Mineral Silence

Live life with such abandon

that even its retelling

turns the storyteller's blood

into something

that no longer remembers warmth.

Something that settles,

slowly,

irreversibly,

into the weight

of mineral silence

while they are still breathing.

There are lives like that;

lives that refuse

to end

with the body.

Lives that escape

their blood work,

leaking instead

into breath that isn’t theirs anymore,

finding shelter

inside mouths

never prepared

for the taste of them.

Until memory

ceases to be recollection,

and becomes something 

that outlives explanation.

By the time

the story reaches

its ending,

the one telling it

has already forgotten

what breath

was ever trying

to keep alive.

Not as metaphor.

As consequence.

Not as fear.

As residue.

The soul,

if there is still

such a word

for what remains

after language

has finished borrowing it, 

does not leave.

It merely discovers

another way

to haunt.

Then write death

with equal depth.

Not as an ending.

Endings are merciful.

Write it

as something

that refuses

to finish dying.

Write it

so that before

the tale arrives

at its final sentence,

the listener

has already begun

to rearrange

their understanding

of survival.

So that grief

does not wait

for the last word,

but enters quietly,

halfway through the telling,

and by the end,

the story

is no longer

about the dead,

but about the living

trying,

and failing,

to remain

unchanged,

mistaking

outliving them

for breathing.

Witch Welfare

It’s cute

when make-believe revolutions learn choreography,

masquerading as papier-mâché conviction,

trading outrage for manifestos,

sickles drawn in rhetoric,

arson performed in syntax,

building enemies from straw

only to stage their dismantling

in borrowed bonfires.

Then insisting

on being called witches.

Witches

whose imagined bloodlines

stretch back

to the women

burnt and pillaged

long before witchcraft

became a metaphor

people learned to wear.

It’s cute,

because the witches they invoke

needed neither slogans

nor curated enemies.

They carried conviction

where others now carry performance.

They were not rehearsed.

They were consequences.

Hunted not for convenient defiance,

but for refusing the grammar of obedience.

Not applauded

for learning the choreography of dissent,

because dissent was never affordable to them.

They did not mistake

spectacle

for resistance.

And that is the slow tragedy

of borrowed martyrdom:

the further it drifts

from the fire,

the more it begins to resemble

something that never burned.

Something safe enough

to re-enact.

Something soft enough

to survive applause.

Something distant enough

to forget heat.

It’s cute,

because witches came

with spine

and with magic.

Their self-anointed descendants

have neither;

only costumes,

echoes,

and the luxury

of confusing theatre

for revolution.

And the most dangerous part

is not the performance itself,

but how easily

the audience begins

to forget

what fire was for.

Sourdough

Have you ever kneaded dough?

It feels like battered skin,

except dough never bruises.

No matter how hard the fist.

No matter how often it folds

into itself.

That's what breathing feels like.

Every inhale,

a thousand needles

checking whether flesh

still intends

to remain flesh.

The strange thing about wounds

is how much easier they are

when they bleed.

A cut knows what it is.

A scab leaves evidence.

Pain becomes real

the moment it stains something.

But how do you heal

from

what consumes everything

and leaves everything behind?

How do you dress a wound

that never breaks the skin?

They say

you should speak.

Talk to people.

Give it language.

Give it shape.

They say it helps.

As though naming a thing

is the same as surviving it.

How do you describe a black hole

without borrowing the language

of stars?

How do you explain a scream

that never becomes sound?

How do you put into words

what survived poetry?

Some wounds

arrive with blood.

Others arrive with silence.

Only one of them

gets believed.

The cruel thing about survival

is that people mistake it

for recovery.

They see you breathing

and call it healing, 

assume the drowning ended.

They see you standing, 

and call it redemption,

assume the collapse is over.

But survival is not the opposite of dying.

Sometimes

it is just dying

that learns to continue

with remarkable consistency.

The part no one tells you about survival 

is that

sometimes

the instinct to keep breathing 

is what keeps the wound alive too.

House Rules

Last month, my house was on fire.

No short circuits.

No faulty wiring.

No electrical mishappenings.

My house was on fire because my words

had punctured through

the flimsy skin

of a neighbour's magnanimous narcissism.

The sort of neighbour

who sold self-love

like it was antiseptic,

and accountability

like it was an infectious disease.

Most of the neighbours

pretended to be asleep.

While some,

with their doors bolted shut,

discussed how inevitable this all was,

and how the realisation

was merely a matter of time.

A few telephoned the arsonist.

Congratulated them

on their latest victory.

Told them

they had waited years for such a day,

and now that it had finally arrived,

they would celebrate it

over an evening of whiskey

and a lifetime of relief.

Two of the neighbours

jumped aboard my lifeboat.

Spoke of brotherhood.

Of grief.

Of despair.

Of anger.

Promised they would do

the right thing

regardless of consequence.

After all,

spines are what make vertebrates

stand upright,

and they were very proud vertebrates.

The firefighters came.

The police came.

The smoke left fingerprints

on every house in the lane.

Yet not a single door opened.

Not out of concern.

Not out of courtesy.

Funny how quickly

basic decency becomes

a strategic liability

when the fire belongs

to someone else.

You see, courtesies aren't warfare mannerisms.

The self-anointed brothers

visited every evening

for a week.

They unpacked sympathy slowly,

between gossip and speculation,

like men comparing vegetables

in a marketplace.

They spoke for hours.

About grief.

About justice.

About loyalty.

About consequences.

Grief,

I discovered,

becomes communal property

the moment it belongs

to somebody else.

