Orchids Of Decay

He named every creature he touched.

Knew which frog could sing underwater,

which bird forgot its way home,

which leaf healed quickest when torn.

A man of science.

Of order.

Of tenderness reserved

for everything that couldn’t answer back.

He spoke to orchids

the way he never spoke to me;

softly,

as if even his breath were benevolence.

He said plants were easier.

They didn’t bruise when disciplined.

And I believed him.

Because I was evidence

of what happened when something did.

He called it education.

I called it language.

He said it built character.

I said it broke sound.

Now his hands tremble not from anger,

but from age.

The zoologist reduced 

to the faint idea of a forgotten animal he once studied,

the body a slow extinction in progress.

He looks for pity in the eyes he once trained to flinch.

Finds only reflections.

I don't feed him soup.

Or, change his sheets.

Every now and then though, 

I document his decline with clinical precision.

A son of unsentimental biology,

unbothered by love, 

unweighted in duty bound guilt.

Upbringing was a myth that wilted a long time ago, 

somewhere between discipline and dinner.

He looks at my incapacity of empathy

and says, “You’ll miss me when I’m gone.”

I say nothing.

He mistakes that for grief and repentance.

And yet, it is neither.

When he sleeps,

I water his orchids.

They come of age

without guilt,

without gratitude,

without grammar.

Like me.

The Pyre

You wail of shackles,

but they are nowhere.

The chains you scream of

rattle only in your skull,

their echoes bouncing off empty corridors

you built yourself.

You claim wars with the world,

but the world doesn’t blink.

Not in its gaze,

not in its periphery,

not in the infinitesimal thought it grants you.

You tell stories of your struggles,

chasing freedom like a ghost

that slips through your fingers

even as you kneel in solemn ritual.

But the world isn't your prison.

You are.

Bound by convenience, by purpose,

by the quiet tyranny of self.

All your grand gestures,

all your pride-drenched theatrics,

are nothing more than ointments for raw, blistered vanity.

The universe moves on.

Always has.

Always will.

Indifference is the molecule of existence.

It stays, 

a silent witness,

as you burn yourself alive

in a world that never paused to watch the matchstick light up.

Shadows In The Mirror

The meat mask of a man you see, 

waking off his measured serendipity like it were a ritual, 

spending time like daily allowances:

seconds, minutes, hours

blemishing into the haze of days, 

lying awake for what feels like forevers embalmed in seasonal flowers, 

swirling eyeballs that refuse to give in to the borderless skins of shut out eyelids, 

Do you recognize him like reflections do

or is he a distant howl overwhelmed in the decibels of concrete?

Do you think he watches you watch him

as you measure his trepid insecurities and timid greed?

Do you think he knows you know

all the filth he hides beneath his manhole of a navel

of all the discreet pasts he holds on to

like memories from the ominous remains of a severed umbilical cord?

Do you think he hears your shallow breaths

gasp in the suffocated air over his watchful shoulders,

as he wages imaginary wars in his lungs and his guts

trying hard to believe there's purpose after all

although you know better

although you know he's just a dreamy lost boy

hoping he wouldn't have to grow up

to the glaring grotesque; no meaning, no matter?

Do you think he knows mirrors don't converge?

Do you think he knows you wait

where the glasses are tinted charcoal black

at the beginning of the end?

Barter

Mist hung low that morning.

Fields slick with dew, earth and cow dung curling into my nose.

Seven mouths leaned over the table, shadows bending my life into pieces.

My mother’s hands cracked like old clay, trembling.

My father’s eyes, rimmed with toddy haze, weighed me.

Three bottles of toddy.

Two days’ meals for seven hungry bodies.

And me.

Me, promised a city I would never see.

They whispered it like a ritual.

Seven faces, some hopeful, some already breaking.

My older brother flinched.

My cousins’ eyes darted, wild with hunger and fear.

My mother’s lips pressed tight as if swallowing me whole could make it right.

And I, fifteen, became a parcel,

folded into hands that were not my own,

sold in quiet, deliberate silence.

The man who came smelled of smoke and oil,

his teeth sharper than knives, promises slick as wet floors.

I should have screamed. I did not.

Flesh pressed into flesh,

warm hand into colder hand,

and the city swallowed me,

a tide of streets and shadows,

a whorehouse that pulsed like veins,

corridors narrow as throats,

windows dead eyes blinking at nothing,

air thick with perfume, sweat, and longing.

Twenty years now.

Twenty years of nights given to survive,

lunches and dinners measured in what I carried into his bed each night,

every thread of skin, every trembling laugh, every piece of warmth offered

so another day might exist.

The girl I once was — small, hungry, pliant —

has drifted away, slipping like smoke through my fingers,

leaving only shadows stitched into the hollow of my chest.

I had always heard of love,

a word whispered like a prayer, a fairytale in fish markets and meat shops.

But I never found it in the drunken eyes of fragile men,

hands shaking, patience thin as ash,

eager only to smell my bare skin,

to take what I had to give and call it possession.

The first night returns to me, every night: 

hands, voices, sweat, the smell of oil and fear,

pressing until my skin was no longer mine,

each year a survival, each year my gods slipping farther away, 

fading into shadows I cannot reach.

