Even when letting go

might be the only mercy.

If mercy exists.

So you resist sleep,

because every good night

is another inch deeper

into the abyss.

And yet when sleep arrives

you hope

there will be

no more mornings.

But time

is terribly patient.

And the one thing killing you

is the only thing

keeping you alive.

Your cancer

is your cure. 

Trial By Blood, Verdict By Water

I am the judge.

Robes stiffened with ritual righteousness. 

Gavel molten, breathing fire, screaming justice.

Conscience sharper than sharpened glass.

The floor trembles. Walls sweat blood and pus. 

Air coils like serpents whispering unholy.

Dust crawls away. Shadows tremble. I do not sit. I descend.

Judgement is inheritance.

By blood. By caste. By closeness to the gods.

My forefathers ruled here. Their verdicts were holy, sanctified in their blue blood. Their hands carved eternity.

On my chair. On the throne of a judge.

Verdicts passed where they must not.

What an absolute abomination.

A filthy stain. A defilement.

The gods recoiled. History shivered.

I inhale that sin. So I can exhale righteousness.

It is my duty to purify. To exorcise. To remake holiness.

And as I unleash Gangajal on the floors of a room sheathed in justice, it hisses like acid from heaven. 

Ink writhes, climbs walls, twists into screaming faces.

Rats kneel. Clerks vomit holy obedience. Paper bleeds. Shadows dance in homage to the ancestors.

Even democracy is a hallucination. 

Dalits breathing Brahmin air? Blasphemy. Horror.

The gods shudder. Faith trembles. History bends under terror.

I bite the pen. I lick the chair. I taste sin. I exhale holiness.

Walls convulse. Ceiling bleeds. Floor vomits dust.

The Dalit flickers; mocking, ephemeral, untouchable.

Judgment is not in his chromosomes.

He can only be judged. Only condemned. Only measured against eternal, inherited law.

I summon the chamber alive.

Ink twists into serpents. Rats scream prayers. Clerks twist, vomit, collapse into worship.

Air coils. Steam rises. Shadows writhe in grotesque obedience.

Gavel melts into molten judgment. Tea turns to bitter ash. Obedience is absolute. Judgment bends only to me.

I rotate the pen thrice. I pour gangajal. I sip molten tea. I bite the pen.

I taste impurity. I exhale holiness.

Walls sweat blood and pus. Floor trembles. Ceiling convulses.

All bends. All submits. All is mine.

I am the judge.

I am divine.

I am eternal.

I am the eye of law.

I am holiness incarnate.

And yet…

The Dalit exists.

Invisible. Untouchable. Defiant.

Like sins do.

Forever beneath me.

Never presiding. Never judging. Only judged. Only condemned.

Cockroaches in my kitchen corners have more power.

I pour more gangajal.

Ink writhes like vipers. Chairs twist and split. Rats kneel, bleed, sing holy songs.

Clerks vomit, choke, weep in obedience. Shadows fold into themselves.

Walls bend. Floor cracks. Ceiling screams.

All bends. All submits. All is mine.

I sip tea. I bite the pen. I taste sin. I exhale holiness.

Obedience is absolute. Judgment bends only to me.

I am the judge. I am divine. I am eternity.

The Dalit flickers.

He is untouchable. Defiant. Haunted.

But he will never sit.

He will never judge.

He can only ever be judged.

He can only ever be condemned.

Like cockroaches crawling my kitchen corners.

I pour gangajal on the air.

On shadows. On ink. On trembling clerks.

On the ghosts of Dalits swallowed by my forefathers’ holiness.

All bends. All submits. All is mine.

I am the judge.

I am divine.

I am eternal.

I am law.

I am holiness incarnate.

I am God’s own hand, His wrath, His eye, His voice.

The only. The truly.

The molten gavel drips Gangajal onto the floor where corpses of forgotten Dalits curl into prayer, and even the shadows writhe, seared with the eternal scars of my justice.

Scar Tissue

There’s hope.

Ointment.

Scissors.

Knives.

For scar tissue

ECGs and X-rays can detect,

opposable thumbs can reach.

For the unreachable,

the undetected,

poetry is blister.

No cure.

Just ruins recollecting rummage.

If I could, I would have saved

all that paper, all those ink blots

pretending to be meaning.

If I could, I would have been eco-friendly.

Paper and poetry are futile brilliance to be paid for in lifetimes.

Kingdom Of Grains & Bones

Is it the king’s foot soldiers

or the farmers cooked in sweltering heat

that let the kingdom breathe?

When the crown inhales,

is it smoke from rifles

or steam rising from wounded earth at dawn?

Answer carefully.

Every empire has mistaken

the sound of marching

for the sound of survival.

Is violence fodder for civilisation,

or is fodder what civilisation fattens

so it may auction violence

beneath ceilings lacquered in obedience?

Do you think a throne can stand on femurs of steel?

How long can a ribcage hold a rifle

before it forgets how to hold hunger?

Can you build a kingdom of starved sentinels,

feed them flags instead of bread,

feed them enemies until appetite becomes allegiance,

feed them obedience until their spines

calcify into permanent salutes?