On the eighth day,

they remembered

their houses were untouched.

And suddenly,

household priorities returned.

The one who had a spine

sold it.

Along with my stories.

For roughly the price

of a month's groceries.

The one who never had a spine

lost his appetite for justice.

Being a good neighbour

to the arsonist,

it turned out,

was far more nutritious.

Time passed.

Ash settled.

People resumed

their ordinary hypocrisies.

The neighbourhood

went back to discussing 

weather, property values, 

and conversations about morality,

at a safe distance from consequence.

Today,

the arsonist was finally arrested.

The neighbourhood watched 

through closed curtains.

The man who sold his spine

is still selling stories

for bread and butter.

The one who never had one

is still hoping

to be remembered

as a good neighbour.

As for me,

the house survived.

Poorly.

Incorrectly.

But sufficiently.

Funny thing about fires.

They never really teach you

who your enemies are.

Enemies are predictable.

Fires teach you

who was already standing

at a safe distance

waiting for the smoke.

The house has since been rebuilt.

The door now has a sign that reads:

"Nuisances and neighbours are not welcome."

Experience has taught me

the difference

is mostly grammatical.

Something's Dead Here

Where do the ghosts of dead dreams go to?

Do they wander 

through the eerie silences 

of the claustrophobic rooms 

they were slowly drained of life in,

or are they buried 

beneath the skin 

of the soil of denial?

I was once a dream too, 

or so I thought.

Weren't all conceptions once dreams?

Don't all dreams begin at conception?

Are dreams not alive until they grow limbs?

Are nightmares not real until they can suckle at a mother's tenderness?

Are breathing cells not living enough to count as proof of life?

Between nothing and everything,

at what exact point does something become something?

Perhaps the question survives

because every dead something

hopes it died closer to everything than to nothing.

My death was never documented.

Dead somethings rarely bleed enough to inconvenience the living.

Because something is always closer to nothing than it is to everything.

Dreams are easy to abandon.

Dreams are easy to abandon once you discover you cannot afford them.

Dead mothers do not get to write memoirs of motherhood.

And for motherhood to survive, childhoods often die quietly in corners.

A dream at the cost of another is called negotiation.

A life at the cost of another is selective homicide.

But then,

something is always closer to nothing than it is to everything.

And just like that,

I was vacuumed clean.

Like dust mistaken for absence.

Where do the ghosts of dead somethings go to?

Sweet Dreams, Ladybug (Alternative Ending)

Don’t wait up on me, ladybug.

I wish I could have done it differently,

I wish we had more time.

I wish you and me together could have been enough to survive the world, the times, the people.

I wish effort alone could have been enough currency for survival.

Do you still call out to me in the middle of the night?

Do you still stay half-starved because dinner alone never felt like dinner at all?

Do you still replay those sleepless nights of conversations

held together with my inappropriate humour,

like something you shouldn’t have laughed at but did anyway?

You said it was my paintings that stole your heart.

We both knew it was the jokes.

Paintings only got me through the door.

The jokes kept stealing the keys.

Like all those times I told you it was your out-of-place canine I stumbled on, 

but teeth were just an excuse to watch you smile;

that sheepish laugh you had, like you got caught existing too honestly.

Like all those times you moved across tiled floors like a clueless penguin on thin ice,

like all those times you scolded cups and mugs and bowls and dishes

like they were emotionally available enough to listen,

like all those times you spoke to cats and dogs and plants and concrete roads

in your mother tongue, with absolute faith they understood you better than people did.

If I could, I would do it all again.

Not differently. Just again.

There was too much left unfinished.

Too many sentences abandoned mid-breath.

The only regret I have is I left carrying the leftovers of regrets;

living with regrets isn't easy, but ladybug —

dying with them is hard.

The dreams we almost believed into existence,

the snow-capped mountains we once stood beneath,

you pretending altitude was negotiable,

your vertigo arguing with the idea of height itself,

the prawns I nearly got killed over,

your allergy acting like it had legal authority—

the son we almost had, the daughter we almost named,

they are gone now,

like fingerprints on borrowed glass.

Don’t wait up on me, ladybug.

You know I’ve always found closures overrated.

Besides,

we were never good at goodbyes. 

We were better at interruptions.

At conversations that wandered past midnight and forgot to come home.

At making plans neither of us could afford.

At arguing with maps.

At promising ourselves one more year.

One more story.

One more chance.

One more ridiculous story we'd laugh about later.

Maybe that's all a goodbye ever is:

a conversation that ran out of tomorrows before it ran out of things to say.

Sweet Dreams, Ladybug

Don’t wait up on me, ladybug.

I wish I could have done it differently,

I wish we had more time.

I wish you and me together could have been enough to survive the world, the times, the people.

I wish effort alone could have been enough currency for survival.

Do you still call out to me in the middle of the night?

Do you still stay half-starved because dinner alone never felt like dinner at all?

Do you still replay those sleepless nights of conversations

held together with my inappropriate humour,

like something you shouldn’t have laughed at but did anyway?

You said it was my paintings that stole your heart.

We both knew it was the jokes.

Paintings only got me through the door.

The jokes kept stealing the keys.

Like all those times I told you it was your out-of-place canine I stumbled on, 

but teeth were just an excuse to watch you smile;

that sheepish laugh you had, like you got caught existing too honestly.

Like all those times you moved across tiled floors like a clueless penguin on thin ice,

like all those times you scolded cups and mugs and bowls and dishes

like they were emotionally available enough to listen,

like all those times you spoke to cats and dogs and plants and concrete roads

in your mother tongue, with absolute faith they understood you better than people did.

