404: Identity Not Found

I am just surprised by the world today

a world where a person in his flesh and bones,

conversations and insecurities,

baring it all,

isn’t a true identity.

But the moment he says his name —

a name that can be fed

into the data-lusting capitalist belly

of a search engine —

he’s suddenly “real.”

Like the blood wasn’t real until Googled.

Like the pain didn’t count

without a hyperlink.

Like the art didn’t breathe

until metadata confirmed

you’re someone.

We are now creatures

of algorithms and indexed sins —

fragments of browser histories

more alive online

than we ever were in person.

You can bleed out on stage,

weep into microphones,

scream poetry so loud

it could crack silence into sonnets,

but until they can spell-check your name,

you’re just a placeholder —

“Anonymous” in italics.

And now,

we are all just usernames

pretending to be people —

QR-coded confessions,

barcoded beings

waiting to be verified

by the same algorithms

that wouldn’t survive five minutes

inside our unsaved drafts of grief.

Because in this world,

you don’t exist

until someone can CTRL+F your very existence

and hit enter

on a name

that doesn’t flinch when searched —

not the face, not the voice,

not the trembling truths you left on stage —

just a name.

A clickable name.

And if it doesn’t autocomplete,

neither do you.

The Obituary Of A Nobody

Death is a funny thing, isn't it? 

Years —

of breath measured in sighs and stutters,

of existence squeezed into calendars and conversations,

of building a self out of borrowed truths and morally flexible promises —

gone like a gust of wind

into the depths of an existential void you can't snap out of.

And what’s left?

Bones and bureaucracy.

Ashes bottled in inexpensive brass.

Your name spelled right on the death certificate

but it's grammar, wrong on people’s tongues.

You become a photo frame,

gathering dust beside a leaking wall.

You become stories told by liars who loved you,

each one polishing your ghost

until it gleams and shines enough to be missed so you find an excuse to remember.

But life —

life was chaos and creaking and compromise,

a script you improvised,

scene by scene: uncertain, unhinged, undone.

Death?

Death is too neat.

Too final.

Too smug in its certainty.

The great full stop.

The goddamn climax

in a play that never found its plot.

Who were you?

What were you?

Why were you?

Second-hand answers from third-hand grief.

A eulogy that turns flesh into metaphor.

As if a life can be stitched into syntax.

As if meaning survives in mourning.

As if how many show up at your funeral measures how well you lived.

Maybe you’re not afraid of dying.

Maybe you’re afraid of ceasing to exist, 

Of being diluted

in dried-up tears,

in healed heartbreaks,

in the silence that follows after the music forgets your name.

Maybe you’re not scared of death, 

just terrified of a life this easily forgettable.

Maybe death would be a lot easier

if life wasn't a grocery list of skin and flesh wasn't a commodity measured in paper currencies and plastic legacies.

Salted Wounds, Pickled Promises

Love is not a fossilized emotion

you bubble-wrap in benevolence

and bury beneath your trauma-tinted tenderness —

like it’s a rabid dog you leashed

because it let you pet it once

without bleeding.

But you —

you turned the relationship into border patrol.

Scanning tone like contraband,

treating pauses as proof of betrayal.

Love isn’t a security threat.

It doesn’t need surveillance,

just space to breathe.

You call it passion.

You call it care.

It’s a hostage crisis

where you’re both negotiator

and fucking terrorist.

Every fight?

Another remix of Paranoia Unplugged,

with Trust Issues on infinite loop.

You call suspicion “care,”

control “concern,”

and cloak your fear of abandonment

in the language of affection.

No wonder love’s gone silent.

You think you’re preserving it —

you’re not.

You’re pickling it

in the brine of your unprocessed grief

until even the salt files a restraining order.

We glorify love like scripture —

as if only the shattered

can pronounce devotion correctly.

But love isn’t here for your healing arc.

It won’t carry your father’s silence

or your ex’s ghost

without breaking its own spine.

Still, we worship it—

sculpting saints out of stalkers,

writing vows like fine print on prenups.

Poetry doesn’t make it love.

It just makes the lies scan better.

Real love?

It doesn’t need a stage or a spotlight.

It doesn’t script grand gestures

or make villains out of vulnerability.

It just shows up —

on quiet Tuesdays,

with unfiltered truth

and the courage to say:

“I care, but I’m still learning how.”

Love is salt.

Unpretty. Honest. Essential.

Too much kills.

Too little starves.

But we —

we keep plating it like a goddamn tasting menu,

calling it fate,

and when the rot sets in,

we blame love —

not the fact

that we cooked every dish

with trauma-soaked hands.

This Is Not A Love Poem, Thankfully

I don't want to love you

like a dog loves a bone —

desperate, drooling, territorial,

snarling at the idea

that someone else might touch what was never theirs to begin with.

I don’t want to be

that drunk poet,

spilling syllables like cheap whiskey

over his dead damsel

and calling it catharsis.

I don’t want to write you

into metaphors

like broken women folded into verses

for the sake of a poet’s redemption arc.