Would you trade grains for bullets?

Would you grind harvest into ammunition

and baptise it patriotism?

Would you salt the earth with blood and bones

and call it fertile?

If you would, 

you are where you should be;

buried in the marrows of history,

carved into the sculpted silence of stone.

But if you would not, 

tell me this:

Why do you riddle the house of grains with bullets each time it dares to speak?

Why must every barn that questions blood

become an altar?

Why must the soil prove loyalty

in corpses per acre?

You say the kingdom must survive.

But survival is not dominion.

And dominion is not breath.

Gunfire does not germinate.

Rifles do not photosynthesise.

Anthems cannot be boiled into porridge.

Borders do not sprout from bone.

We have mistaken blood-boots for heartbeats.

You cannot salt the earth with men

and expect wheat to forgive you.

You cannot starve the hands that feed you

and then blame the famine on dissent.

The kingdom breathes, yes —

but listen closely.

That is not oxygen.

It is a wheeze.

A throne pressing its full weight

on the ribs of the hungry.

And when the ribs give way, 

the kingdom will finally learn what it was built on.

The mouth that demands worship swallows its own tongue.

Tastes Like Rust

What did it feel like

when the first throat split open

and the warm, coppery scream

spilled over your fingers?

Did it shiver your bones,

or make them ache for more?

Whose laughter shredded first —

children ripped from the world like paper dolls?

Whose names were eaten by dust before they even knew themselves?

Did the silence claw at you,

or did it taste sweet in your mouth like iron?

What did the bones whisper

as they cracked beneath your boots?

Did the sound make your heart leap,

or did it gnaw at the edges of your soul

with teeth sharper than your own?

How many lives curl, wet and broken,

under the weight of your hands?

How many hearts spattered across walls,

how many faces ground into mud

before the taste of blood taught you pleasure?

Whose blood trickled into your pockets?

Whose eyes did you swallow with your greed?

Did the shadows watch,

did the walls tremble at the wet, sticky joy you claimed,

or did you think darkness belonged only to you?

Did you feel them —

the dead crawling in your spine,

their ice fingers carving knives into every rib,

their whispers splitting your chest

and laughing as it bled?

What did the hollow pit inside you taste like,

where shame used to writhe and scream?

Did it fill your mouth, your teeth, your stomach,

or only your dreams when the lights died?

When your eyes closed,

did you see them all?

The life crushed beneath your thumbs,

the screams you swallowed whole,

the coins ringing wet against skulls, 

or did you pretend innocence,

as if it were a cloak?

If the dead were counting,

if they were watching

every heartbeat, every gulp, every wet whisper of terror,

would you still lick the pleasures you thought were yours?

Would you still smile

while shadows dripped across your face,

clawing at the corners of your mind?

What happens

when the storm of eyes and whispers and laughter

floods your skull

and every bone, every coin, every wet crack of flesh

stares back at you,

and you are nothing but a stain

in the ledger of all they remember?

Will you taste it again,

and know it is not yours,

never yours, 

but theirs?

Do you even deserve it?

Does anyone?

And when the world sleeps,

and the dead lean closer,

will you still smile,

or will the storm finally swallow you whole,

gut you, skin you,

and leave only the echo of terror

ringing in the dark,

your own hands still wet,

your teeth still biting air,

and your mind,

your fragile, squirming mind,

trapped inside the carnival of the dead,

laughing at you

while you are nothing,

only carnage, only hunger, only guilt,

only the taste of blood that was never yours to take?

The Sum Of Us

In the beginning

there was not God.

There was counting.

Before prayer,

before sin,

before heaven was franchised, 

someone stacked stones

and realised

quantity could replace mystery.

That was the first betrayal.

One plus one is two.

Say it like a prayer.

Say it like a hammer

driving bone into bone.

It doesn’t care about children.

It doesn’t care about graves.

It doesn’t care about hunger,

or rage,

or how fear curls in your chest.

It balances.

Always balances.

Triangles were cleaner than prophets.

Ratios quieter than doubt.

Geometry cut the sky into obedient pieces.

Trigonometry whispered secrets like torturers.

Calculus measured your despair

before you felt it.

We invented zero.

A perfect circle.

A mouth open without a scream.

Assigned to people.

Zero value.

Zero mercy.

Zero hope.

A ledger of the flesh.

A census of the soul.

We say mathematics is neutral.

So was the cross.

So was the rope.

So was the bullet

before it was aimed.

Neutrality is a myth told by tools.

You don’t need faith when you have proof.

That’s the seduction.

Science, bureaucracy, mathematics —

all faith forms in different robes.

They bleed the same devotion.

One plus one is two.

Unless one is power

and one is fear.

Then one plus one is submission.

Unless one is hunger

and one is silence.

Then one plus one is famine.

Unless one is god

and one is insecurity.

Then one plus one is war.

You think genocide begins with hatred?

No.

It begins with enumeration.

List them.

Number them.

Classify them.

Reduce them.

Once a human becomes a number,

erasing them

is administrative.