If I could, I would do it all again.

Not differently. Just again.

There was too much left unfinished.

Too many sentences abandoned mid-breath.

The only regret I have is I left carrying the leftovers of regrets;

living with regrets isn't easy, but ladybug —

dying with them is hard.

The dreams we almost believed into existence,

the snow-capped mountains we once stood beneath,

you pretending altitude was negotiable,

your vertigo arguing with the idea of height itself,

the prawns I nearly got killed over,

your allergy acting like it had legal authority, 

the son we almost had, the daughter we almost named,

they are gone now,

like fingerprints on borrowed glass.

Don’t wait up on me, ladybug.

You know I’ve always found closures overrated.

Besides,

we were never good at goodbyes.

Look at me:

caught in transit; not between leaving and being left,

but between what was real

and what we kept rehearsing until it felt like it was.

Safe Word

You say my safe word is "fuck you,"

as though I should be embarrassed by it.

Not realizing

it's pests like you

I reserve my "fuck you" for,

the way sane people reserve rat poison

for infestations,

not houseguests.

You hear "fuck you"

and mistake it for participation.

Which is adorable.

Because parasites have always confused survival

with relevance.

You flatter yourself

into believing you're troublesome enough

to occupy real estate in my thoughts.

You mistake irritation

for significance.

You mistake acknowledgment

for respect.

You mistake being noticed

for mattering.

A mosquito can interrupt sleep.

That doesn't make it memorable.

The problem with vermin

has never been appetite.

It is imagination.

Stay long enough

inside someone else's walls,

and eventually

you begin believing

the house was built around you.

It wasn't.

You arrived later.

Hungry.

Uninvited.

And immediately mistook consumption

for contribution.

That is the tragedy of pests.

Not that they feed.

That they mistake feeding

for purpose.

My beard bothers you.

Which is strange.

It has survived longer

than most of your convictions.

It grows in one direction,

year after year,

without rephrasing itself every season

to match whichever outrage

is currently paying dividends.

You complain the music is too loud.

It isn't.

It's the lyrics.

Volume never frightened you.

Meaning did.

Because noise can be ignored.

Recognition cannot.

You wanted to be seen.

You wanted to be heard.

You wanted to be important.

And yet somehow,

despite all the shouting,

all the posturing,

all the elaborate theatre of indignation,

you accumulated

the way dust accumulates:

everywhere,

gradually,

and only becoming visible

when sunlight enters the room.

That is why my "fuck you"

offends you so deeply.

Not because it is cruel.

Because it is economical.

It denies you

the one thing

you have spent your entire life demanding:

importance.

So yes,

for your sake,

let's agree

my safe word is "fuck you."

What is yours?

No —

don't answer.

I already know.

Victimhood.

The difference is,

mine ends conversations.

Yours starts them.

Mine is a boundary.

Yours is a business model.

One asks to be left alone.

The other cannot survive

without an audience.

And that,

more than anything,

is why one of us sleeps

and the other 

keeps crashing into ill-lit candles.

As for safe words,

I don't need one.

Safe words imply mercy.

Mercy implies negotiation.

Consequences do not negotiate.

They arrive: 

no disclaimers, no statutory warnings.

And I am the consequence.

Welcome To The Sisterhood (Unabridged)

I’m a small-town girl from a big damn city.

My mother sells overpriced, undercooked food for breakfast

to people who sell the poor, skin and bone,

over whiskey on imported dinner tables.

People like my father.

My grandmother, born when the 20th century was still learning to speak alphabets,

could never voice her opinions.

So I, her befitting 21st-century granddaughter,

peddle her struggles as mine,

because what good is pedigree

if you can’t inherit convenience?

Convenience is currency for the entitled.

And what good is entitlement

if you can’t package imagined sob stories

and sell them at twice the price?

But dare you call my bluff,

dare you question my bias dressed as fact,

dare you disagree with anything

I have already anointed as the only acceptable truth,

you’re a fucking monster.

I come from a state the country considers irrelevant,

so I learned early how not to be.

How to make my existence as visible as daily news.

I learned to camouflage as seasonal fruit;

different seasons, different selves, 

because trading spines for reptilian malleability is the only language

that passes for significance, in capitalist economies.

And when you don’t come from generational wealth,

and the only way to monetise your paper-rich education

is to preach disguised as teaching,

because that is all survival allows,

you learn something else.

You learn to intimidate what intimidates you.

And so I did.

And strangely, it works.

So I repeated it.

Like addicts repeat chemicals.

But dare you see through it, 

dare you look past borrowed culture,

plagiarised intellect,

inflated certainty stitched together from necessity, 

you become the abomination.

I tell people I am a doctor,

because truth alone does not carry prestige.

What good is a doctor who does not save lives;

only grinds herbs and plants into meaning,

calling approximation healing

because language forgives uncertainty?

I tell myself I am a poet,

and repeat it often enough

for repetition to resemble identity.

Because subtleties die easily

in the noise of mediocrity pretending to be volume.

And I have learned this much:

when you cannot convince them,

confuse them.

But do not mistake confusion for credibility.

The moment you hold up a mirror,

you stop being a storyteller

and become a fabrication under observation.

I am not defined by profession.

No one is, 

until they have to justify themselves.

My teeth are stained in phallic hatred, 

my gums reek of blood and testosterone, 

from all the penises I've have rid men of, 

my voice sharpened into argument

because softness never paid rent.

I find problems everywhere;

from my father's dentures to my mother's sarees.