I want to love you

like silence loves ruins —

without saving,

without salvaging,

without the pretense of purpose.

Like thunder loves distance —

felt,

but never held.

I want to love you in a way

that doesn’t ask for belonging,

that doesn’t collect pieces of you

to build altars out of abandonment.

I want to leave you untouched —

not unloved,

just not conquered.

Not turned into another symptom

of my fragile genius.

Because love, the way we write it —

is often just colonisation

dressed up in metaphors

and bleeding journals.

So no,

I don’t want to love you

like poets love their pain,

or men love their mothers,

or gods love obedience.

I want to love you

the way endings love honesty —

with no flowers,

no crescendo,

just the truth

that not all stories deserve

a second draft.

Rot Beneath The Rhyme

You want to write about buzzing bees and blossoming blooms?

Write all you want.

You want to glorify the first-world experiences

of your third-world existence?

Suit yourself.

But don’t you dare call it poetry.

It’s genital boils and gentle farts at best.

Perfumed deception.

Filtered thought.

Main course of delusion with privilege for garnishing.

You think life’s beautiful —

No, you don’t.

You just want people to believe

that your life

is a curated gallery of minimalist heartbreak and aesthetic orgasms.

Because what would the picture-perfect idea of you say

when those nicotine-stained fangs

finally cut through the illusion you've woven —

for the world, and, for yourself?

You don’t talk about the dirty.

The filthy.

The real.

Because that would mean acceptance.

And you, my pretend-intellectual acquaintance,

are denial on drugs at best.

And addicts?

They don’t heal.

They hallucinate.

They monologue in mirrors and call it poetry.

You write in languages

too archaic to even be nostalgic —

as if dead tongues

can resuscitate your relevance.

You do it so you can sleep

feeling superior

about a petty existence

with the exact importance of a shriveled ball sack

in winter.

You take pride in writing obituaries in a language buried for hundreds of years.

Well, be my guest.

Join the fucking dinosaurs.

Carved.

Catalogued.

Caged in museums.

Sold for cheap exhibitionism.

Because while you drown in scented denial,

some of us are busy living —

ugly, honest,

filthy,

feral,

free.

Parallel Lines, Parallel Lies

You and I are parallel lines 

going around in circles —

not elegant abstractions on chalkboards,

but bloody proofs scrawled across generations

that proximity doesn’t guarantee closures

dopamine and cerebral spillages don't agree to the obvious truths of math

We move side by side,

like grief and memory,

like privilege and denial,

like god and silence.

We are the mathematical equivalent

of almost.

The geometry of ache —

two straight lines pretending

they’re not running from the same center.

Go ahead, calculate the distance.

Try finding solace in symmetry.

Tell me if it soothes

when the bed is warm

but never whole.

You — always just fucking there

but never here.

Me — measuring your absence

in broken promises

and phone calls that end

before the dial tone dies.

We scribbled futures

like ignorant men drew maps —

with rulers and delusion.

Never mind the bodies buried beneath.

Never mind the borders burned

into the flesh and the skin

with chalk made from colonial bones.

We didn’t fall apart.

We were designed

to never touch.

Don’t romanticize it.

This isn’t tragedy.

It’s engineering.

It’s god playing cruel games

with straight lines

and crooked intentions.

And still —

we orbit each other

like survivors of the same explosion

too traumatized to collide again.

We make art of our angles,

confuse motion for meaning,

pretend infinity is profound

instead of pathetic.

Fuck Euclid.

Fuck symmetry.

Fuck every poem that dressed our dysfunction

in silk metaphors.

We were not star-crossed.

We were formulated mutations.

Parallel, not equal.

Not meant to intersect.

Not meant to matter.

Just two pointless existences

floating like dead fishes in the depths of a folklore

told in dead languages.

And when I die,

burn this geometry with me.

Let the ashes scatter

in between the spaces you never filled.

Let the wind draw curves

we were too rigid to imagine.

Let our story end, finally,

without angles.

Just ashes.

And absence.

And one last unspoken line.

The Anatomy Of Absence

I carry the scent of your being

laced in my entrails,

like cyanide on apple seeds —

helpless on the skin, poison within

You are rot,

painted in nostalgia,

a ghost with lipstick smudged

on the rim of every thought I sip from

I can’t scrub you out —

you live under my fingernails,

in skin folds

where memories ferment quietly

into grief

You are the silence

I mistook for safety —

a stillness so precise

it carved absence into habit,

until I could no longer tell

if I was loving you

or learning how to disappear

Some nights,

I dream of plucking you out

organ by organ,

but wake up

choking on the scent again —

sweet, sour, rusted, ruined

like bruised fruit

left out too long

You were never poison in a vial —

you were the kiss

before the drink,

the breath before drowning,

the lull between pulse and flatline

And I,

I am still

sipping silence,

wearing your absence

like vows

tailored in grief's shadow —

learning to rot

gracefully on the outside,

while maggots of memory

feast on the inside

where love once lived