Clerical.

Mundane.

Divine.

We count bones, we count votes,

we count dollars, we count followers.

We kneel to certainty.

We kneel to predictability.

We kneel to the illusion

that if it adds up, it must be truth.

But tell me —

One trauma plus one generation

equals what?

One lie plus one census

equals what?

One decree plus one orphan

equals what?

Not two.

Never two.

Always metastasis.

Parallel lines never meet.

Life never sums.

Life never balances.

Life never forgives arithmetic.

Repeat it until it feels like oxygen.

Repeat it until doubt sounds insane.

Repeat it until anyone who questions it

looks dangerous.

Because they are.

If one plus one

is not guaranteed, 

then nothing is.

Not borders.

Not hierarchies.

Not gods.

Not you.

And that is the real terror.

Not that mathematics lies.

But that it works

without conscience.

It works when you design a bridge.

It works when you design a bomb.

It works when you calculate interest

so precisely

a man dies owing money

to a number.

It works.

And because it works,

we mistake it for morality.

Obedience is written in ink.

Faith is counted in ledgers.

And the body trembles

under every summation.

Every calculation a blow,

every diagram a noose.

We measure love, measure suffering, measure grief.

We optimise obedience.

We classify dissent.

We ration hope.

We distribute terror.

We file souls under columns:

productive, neutral, disposable.

And in the end,

the equation closes.

Numbers do not confess.

They only conclude.

Life, however,

never adds up.

In the beginning

there was counting.

In the end

there will be counting still:

bodies, losses, regrets.

The sums remain cold.

The book of bones waits.

Indifferent.

Implacable.

Numbers do not plead.

They do not pause.

They do not forgive.

They only conclude.

And we are left

reckoning nothing.

Sheepskin Truths

I was born to a man who believed the government was a religion.

Not metaphorically. Religiously.

With faith.

With fear.

With rituals mistaken for values.

A god whose faces change like chameleons shift complexion.

A scripture written in circulars.

A morality that changed tone but never intent.

In a middle-class household,

a government job is not employment.

It is orgasm.

The kind that justifies the marriage.

The kind that forgives the compromises.

The kind that turns survival into honour,

wages of slavery into dignity,

and retirement into a vague promise of heaven.

Four decades of service.

Fixed timings.

Fixed morals.

Fixed spine; bent only when required,

then straightened again just enough

to be mistaken for integrity.

He believed service to his nation purified a man.

That proximity to authority was proof of virtue.

That obedience, practiced long enough,

matured into wisdom.

Vanity is a dangerous thing.

But vanity wrapped in patriotism

is a hereditary illness.

Passed down as discipline.

Diagnosed as values.

Everyone thinks they’re immune

because they say the right words

at the right volume

in the right posture —

because the job came with a chair,

a badge,

and relatives who finally spoke with pride.

Patriotism was never about love.

Love asks questions.

Patriotism hands you answers

and calls doubt disrespect.

It doesn’t change with time.

It morphs meaning.

My father thought serving the country made him permanent.

Like loyalty comes with tenure.

Like time converts into belonging.

Like obedience compounds interest.

He believed the system remembers.

That effort leaves residue.

That years become proof.

They don’t.

Belonging is never earned.

It is granted.

Temporarily.

And always revocable.

Here, existence is not guaranteed.

It is reviewed.

You can give your youth.

Your health.

Your silence.

Your spine.

Your children. 

You can pay your dues

in money,

in time,

in belief.

And yet, nothing, absolutely none of it, matters.

Not a shred. Not an inch.

Eventually, power gets bored.

And boredom is authority’s most honest emotion.

So it asks calmly, administratively:

“Prove you exist.”

Not prove you lived.

Not prove you served.

Not prove you complied.

Prove you exist.

Existence becomes paperwork.

A form.

A signature.

A stamp applied by someone who doesn’t know you

but controls your validity.

One error and you’re a footnote.

One correction and your past becomes negotiable.

One revision and your lineage turns suspicious.

And when, out of habit, or exhaustion, you ask

what was done with what you gave —

the labour,

the taxes,

the integrity shaved down to fit policy, 

they reassure you.

Nothing was taken.

Your integrity was never sold.

It was loaned.

Loaned to a permanent class of power

that survives every era

by changing accents, not instincts.

Men who mistake longevity for legitimacy.

Men who sit long enough

to believe the chair belongs to them.

They run the same structure everywhere.

Different flags.

Same factory.

A human sweatshop

where obedience is renewable

and dignity is not.

Where mediocrity rises because it doesn’t threaten.

Where ambition is corrected.

Where silence is rewarded

until it becomes tradition.

Patriotism, then, is not devotion.

It is resignation to a dysfunctional family.

Stand here.

Say this.

Look proud.

Forget later.

It is not love of country.

It is familiarity with captivity.

And the cruelest inheritance

is not poverty,

or fear,

or silence.

It is teaching your children

that the flocking obedience of sheep make them honourable, 

while the very shepherd entrusted to lead them,

reserves the right

to erase them, like specks of dust.