I name them, shape them, expand them, 

until even coincidence feels like conspiracy.

And I call that clarity.

I call it truth.

I call it survival refined into ideology.

But dare you call it what it is:

a carefully maintained illusion of authority, 

and I will make sure I dismantle you

before you dismantle the story.

We are four sisters.

Of the many.

Of a sisterhood.

A sisterhood that swears to erase every place it enters

of men —

because men do not make good sisters,

and anything that does not make a good sister

is not inclusive, and must be misogyny.

A sisterhood that swears to reduce men to ash,

because we descend from the witches your patriarchy couldn’t burn.

Our grandmothers’ suffering is our inheritance,

and your grandfathers’ sins, your lineage.

So what if a century has passed?

So what if you had no hand in it?

We will burn the whole herd of you down anyway, 

and from its ashes, we will build bricks.

Bricks for a sisterhood that sees nothing,

hears nothing,

says nothing, 

except what it believes to be true today.

And dare you call it a facade, this revolution of ours, 

we will rebirth you just so we can burn you again.

And when law enforcement finally arrives,

running awfully late, because old habits die hard, 

we will call it proof of oppression.

And ourselves, 

the martyrs of a forgotten history, 

the lesser witches who were dead in skin but kept breathing in soul.

Welcome to sisterhood, Adolf.

Welcome To The Sisterhood

I’m a small-town girl from a big damn city.

My mother sells overpriced, undercooked food for breakfast

to people who sell the poor, skin and bone,

over whiskey on imported dinner tables.

People like my father.

My grandmother who was born when the 20th century was still learning to speak alphabets,

could never voice her opinions.

So I, her befitting 21st-century granddaughter,

peddle her struggles as mine,

because what good is pedigree

if you can’t inherit convenience?

Convenience is currency for the entitled.

And what good is entitlement

if you can’t package imagined sob stories

and sell them at twice the price?

But dare you call my bluff, 

dare you question my bias dressed as fact, 

dare you disagree with anything

I have already anointed as the only acceptable truth, 

you’re a fucking monster.

I come from a state the country considers irrelevant,

so I learned early how not to be.

How to make my existence as visible as daily news.

I learned to camouflage as seasonal fruit;

different seasons, different selves, 

because trading spines for reptilian malleability is the only language

that passes for significance, in capitalist economies.

And when you don’t come from generational wealth,

and the only way to monetize your paper-rich education

is to preach disguised as teaching, 

because that is all turncoats can afford, 

you learn something else.

You learn to intimidate what intimidates you.

And so, I did.

And strangely, it works.

So I repeated it.

Like addicts repeat chemicals.

But dare you see through it, 

dare you look past the borrowed culture,

the plagiarized intellect,

the inflated certainty stitched together from survival, 

you become the abomination.

We are two sisters.

Two of the many.

Of a sisterhood.

A sisterhood that swears to erase every place it enters

of men —

because men do not make good sisters,

and anything that does not make a good sister

is not inclusive, and must be misogyny.

A sisterhood that swears to reduce men to ash,

because we descend from the witches your patriarchy couldn’t burn.

Our grandmothers’ suffering is our inheritance,

and your grandfathers’ sins, your lineage.

So what if a century has passed?

So what if you had no hand in it?

We will burn the whole herd of you down anyway, 

and from its ashes, we will build bricks.

Bricks for a sisterhood that sees nothing,

hears nothing,

says nothing, 

except what it believes to be true today.

And dare you call it a facade, this revolution of ours, 

we will rebirth you just so we can burn you again.

And when law enforcement finally arrives,

running awfully late, because old habits die hard, 

we will call it proof of oppression.

And ourselves, 

the martyrs of a forgotten history, 

the lesser witches who were dead in skin but kept breathing in soul.

Welcome to sisterhood, Adolf.

Heroes Need Wars & Wars Need Enemies

There's something beautiful about bullies.

They disguise narcissism as sacrifice.

Sell themselves as messiahs 

prepared to take a bullet for the greater good, 

then spend years 

convincing you there's a war to begin with.

A war so urgent, 

so existential, 

you must empty every last bullet 

before the enemy even reaches for a weapon.

Because proximity is dangerous.

The closer people stand to one another, 

the greater the chance they discover 

there were no bullets,

no guns,

no grenades.

More importantly, 

no enemies.

Bullies build enemies the way children build dollhouses:

with imagination.

Walls where none existed. 

Families that never lived there. 

Entire worlds assembled to justify ownership.

Their talent is not violence.

Violence is merely the ribbon on the package.

Their talent is architecture.

They construct a fiction large enough to rent out as reality.

And when someone points at the scaffolding and calls it a lie,

they are offended.

Not because truth hurts.

Because outrage has a far better return on investment.

A wounded ego can always masquerade as a wounded cause.

And before you notice,

your messiah becomes your martyr.

The martyr who took the bullet so you wouldn't have to.

Never mind that nobody fired.

Never mind that the battlefield was mostly carpentry.

Never mind that every corpse was produced by people trying to survive a war they had only heard about.

That is the genius of bullies.

They do not conquer reality.

They recruit enough witnesses to outnumber it.

And once a lie acquires a census, it begins applying for citizenship.

Soon, the fiction has borders.

Flags.

Anthems.

Heroes.

Traitors.

Heretics.

Infiltrators.

Every successful enemy eventually becomes public infrastructure.

And that is the problem.

Because a story built upon enemies requires enemies to survive.

The supply must never stop.

Sooner or later, all the strangers are gone.

Sooner or later, the circle tightens.

The traitor.

The heretic.

The infiltrator.

The unbeliever.

The insufficiently loyal.

Eventually, the only enemy left inside the story

is the author.

And so they are buried

in the very grave 

they dug for somebody else,

still insisting,

through the settling dirt,

that the revolution succeeded.

The Effigy That Wouldn't Burn

Stabbing a man with a knife

is surprisingly easy.

About as difficult

as scooping frozen ice cream

with a metal spoon.

A little pressure.

A little persistence.

A little willingness

to ignore the screaming.

Entire lives have ended

for less effort.

But there is something about a man

you can kill

much quicker than you can kill him.

His identity.

Kill that,

and what remains is mostly anatomy.

A collection of organs

fulfilling contractual obligations.

A heartbeat paying rent

to a corpse still awaiting paperwork.

Mine wasn't killed.

Mine suffered

a failed assassination attempt.

Repeatedly.

Knives buried so deep

they snapped inside the wounds.

Twisted.

Abandoned.

Left to rust beneath the skin

until the blood itself

began tasting metallic.

It wasn't murder.

Murder is honest.

Murder admits intent.

These people wanted something far more sophisticated.

They wanted revisions,

until only mutation remained.

They wanted

to turn a man into a rumour, 

a reputation into graffiti, 

a voice into background noise, 

a name into an apology, 

to assassinate a person

without ever having to explain

where the body went.

And they almost succeeded.

Almost.

Funny thing about identity.

It heals incorrectly.

Scar tissue develops opinions.

And opinions, 

unlike wounds, 

do not close neatly.

They linger. 

They compare notes. 

They remember dates 

other people misplace intentionally.

Today,

I stand here

with affidavits where the weapons should be.

Chronologies.

Statements.

Evidence.

Witnesses.

And suddenly,

everyone discovers morality.

Cute, isn't it?

Now you speak of restraint.

Now you speak of forgiveness.

Now you speak of healing.

Now you speak of collateral damage.

Now you speak of consequences.

As though consequences

were a natural disaster

and not a receipt of owed dues.

As though stitches were an acceptable substitute for skin.

Funny how morality always arrives after the forensic reports.

Where were these sermons

when the knives were still entering flesh?

Where was all this moral architecture 

when demolition was being conducted without permits?

Where were your righteous amygdalas

when character assassination

was being conducted

like a community development project?

At what exact point

does spectatorship become participation?

How many witnesses

does a lynching require

before it qualifies as a constitutional joke?

You watched.

That is the part

you keep trying to misplace.

You watched.

Crowds are fascinating that way.

Nobody wants blood on their hands.

So they outsource the stabbing

and volunteer for the audience.

Everybody wants innocence.

Nobody wants responsibility.

Everybody wants innocence. 

Nobody wants fingerprints.

Everybody wants the story.

Nobody wants authorship.

Everybody wants the execution. 

Nobody wants handwriting on the warrant.

You stood there

while they picked at me

like crows discovering roadkill.

Piece by piece.

Excuse by excuse.

Joke by joke.

Lie by lie.

Until even my shadow

looked exhausted.

And now,

when consequences finally learn their names,

you wish to discuss ethics.

No.

Save your morality.

Save your wisdom.

Save your motivational posters

and your discount spirituality.

I have lost appetite for all of it.

Because there are only two categories here.

Those who twisted the knife.

And those who took measurements.

One committed the act.

The other filed it under acceptable losses..

The only difference between them and me

is they believed

power could bury accountability.

They believed institutions

were decoration.

Laws were suggestions.

Consequences were mythology.

And justice was merely a bedtime story

poor people told themselves

to make sleep arrive faster.

The only difference between them and me

is they mistook silence for absence.

Mistook patience for escape.

Mistook filing cabinets for graveyards.

They looked at paperwork the way arsonists look at smoke — certain the evidence was leaving with the wind.

They believed archives forgot. That dates decayed. That signatures expired. That memory was merely a witness with poor attendance.

And so they behaved with the confidence of people who mistake an unopened door for a missing room.

I disagreed.

I still do.

Because the amusing thing about law

is that it does not require rage.

It does not require forgiveness.

It does not require closure.

It does not require healing.

It does not even require satisfaction.

It merely requires evidence.

And evidence,

unlike guilt,

does not suddenly develop a conscience

when the invoice arrives.

So no.

This is not revenge.

Revenge is emotional.

Revenge seeks catharsis.

Revenge wants blood.

I want records.

Dates.

Statements.

Evidence.

Witnesses.

A trail so long

it stops resembling paperwork

and starts resembling a procession.

The same constitution

they believed themselves above

is now the sound

they mistake for thunder.

Not because I became a monster.

But because they spent so long

trying to manufacture one

they forgot something crucial.

Monsters require belief.

Evidence does not.

Monsters are anecdotal.

Evidence is matter of fact.

Villainaire

All villains have something in common.

Not blood.

Not power.

Not cruelty.

Those are merely hobbies.

The real commonality is narrative.

From psychopathic serial killers smearing blood across walls like a narcotic signature,

to narcissistic autocrats smothering lives like they were pocket change fed into a vending machine called glory,

all villains have one thing in common.

They believe they are the victim.

The wound.

The injustice.

The tragic exception.

And somehow,

simultaneously,

they believe they are the Messiah.

The cure.

The chosen one.

The correction.

The reluctant saviour history simply hasn't thanked yet.

That is the trick.

No one wakes up and volunteers to be the monster.

Monsters are what happen when presumed victimhood develops delusions of grandeur.

Monsters are what happen when imagined crimes stop seeking justice and start seeking authorship.