Cold Cut Culinary

Cannibalism is a matter of culinary taste

and moral appetite.

Drinks arrive first.

Not to soften the act, 

to rinse the mouth of hesitation.

You don’t begin with hunger.

That’s amateur psychology.

You begin with stillness.

The body is quiet.

Quiet makes everything efficient.

Skin parts

the way agreements do —

without ceremony,

without apology.

Blood shows up eager,

bright as a fresh opinion,

then learns its place.

It always does.

There is a towel.

There is time.

Urgency ruins flavour.

People think brutality is loud.

It isn’t.

It’s meticulous.

Knives and cuts are not emotional.

Emotion spoils texture.

Some muscles have spent decades

proving loyalty to useless systems.

They harden with pride.

You can taste the distaste.

The cuts don’t argue.

They remember being decided

long before they happen.

Hesitation introduces ethics.

Ethics introduce mess.

Waste is offensive;

not morally,

aesthetically.

The room smells of iron

and fresh obedience.

Heat behaves.

Metal listens.

Nothing theatrical.

Theatrics are for people

who still need forgiveness.

Everyone expects cannibalism

to feel forbidden.

That expectation is childish.

Like thinking blood should scream

instead of stain.

Flesh makes for a beautiful recipe.

It always does

when stripped of mythology.

Morality arrives late;

a thin aftertaste,

noticeable only if you’re waiting for it.

Choice of cutlery matters.

Presentation is the last lie

society still rewards.

There is no ecstasy.

No rupture.

No fall from grace.

Only confirmation.

Some people are ruined

by the idea of eating another human.

Others are ruined

by the realization of how easily it can be done.

The eating is slow.

Not for pleasure, 

for assessment.

And the conclusion doesn’t announce itself.

It seeps in.

The problem with cannibalism

is never violence.

It is how many people

have been doing it their entire lives

without ever learning

how to do it properly.

Gods.

Governments.

Guardians,

and 

Guillotine.

How Many Lines Make A Circle?

A circle is a straight line.

And no I won't be taking questions. 

Because today, I am your geometry.

A straight line is just an idea 

that still believes movement is progress. 

Straightness is impatience; 

a refusal to stay long enough to learn its own shape.

Civilisation loves straight lines. 

Roads. Borders. Spines. Deadlines. 

Anything that points forward so no one has to look down.

Arrows calm the anxious. 

Mirrors force them into cognition.

So we drew time straight — 

years marching, 

history advancing, 

tomorrow behaving. 

Anything to avoid noticing 

how often we return to the same damage 

wearing better grammar.

But we didn’t begin as straight lines.

We began curled. 

Warm. 

Circular. 

A question with no direction. 

A foetus is a circle;

no hierarchy, 

no ambition, 

just becoming 

without justification.

Then gravity arrived. 

And then, grammar. 

They pulled us upright and called it evolution.

Stand straight. 

Walk forward. 

Look ahead. 

Grow a spine. 

Pick a side.

The first violence was posture.

The first betrayal was obedience. 

A circle is not what time is. 

A circle is what we abandon to survive.

Time does not bend.

Time does not return.

Time does not care if you scream.

Time happens. 

Once. 

With the indifference of ancience. 

What repeats is behaviour. 

What circles is explanation.

They call it history

when patterns survive

because no one names them.

They call it tradition

when repetition feels safer 

than surviving obsoletion.

They call it progress

when the same mistake walks in

wearing a tie, a crown, a dress, a smile.

You don’t move through time. 

Time moves through you — 

a straight line forced through a mind 

that keeps folding itself back into comfort.

Capitalism understands this perfectly. 

That’s why it doesn’t sell endings. 

It sells continuity.

Desire. 

Acquisition. 

Disappointment. 

Upgrade.

Not a loop, 

a line you bend yourself around

until exhaustion whispers:

“This is destiny.”

They call it healing 

when pain becomes useful. 

They call it enlightenment 

when resistance gives up politely. 

They call it maturity 

when you stop asking who benefits.

Pause.

Breathe. 

Take a minute.

Now. Think about it.

Notice how none of this felt unfamiliar.

That’s because belief doesn’t arrive as truth. 

It arrives as recognition, spoken slowly, with good posture.

You didn’t argue when I said a circle is a line. 

Because I asked for obedience.

And, you obliged.

That is how conviction works:

not by proof,

not by reason,

but by exhaustion, by surrender,

by the slow accumulation of fear

draped in coherence.

A sentence repeated cleanly enough 

starts sounding ancient. 

A lie aligned neatly enough 

starts feeling earned.

Say it again. Inside.

A circle is a straight line.

It still holds. 

Not because it’s correct, 

but because it’s coherent.

And coherence is more dangerous than being right.

Time is not circular. 

Time does not care.

We are the ones who keep returning — 

to habits, 

to harm, 

to versions of ourselves 

that felt simpler 

when we were smaller and curled,

unsullied by gravity.

The circle is the shape we remember 

from before responsibility broke us upright.

A circle is a straight line.