When grievance acquires a microphone.

When self-pity discovers empire.

When suffering ceases to be an experience and becomes an identity with expansion plans of a multinational conglomerate.

And everyone else?

Everyone else becomes scenery.

Props for storytelling.

A spouse becomes character development.

A friend becomes exposition.

A stranger becomes collateral.

A grave becomes an asterisk.

The judiciary becomes democratic inconvenience.

Because once you are both the victim and the Messiah,

other people stop being people.

They become evidence.

Obstacles.

Special effects.

Supporting cast in a redemption arc they never auditioned for.

And that is perhaps the most frightening thing about villains.

Not that they lack humanity.

But that they reserve all of it for themselves.

All villains have something in common:

they build cathedrals out of their wounds, crown themselves patron saints of suffering, and mistake a crime scene for a standing ovation.

One's Fable Is Another's Faith / Fiction Is Subject To Market Risks

Spin yarns of fiction around me,

and I’ll weave a cautionary tale of you.

Not out of anger.

Out of procedure.

People don’t build narratives.

They build altars.

And then they step onto them like height is proof of truth.

You turn me into a character you can defeat.

You assign motive until I fit your ending.

You simplify until contradiction looks like something you can safely win against.

And then you call it a story.

It isn’t.

It is positioning.

For yourself.

That is the part people miss.

You are not writing me into fiction.

You are writing yourself into finality.

Clean. Coherent. Comfortable.

But stories don’t stay obedient when told in that manner.

They remember what was done to make them legible.

So I let it happen.

I let you construct the version where your stance is higher.

I let you believe the ground beneath it is stable.

Then I use the same story.

Not to respond.

To sieve the assumptions pretending to be conclusions.

There's a pattern to rots.

Pedestals don’t fall.

They are simply no longer supported.

Thrones don’t break.

They stop being structurally required.

And what is no longer required

does not announce its removal.

It just stops continuing in place.

You will still be there when all of it happens.

That is the point.

Correction does not appear at initiation.

Only after completion.

Interpretation is optional.

Continuation is not.

Call it vengeance if you need language for it.

People usually do.

They prefer narrative names for structural consequences.

But this is not narrative.

This is removal of support that no longer agrees to hold.

Not destruction.

Reclassification.

And what survives that process

is always the part that no longer resembles what depended on being believed.

So when your version meets mine, nothing performs.

No opposition.

No climax.

No moral symmetry.

Just a quiet failure to align.

And then the only thing left is, 

a story still standing

without anything underneath it

agreeing to carry its weight.

Spin yarns of fiction around me,

and I’ll weave a cautionary tale of you.

Before you confuse relevance with importance, 

understand the terms.

The outcome will not be remembered in the way you expect.

It will not require memory to function.

Cautionary tales are not stories.

They are what remains after stories stop agreeing to the people inside them.

Q In A Queue

From where you stand,

you are always the last in the queue.

Not metaphorically.

Practically.

The line behaves like it ends with you.

It always does that trick.

It learns your perspective and pretends to agree.

You look back and see nothing but continuation.

You look forward and see only justification.

So you assume:

this is where life stops distributing itself.

But queues are dishonest in a very democratic way.

They extend equally after you, as they did before you.

They just refuse to announce it.

From where you stand, you are the end of something.

From where you are not looking, you are only a middle.

And that is the first quiet violence of perspective.

You forget a simple thing:

You are not the observer of the line.

You are inside it.

Someone behind you is learning your shape as “front.”

Someone ahead of you is learning your existence as “delay.”

You are not outside the story watching it happen.

You are the reason someone else believes there is a story at all.

And yet, you still think in singular terms.

I.

Me.

Here.

As if the line has agreed to isolate you.

But the line is a lie that only works when it is believed locally.

Because for the one behind you,

you are not a witness.

You are obstruction.

For the one ahead of you,

you are already background noise.

So where exactly are you?

Not at the end.

Not at the beginning.

A position that only exists because you cannot see yourself continuing.

That is how most lives function.

As endings that have not yet noticed they are being extended.

And for the one behind you,

you are already what waiting looks like.

For the one ahead of you,

you are what impatience becomes.

And still, you think you are simply waiting.

Periodic Table

There are four kinds of people.

The have-nots.

The had-nots.

The almosts.

And the nearly-s.

And the ones who are not spoken of in the same language at all.

The successful.

And none of them are singular.

Each contains two versions that never agree on each other.

The ones who never quite brought themselves

to give it everything they had.

And the ones who gave it everything

and still could not make it hold.

The distinction never survives outside the person.

But it never leaves inside them either.

The have-nots are not rejected by life.

They are not even selected.

Things do not leave them.

Things do not arrive for them.

They exist in a quieter cruelty

where even absence feels scheduled.

And within them too, 

there are those who never tried to reach the edge,

and those who reached it

and found nothing waiting back.

The had-nots are what happens

when life briefly pretends to participate.

Something arrives.

Something stays long enough

to reorganize a person

into someone who can now be revised.

And then it leaves.

Not as loss.

As correction.

Had-nots do not miss what left.

They miss the version of themselves

that did not yet know it would.

And inside them, 

there are those who let go halfway

and called it wisdom,

and those who held on past damage

and called it love.

The almosts are different.

The almosts are where life stops behaving like sequence

and starts behaving like hesitation with memory.

Not absence.

Interrupted presence.

A word that reached the edge of becoming speech.

A future that learned your body before permission arrived.

A moment that stood close enough

to make possibility feel like something already earned

and still withdrawn.

And even there, 

there are those who never fully stepped in,

and those who stepped in completely

and were still not enough to make it stable.

Almosts do not end.

They remain open in a way that keeps demanding interpretation.

And then there are nearly-s.

Nearly-s are almosts translated into acceptable language.

“You were close.”

“It didn’t work out.”

“Good but not enough.”

As if proximity were neutral.

As if effort had ever been a currency the system accepts consistently.

And then there's the successful.

Not as opposite.

Not as exception.

But as a category that is not required to justify itself in the same language.

They are treated as if continuity agreed with them.

As if life began to behave consistently only when they arrived.

As if repetition became evidence of legitimacy.

They are not called lucky.

Luck implies randomness.

They are called aligned.

As if structure recognized them early and never changed its mind.

And slowly, they stop being read as participants.

They are read as reference points.

And that is where it begins to shift.

Because none of this is just categories of experience.

It is how experience gets replaced.

The have-nots are called lack.

The had-nots are called past.

The almosts are called failure.

The nearly-s are called acceptable deviation.

And within every label

there is always the same hidden split:

those who did not try enough to be judged fairly

and those who tried too much to be saved by effort at all.

And neither changes the outcome.

Only the memory of effort changes shape.

And slowly, without announcement, something changes inside the onlooker.

Not life.

But the thing looking at life.

It stops asking what something felt like.

It starts asking what it will be recorded as.

It stops living as occurrence.

It starts living as assessment.

At some point, there is no moment where it changes.

Only a moment where it becomes noticeable

that it already has.

You stop noticing when you began translating yourself.

Hunger becomes output.

Grief becomes phase.

Confusion becomes transition state.

Joy becomes anomaly with expiry.

Even silence starts arriving formatted.

And then the sentence appears;

always correctly spoken, never questioned:

“Don’t forget to live each day.”

No instruction.

No method.

No return path to what it refers to.

Only repetition.

Because simplicity has already been reclassified

as a polite form of incompetence.

Anything unmeasurable becomes suspect.

Anything untranslatable becomes informal.

Anything unrecorded becomes unreal.

Even living.

Especially living.

And now it is not something outside you.

It is how you speak.

How you justify.

How you remember.

How you edit.

Not transformation.

Normalization.

And somewhere in that correctness

there is a small, continuous misrecognition:

that life is still something nearby,

waiting to be done properly.

But there is no point where that begins.

Only the moment you realise

you are already speaking from inside it.

Those You Call Collateral Damage

There are crimes that begin with certainty

and still end in paperwork.

And systems that no longer wait for certainty

because waiting is a liability.

An allegation enters

and nothing checks if it should.

That checking function is already deprecated.

So it enters.

And once it enters, everything begins rearranging itself

to make the entry feel inevitable.

What happened bends first.

Then what was said.

Then what was meant is quietly removed

because meaning slows throughput.

What survives repetition becomes real.

Not because it is real.

Because it remained usable.

Nobody is fully right. Nobody is fully wrong.

That is not balance. That is clearance.

Inside that clearance

a life stops being a life

and becomes something that can be spoken without resistance.

That is the first loss.

And people keep speaking.

And almost nobody believes they are the ones doing harm. 

The system does not accuse.

Accusation requires distance.

This is not distant. This is immediate processing.

It does not hate.

It does not verify.

It does not pause at the edge of consequence.

It continues.

And what it continues through

is not stored as impact.

It is stored as passage.

By the time truth arrives, 

if it arrives, 

it is not late.

It is non-compatible.

Nothing is waiting for it that still knows how to receive it.

Reversals exist.

But they arrive like afterimages of impact.

Technically present. Operationally irrelevant.

Corrections written after damage has already chosen its shape.

They update records. They do not update outcomes.

Because between accusation and correction

there is a silent interval

where lives are rewritten without consent.

Names lose stability.

Identities collapse without reversal path.

Relationships end without procedural origin.

Entire futures are quietly replaced

by versions that would never have existed otherwise.

Someone is always “just sharing.”

Someone is always “just agreeing.”

Someone is always “just amplifying.”

As for the accused,

some people stop returning to themselves correctly, 

and some do not return.

And the system does not call it a failure.

It phrases it as completion.

Because the life was never the unit being measured.

The procedure was.

The appearance of resolution was.

The outcome was whatever survived the procedure.

The life was merely where the process occurred.

Like fire occurring in wood.

Like impact occurring in flesh.

Necessary for the event.

Irrelevant to the report.

And that is why nothing stops.

Not because nobody notices.

Because noticing changes nothing.

The destruction is not outside the process.

The destruction is what the process passes through.

So when it says insufficient evidence

it is not undoing anything.

It is exiting.

Leaving everything else exactly where it fell.

No rollback exists for that interval.

Only documentation of closure.

And closure is not repair.

Responsibility disperses immediately.

Into process.

Into timing.

Into correctness of procedure.

Which is another way of saying:

nothing is accountable for what moves fast enough.

And once it moves

the only thing that matters

is how cleanly it can be described later.

Not what it did.

Only what remains writable without hesitation.

And what remains writable

is never the same as what remained alive.

Land Of Vulture Virtue

Activism has become a luxury accessory.

An earring.

A tote bag.

A curated identity layered over inherited comfort;

an intellectual strap-on

for people fortunate enough

to mistake boredom for oppression.

The children of privilege

inherit houses,

surnames,

investment portfolios,

and house help

who have spent lifetimes

learning when not to exist loudly.

They inherit convenience as oxygen.

Then they inherit guilt.

And guilt is not morality.