Not because it’s the truth, 

but because 

standing still in a curve 

would mean admitting

we chose this posture, 

we chose this direction, 

when we could have remained otherwise.

And somewhere in you, 

something ancient, 

curled and quiet,

is still nodding.

Still counting fingers. 

Still bleeding.

When Sisters Swallow Spines

Behind every successful man,

there is a woman —

they said.

In the shadows.

Unpaid.

Uncredited.

Bleeding quietly.

Erasing herself for applause

that gnaws at teeth and gums

and tastes like dust.

History knelt.

Poetry inked love letters in blood.

Revolutions whispered thanks in crumbs.

Because when a woman bleeds quietly,

it’s virtue, 

it's discipline, 

it's edible.

Then the chairs shifted.

The woman stepped into money,

into rooms with microphones,

into a life that finally paid interest.

The man stayed back.

Held the children.

Held the house.

Held the scaffolding

that success pretends it doesn’t need.

Same labour.

Same erasure.

Different gender.

And suddenly, the story screamed different:

"What kind of a man

feeds off his wife?"

There it was.

The ancient sneer.

Polished.

Rebranded.

Delivered by a mouth

that once preached equality.

And instead of silence breaking, 

it multiplied.

Feminists didn’t flinch.

They sharpened language.

Folded it.

Explained it to death.

Until truth was dead, embalmed,

smiling politely at the corpse.

They didn’t ask why care became shame

the moment a man performed it.

They didn’t ask why sacrifice

lost its holiness

when it grew a beard.

Because truth is inconvenient

when it interrupts a good narrative.

Because calling out one of your own

is harder

than slaughtering an enemy on cue.

Convenience wore a crown.

Cause dressed it up.

Lies were whispered

until they sounded like commandments.

Equality, it turns out,

is optional.

Equality, apparently,

was aspirational.

Not literal.

Because real equality

is ugly.

It doesn’t flatter women.

It doesn’t castrate men.

It humiliates everyone evenly.

And feminism —

when equality finally showed up

without makeup,

without exemptions,

without emotional airbags —

didn’t recognise it.

Didn’t like it.

Power is intoxicating,

even when borrowed from the very people

it pretends to liberate.

Turns out, many didn’t want the end of hierarchy.

They wanted their turn at the gallows.

But dare they call it what it is, 

a betrayal by a movement

that forgot

it was supposed to interrogate power, 

not inherit it.

And in that convenient amnesia

rots the bones of feminism.

Because the fastest way

to rot a revolution

is not opposition.

It’s agreement

without spine.

And the one thing

feminism cannot survive

is its own reflection,

staring back and asking:

If roles are poison,

why does the vomit only spatter

when men swallow it whole?

A Brief History Of Nostalgia

Have you ever smelled nostalgia?

Not perfume.

Not memory sunk in jewellery.

A cold breeze at the edge of the nose.

The kind that carries ghosts

who still believe they mattered.

Vanity, fossilised.

Stories repeated so often

they forget they were once alive, 

pages drying into dust,

like leaves pretending they chose autumn.

Concrete. Mortar. Civilisation

slowly swallowed by moss and wild ferns.

Because the presence of life

has never been proof of progress.

Thirty summers ago,

nostalgia was introduced to me as inheritance.

Something sacred.

Something to defend.

Thirty autumns later,

it’s still nostalgia;

no new pages,

not even footnotes.

Just the same story

aged into reverence.

At what point does nostalgia

stop being memory

and start being archaeology?

At what point does living

become maintenance?

Loss, here, is hereditary.

It sleeps well.

Wakes late.

Outlives intention.

The future keeps arriving

like a delayed train —

always announced,

never present.

And the present?

Already filing itself

under “past.”

And yes it feels like thinking

for a brief moment in time, 

because it smells all so familiar,

and we were brought up 

to mistake familiarity for longing.

It's not.

It’s rot, 

aged carefully,

labelled heritage,

and handed down

with the mandate

to call it meaning.

And, that is the story of the city I come from, 

or as I call, a brief history of nostalgia.

The Invention Of Inhumanity

Every time there is a spectacle of cold-blooded cruelty —

guts pulled out,

genitals carved into warnings,

newborns torn apart while still latched

to their dead mothers, 

humans rush to call it inhuman.

I’ve always found that

exorbitantly hilarious.

As if cruelty arrived from elsewhere.

As if it trespassed.

As if it forgot it was home.

Civilisation begins here.

Religion begins here.

Inheritance, borders, lineage, gods, 

all drafted in the handwriting

of brothers slaughtering brothers,

sons and fathers spilling blood

over symbols 

they will later teach children 

to respect.

And we still pretend

this is not our most reliable instinct.

What is it,

if not comedy,

to name the most consistent human behaviour

after something 

we insist we are not?

“Inhuman” is not a judgement.

It’s a reflex.

A linguistic recoil.

The sound a species makes

when it catches its own reflection

mid-swing

and looks away.

No monsters.

No deviations.

No bad apples.

Just design.

Violence is not an invention.

It is a ceremony.

A ritual.

A christening.

We gift-wrap it.

Sanctify it.