It is metabolism gone rogue.

Leave it unattended long enough,

and it stops being an emotion

and starts becoming architecture.

It builds rooms inside perception

where everything begins to echo as harm.

A glass of water becomes symbolism.

A clean floor becomes evidence.

A functioning household becomes violence written in impeccable grammar.

Soon the mind no longer observes reality.

It audits it.

Then college happens.

And revolution arrives

the way acne does.

Biological. Predictable. Socially contagious.

It does not announce itself as ideology.

It arrives as aesthetic urgency.

A new vocabulary.

A new sensitivity threshold.

A new way of saying “I am aware”

without ever saying “I am involved.”

Suffering enters circulation.

And like all circulating things in privilege economies,

it becomes stylised.

They read suffering

the way tourists read maps —

not to inhabit terrain,

but to collect ink trails on paper passports.

Enough detail to perform understanding.

Not enough exposure to lose comfort.

Soon they stop admiring martyrs

and begin auditioning for proximity to martyrdom.

Not survival.

Never survival.

Just narrative adjacency.

Just enough pain to be legible in the correct circles.

So they borrow wounds.

Rent tragedies.

Curate suffering

the way others curate wardrobes.

Pain becomes interchangeable.

Grief becomes modular.

Trauma becomes portable identity.

And it must always be returned

before consequences arrive.

Because the entire performance depends on one condition:

that nothing actually breaks them.

And when someone notices the performance, 

when someone points out the choreography, 

they respond with sincerity.

Not defence.

Sincerity.

The most dangerous form of armour,

because it makes contradiction look like cruelty.

They say they speak for those who cannot.

The silenced.

The erased.

The dead.

A perfect constituency.

No rebuttal. No revision. No correction.

But watch closely, 

because representation is selective.

The silenced are always those

whose suffering can be quoted safely.

Never those

whose suffering might implicate the speaker.

Never those

whose pain disrupts the moral supply chain.

Curious how solidarity

has geographical limits.

Curious how empathy

requires ideological clearance.

Curious how outrage

thrives in abstract distance

but develops paralysis

when accountability becomes local.

Because state violence is always intolerable

until it can be narrativised safely.

Then it transforms.

Prisons become policy discourse.

Censorship becomes collective safety.

Surveillance becomes protection architecture.

Death becomes statistics with formatting.

And activism,

in its most socially transferable form,

has never been about the victim.

The victim is raw material.

The story is the product.

The applause is the return on investment.

Facts are not destroyed.

They are refined.

Facts become fiction.

Fiction becomes identity.

Identity becomes currency.

And currency, once stabilised,

begins manufacturing its own physics.

It produces wings.

They call them liberation.

Freedom.

Resistance.

Every feather stitched together

with approval, performance, and redistributed guilt.

From a distance,

it looks like flight.

Up close,

it is coordination.

Because vultures do not fly.

They orbit.

Not freedom, 

but availability.

And vultures do not locate corpses.

They locate instability.

A stumble.

A misworded sentence.

A joke that lands correctly but travels incorrectly.

A disagreement that acquires witnesses before context.

That is enough.

Because once something is marked as unstable,

it becomes metabolised.

Then they circle.

Not in chaos.

In pattern.

In rhythm.

In increasing certainty

that something must be wrong

for so many of them to agree.

And agreement itself

becomes evidence.

Suspicion becomes structure.

Rumour becomes gravity.

Accusation becomes environment.

Then they descend.

Not with violence.

With procedure.

With statements carefully stripped of doubt.

With solidarity that does not require verification.

With outrage pre-approved by consensus.

With morality that scales efficiently.

They do not tear flesh.

They distribute its removal.

They delegate the act

until no one remembers

who first decided it should be gone.

And by the time it ends,

even absence looks procedural.

Character assassination becomes accountability.

Public humiliation becomes correction.

Professional erasure becomes safeguarding.

Public manslaughter becomes collective hygiene.

And the blood is always absent

from the final narrative.

Because cleanliness is part of the product.

The audience never objects.

Not because they agree.

But because repetition

has replaced cognition.

Echo has replaced memory.

And memory is what would have asked:

“what exactly did we just do?”

But questions, 

questions are structural threats.

Why does justice require crowds?

Why does truth require amplification?

Why does accountability require anonymity?

Why does every moral certainty

arrive with identical handwriting

from different mouths?

Why do seventeen hands

always converge on one disappearance?

Why does the system

never consume its architects?

Nobody likes questions.

Questions interrupt circulation.

And vultures can smell interruption

before it forms language.

That is why

the moment you become trouble,

you are no longer engaged with.

You are processed.

Not because you are guilty.

Not because you are dangerous.

But because systems like this

do not require intent.

Only participation.

And participation,

once normalized,

does not distinguish

between justice

and appetite.

Bark

Dogs bark because it is their religion.

Let them bark.

Every creature deserves a faith,

and some are unfortunate enough

to find theirs in noise.

Let them bark at strangers,

at shadows,

at passing storms.

The day you take religion away

from the myopic and the illusioned,

they will have to confront

what they have been barking at.

So let them bark.

Until they realise

barks are all they have left.

No teeth.

No claws.

And bones too fragile

to carry the weight

of their borrowed convictions.

But should they wander

into your corridors

mistaking indifference for hospitality,

don’t let them confuse patience with permission.

They will bark.

That is what dogs do.

Offer them a chewed-on bone tomorrow,

and they will trade loyalties

before you have finished blinking.

You see,

faith is only valuable

as long as it is affordable.

Which is why

dogs do not worship god;

they barter him for bones.