Normalise it.

Teach it through uniforms, oaths,

and bullet-riddled ethics.

When it becomes uncomfortable,

we rename it.

Distance it.

Call it inhuman

and resume normal functioning.

“Inhuman” is not condemnation.

It’s hygiene.

A way to keep the hands clean

while the blood on the floor

learns to dry.

No other species does this.

No other species kills

and then negotiates vocabulary

to feel innocent again.

Only humans commit atrocity

and demand applause

for feeling conflicted about it.

That is the real evolution.

Empathy didn’t civilise us.

It refined the excuse.

Gave us grief convincing enough

to hold a knife

without our hands trembling.

This is not inhuman.

This is humanity

unedited.

No fall from grace.

No corruption.

No anomaly.

Just a species

doing exactly

what it was built to do, 

and inventing a word

to pretend

it had a choice.

Pea-Sized

Floccinaucinihilipilification. 

A rather audacious attempt

to describe the futility

of considering yourself inconsequential

of being too small to make a difference.

Makes me wonder, 

have they never heard of the amygdala?

The amygdala is tiny.

Pea-sized.

Which feels irresponsible,

considering it governs

most of human civilisation.

A soft biological switch

deciding when your shoulders drop,

when your voice apologises,

when your life narrows

and you call it realism.

One pea.

Running households.

Running marriages.

Running economies.

Running entire bloodlines

on fear-based logic.

Families are built around it.

Fathers who shout

because fear learned to speak loudly.

Mothers who stay

because fear memorised endurance.

Children who behave

because fear works better

than affection.

No one calls it fear.

They call it values.

Relationships follow.

We marry not out of love,

but out of timing.

Out of panic.

Out of the terror

of being the last one left

at the table of normalcy.

We mistake fear for compatibility.

Silence for peace.

Longevity for success.

Divorce is feared

more than decay.

Loneliness more than dishonesty.

A bad marriage is more respectable

than an amicable exit.

You wake up every day

to a job you hate

because a pea

told you starvation

is more frightening

than disappearance.

This is not cowardice.

This is conditioning.

In this country and every other,

fear is not an emotion.

It’s inheritance.

Passed down with surnames,

family honour,

wedding invitations,

and the unspoken rule

that happiness is optional

but stability is mandatory.

Religion perfects it.

Politics weaponises it.

Corporations monetise it.

And most people never notice.

Because when fear is shared,

it feels like culture.

Society even sings songs

about fearlessness.

They sell it as strength.

As rebellion.

As leadership.

They put it in films and fairytales.

They applaud it on stages.

They quote it to others like them

right before asking permission

to breathe.

But fearlessness isn’t strength.

It’s damage.

Which brings me

rather reluctantly, 

to myself.

My amygdala doesn’t work right.

Not absent.

Not heroic.

Just dysfunctional.

Fear doesn’t arrive

where it’s meant to.

It doesn’t respect hierarchy.

It doesn’t flinch on cue.

So I don’t fear authority.

I don’t fear elders.

I don’t fear institutions

that depend on silence

to survive.

That’s not courage.

That’s a malfunction.

I am not aspirational.

I am not enlightened.

I am the unsafe variable

fear failed to train.

Families don’t know

what to do with people like me.

Relationships exhaust themselves

trying to teach me caution.

Institutions label me unstable

because I don’t confuse survival

with loyalty.

Society loves fearless men

as long as they’re fictional,

historical,

or dead.

Living fearlessness?

That’s called deranged.

So yes.

Something is wrong with me.

In fact, a lot is wrong with me.

My amygdala doesn’t ring the bell

that tells you to kneel,

to settle,

to stay.

I don’t feel the fear

that keeps families intact,

marriages tolerable,

jobs respectable,

and lives, socially acceptable.

That doesn’t make me free.

It makes me dangerous, 

like a ticking time bomb.

Fear isn’t just an emotion.

It’s the leash.

And I am a rabid mad dog.

So, don’t romanticise this.

I am not the anomaly.

I am not the exception. 

I am the fallacy.

I am the malfunction

that proves how much of your life

runs on panic

pretending to be purpose.

If fear makes you human,

then you are perfectly assembled.

Me?

I’m what happens

when the glue fails,

the alarm stays silent,

and a pea-sized organ

forgets to tell a man

to be afraid.

I am the fabric nightmares are made of. 

Mixed Feelings

You wake up.

You don’t remember deciding to exist. 

You’re five. 

Someone has already picked your clothes.

They say, “Smile.” You comply. 

You learn familiarity assumes consent.

Your first memory is not love. 

It’s being told, “Don’t touch that.” 

Followed by touching it anyway. 

Followed by consequences. 

This is called learning.

School happens. 

You are taught alphabets, numbers, 

and how to stand in straight lines for reasons no one explains. 

You are rewarded for silence. 

You are punished for curiosity. 

You are told this will matter later.

You believe them.

You learn that good handwriting is a moral achievement. 

That colouring inside the lines is character. 

That stars on notebooks are early forms of currency.

Someone asks, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” 

You say, “Happy.” 

Everyone laughs. 

You learn truth has a funny side.

Years pass. 

Your backpack gets heavier. 

Your questions get quieter. 

You discover comparison. 

It moves in next door and never leaves.

You learn to raise your hand only if you’re sure. 

You learn that wrong answers linger longer than right ones. 

You learn that confidence often belongs to people who do not question.

Puberty arrives unannounced. 

Your biology mutates without permission. 

Your emotions crash without explanation. 

Everything feels personal. Nothing is.

You fall in love. 

Not with a person. 

With an idea. 

Mostly of yourself, reflected back with approval.

It ends. 

You call it character development. 

Your friends call it “part of life.” 

You realise life scribbles in ink

and all you have is an eraser.

You get a phone. 

Then a better phone. 

Then the anxiety of keeping it charged. 

Your Wi-Fi becomes your personality. 

Your algorithm knows you better than your parents ever tried to.

Your school says, “These are the most important years of your life.” 

You panic responsibly. 

You optimise stress. 

You learn to perform concern.

Adulthood arrives disguised as freedom. 

It comes with passwords. 

And meetings. 

And the slow realisation that weekends are just brief cooling periods before shit hits the ceiling.

You get a job. 

You introduce yourself with your designation. 

You laugh at jokes you don’t find funny because rent has opinions.

You learn new phrases: 

“Circle back.” 

“Let’s align.” 

“This is not personal.” 

You say them fluently. 

You stop asking what they mean.

You scroll past wars. 

You double-tap grief. 

You watch the world burn between two ads for shoes you don’t need but deserve, apparently.

Someone asks again, “What do you want to be?” 

You say, “Stable.” 

No one laughs. 

You realise honesty and humour are both subjective.

You start conversations with, “Back then…” 

You complain about kids these days. 

You forget you were once a complaint too.

One day, you stand on a stage, 

sit at a dinner table 

or wallow inside your own head and say, 

“Back in my day, things were different.”

The pigeons nod. 

They have heard this before.

From cavemen. 

From kings. 

From rebels. 

From people who genuinely believed they were the exception.

You wake up.

You hope it was a fever dream, 

that you could wish it all away

like how someone you once loved

told you they had.

Your phone is at 4%. 

Your brain is rebooting. 

Your Wi-Fi is trying to connect, 

because humans don't anymore, 

they vibe like dead wavelengths

bouncing off binaries stacked up as walls. 

Somewhere, the pigeons watch, absolutely certain 

this is going exactly as planned

nodding like mixed feelings

watching history repeat itself 

and wondering, if getting monkeys off trees and into SUVs was evolution's greatest heist.

Thy Kingdom Come

The chessboard breathes.

Squares pulse like veins — black and white pumping life into chaos.

Pawns march, tiny and screaming, teeth rattling in allegorical skulls.

Knights twist in arhythmic hallucinations,

vomiting entrails into geometric patterns

no human should survive.

Castles bleed towers of ambition, dripping ink, dust, and the smell of burned kingdoms.

Queens strangle diagonals, laughing.

Kings whimper under ceremonial robes that could never protect them.

The hands that move them all, at will, are not human.

They are monsters.

Symbiotic parasites of flesh, tendon, and conspiratorial laughter.

Two friends.

Fused with caffeine, cynicism, and cosmic malice.

They twist.

They gnaw.

They crush pawns.

They strangle knights.

They squash kings.

Enemies rage on the squares.

The hands laugh.

The friendship thrives.

History quivers in their joints:

Empires marched pawns like disposable meat.

Generals drew borders like rooks vomiting sand.

Politicians peddled war and peace like queens strangling civilizations diagonally.

Civilization is nothing.

And the hands know it all too well. 

The pawns scream in existential terror.

The knights twist their own skulls.

Castles collapse into mounds of metaphorical despair.

Kings hide under robes soaked in the tears of the world.

Queens dance on the corpses of their own absurdity.

And still, the hands gulps quelches of coffee, toast apocalypse, whisper hand-crafted prophecies:

“We survive. The board bleeds. Civilization obeys.”

The board convulses.

Squares bleed.

Pieces scream.

Fingers split like roots.

Palms hollowed into ceremonial bowls of friendship and malice.

Veins pump bile instead of blood.

Every move is a sermon.

Every capture is a ritual.

The game is a cathedral.

The pawns are sacrifices.

The kings are theatre.

The friendship is parasitic.

And deliciously unhinged.

Culture applauds the slaughter.

History canonizes fools.

Faith immortalizes checkmate.

Pieces suffer.

Hands feast.

Eyes flinch.

You think you see strategy.

You think you see morality.

You see nothing.

You are dust.

You are applause.

You are fodder for friendship masquerading as chaos.

And still, the hands laugh.

Twist.

Gnaw.

Sip.

Survive.

The war is theater.

The enemies are theater.

The pawns, rooks, knights, kings, queens — all theater.

The board feeds off your perception.

A joke for the ages lives to see another apocalypse:

Humans will fight, scream, strategize, die.

The hands will watch it all, laugh it off, survive.

The pieces are expendable.

The friendship is eternal.

Everything else? 

Ashes, applause, grotesque echoes bleeding into eternity.

Listen!

Hear the board convulse.

Feel the pawns scream.

See the kings hide.

Watch the queens dance.

Taste the coffee, bite into the apocalypse, inhale the cosmic malice.

Remember!

You are alive.

But the hands…

they are immortal.

A Sellout's Manual To Survive Art

Step One: Remove all mirrors.

Reflections cause rebellion.

They suggest, even for a second, that someone might be wrong about themselves.

Replace them with applause — foam-lined, ethically harvested, genetically engineered to nod at everything.

Step Two: Inscribe the Oath.

Nothing I make is wrong.

Nothing I make is finished.

Say it three times while drinking something bitter enough to sting the tongue.

Say it in the morning, at noon, and at night, or the walls will smell your doubt.

Step Three: Feed abstraction to the herd.

Meaning is outdated.

Effort is fascist.

Clarity is terrorism.

Teach them to nod like rocks.

Nods are cheaper than insights.

Step Four: Enforce pack behavior.

Because predators hunt alone, 

and the prey must flock for dear life.

Solitude is lethal.

Silence is criminal.

If anyone whispers truth, administer a gentle slap of political correctness

and a half-hour lecture on the importance of surface lies peddled as feelings.

Step Five: Handle accidents mercifully.

Sometimes something real slips through.

It bleeds.

It sweats.

It smells of work.

Do not comfort it.

Do not congratulate it.

Smother it in dismissive adjectives,

and politely call it a glitch

until it stops twitching.

Step Six: Incentivize chaos.

Reward confusion.

Confusion cannot be wrong.

Confusion cannot fail.

Confusion is delicious.

Confusion smells faintly of gluten-free snacks and pretend art.

Step Seven: Implement the reciprocity economy.

You clap for me.

I clap for you.

We call this community.

We call it healing.

We call it safety.

Never call it what it is:

cowardice for currency.

Step Eight: Polish the language.

Asshole is holy water.

Spray generously on anyone bringing light, honesty, or work.

It kills germs.

It kills conscience.

It keeps the herd intact.

Step Nine: Spot the artists.

They wander in occasionally.

They smell like effort and poor hygiene.

They limpingly carry unfinished things that hum with honesty.

Do not approach.

Do not clap.

Do not breathe in their direction.

Step Ten: Confess quietly.

I stayed too long once.

I clapped.

I nodded.

I smiled at mediocrity.

I even called it networking.

I almost called it art.

I almost forgot how teeth feel.

Step Eleven: Wait for the artists to leave.

They always do.

They carry their unfinished things.

They leave dust, not echoes.

They leave truth, not applause.

Step Twelve: Celebrate survival.

Exhale.

Nothing has been risked.

Nothing has been questioned.

Nothing has been hurt.

Step Thirteen: Maintain the autopsy room equilibrium.

Soft, padded, climate-controlled.

Where ideas never age

because the dead are forever young.

Where noise is mandatory

because silence is an excuse for the dead to speak up.

Step Fourteen: Begin again.

Reheat the lies.

Re-stack the cardboard crowns.

Turn the applause up to eleven.

Start a new panel.

Pretend enthusiasm is oxygen.

Smile at your own incompetence.

Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. 

Because boredom is illegal,

and death hasn’t arrived, just yet.

Step Fifteen: The finishing touch:

Laugh.

Laugh because you survived art.

Laugh because you aced the circus of fake it till you make it. 

Laugh because you convinced the herd you were a genius.

Laugh because art believes in democracy

and democracy belongs to the herds.

Bow. Clap. Smile.

You’ve not just survived art;

you’ve become the inseparable lie in the epidermis of its skin.

Parallax Error

Do ends exist because beginnings are compulsory,

or are beginnings just mathematical errors put to reason,

the perfect excuse

of an inevitable collapse?

Does the sun really rise in the east

and set in the west,

or is that just civilisation

demanding obedience

from a rock hurtling through nothing

so we don’t panic before breakfast?

Is life the truth of death,

or is death the only honest thing here

and life its timeless distraction;

a folklore we've told ourselves 

to keep the nightmares at an arm's length and sleep at a finger's,

because the silence in the darkness terrifies us?

Maybe it’s neither.

Maybe we’re just rabid philosophers,

foam at the mouth, faith in hand,

arguing over truths

that were never addressed to us.

Debating existence

like squatters in a house

we don’t own,

won’t inherit,

and will be evicted from,

without a word ever being uttered.

Maybe what actually matters

isn’t beginnings or ends,

not suns or directions,

not heaven, hell, or historical accuracy —

but what becomes of you

while you’re busy intellectualising extinction.

Who you sell yourself to.

What you learn to excuse.

How comfortably you rot.

Everything else, 

truth, meaning, destiny, god, freedom, 

is parallax error:

the lie birthed

when you mistake motion

for progress,

and proximity

for understanding.

Stand far enough away

from yourself

and suddenly

nothing you believed

was facing forward.