And the one I was named for,

the goddess who stayed the farthest from me,

the one of wealth, of fortune, of blessings—

I am nothing but her absence,

her hollowed echo,

trading pieces of myself for bread, for water,

for rooms that never learn the warmth of life,

for a life I will never touch again.

I drift,

through corridors stitched from memory and darkness,

walls leaking years I was sold,

floors slick with hands that counted me,

breath tasting survival,

steps dragging vanished bodies,

fingers brushing ghosts of flesh I once was,

shadows folding into shadows,

village and city bleeding together.

I am Lachhmi.

I am blessing bled into corridors,

threads of skin and hunger unraveling,

echo of promises never paid,

ghost of the girl I cannot reach.

I am everything they bartered for,

and nothing left to claim.

I am ghost. I am absence.

I am Lachhmi

in a country where gods are bartered

for a few lunches,

and prayers are cheaper than bread.

Dreams Of An Eclipse

What are dreams really?

Mirrors of a brain hollowed out whole,

foetuses of possibility strangled in their umbilical cords,

or parallel worlds where I am whole,

and my shadow doesn’t metamorphose into a faceless lump of flesh?

Why aren’t my dreams simple?

Of light, of humanity, of hope?

Why do they crawl instead,

through the cracks of my skull,

whispering that I’ve been nothing but fragments

since before I learned my own name.

Why do I exist in them in shreds, 

threads of myself unraveling,

suffocating in corridors sutured shut, 

a corpse of thought staring back,

mocking, grinning, bleeding into me.

Or have I lived in darkness so long

that my mind lashes its own eyes,

and I am but blind,

naked,

an unsaid prayer, 

to godless ghosts of god fearing men

while I rot inside myself?

Do Apples Dream?

Apples don't fall from the tree

because science doesn't indulge in the absurd

quite like fiction does in the name of romance.

Call it inheritance laws

or the inheritance of loss;

it doesn't matter.

Calling incident an accident doesn't change much.

Gravity doesn't care

about the fallen apple's dreams

of being a hummingbird.

Muscle memory doesn't let go

of the towering shadows of the branches,

even at the cost of sunlight.

Do you think the man who claimed gravity

wondered about the bruises on the apple,

heard the muted laments of his childhood cut open?

Nothing matters as much

as the stories,

and once your stories are theirs,

what use could you possibly be?

Apples fall like they always have,

and no one wonders;

not once, not ever.

Some sell their skins and souls,

not because they want to,

but because some voices are better forgotten as noise.

The ones who couldn’t,

mend open bruises with imagined balms,

as if healing were a placebo.

Vanity In A Fishnet

Beneath a coral sun lying like every critic ever,

the fisherman rows.

Hands steady. Eyes tracing silver threads of tide.

Counting fish. Counting breaths. Counting the stubborn tyranny of small truths.

She rises.

Scales molten, blazing glass in a world too dull to reflect her.

Voice a carving knife.

Bullet. Hurricane. Unadulterated fury incarnate.

The mermaid speaks in tongues dipped in acid,

in waves of spite,

in sirensong accusations that make gulls reconsider ambition,

clouds reconsider patience,

the ocean reconsider everything it thought it knew.

“Do you see?” she hisses.

“Do you bow? Break? Vanish into irrelevance?”

Every word a boulder.

Every glare a storm.

Every laugh a slingshot obliterating the quiet, pathetic ordinariness of his life.

Weak. Blind. Boring.

A human abacus lost in the poetry of her fury.

Gestures, a Renaissance of uncut hate.

Whims, the epitome of binary rage.

Meteors, comets, shooting stars —

why settle for a puddle when you can incinerate oceans?

Divinity, after all, is sheep’s skin for monsters.

The fisherman pauses.

Nets dripping salt. Mind uncluttered. Heart steady, metronome-perfect.

He tastes the tang of her rage, smells the scorched ocean,

but does not bite. Does not roar.

Storms are for watching. For secret notebooks.

For the quiet laughter that says: “Well, look at this idiot again.”

Days curl. Months coil. Years spiral.

And she continues —

flaming, flailing, fabulous,

a fireworks display of self-worship.

Scales ignite. Voice crescendos. Fury convinced of invincibility.

She pins invisible trophy heads on the walls of her pride-palace,

each insult a chandelier swinging above the moat of arrogance.

For no tide, no fury, no glittering rage can drown a man who rows steady through his own small truths.

Then —

mid-gloat, mid-spectacle of self-admiration,

she lunges into proving him broken.

The fishnet snaps.

Silver threads coil like accusatory fingers of a god.

Scales caught. Claws entangled.

The ocean gasps.

The cathedral of scorn collapses.

The Renaissance of hate becomes a glittering cage.

She spins, screams, recites every insult ever thrown,

trapped in the architecture of her own conceit.

The fisherman rows.

Hands steady. Eyes on horizon. Simple. Human.

Witness to absurdity, rage, and vanity so profound it should be illegal.

The tide resumes its ordinary, unbothered rhythm.

The mermaid —

still glorious, still furious,

thrashes like a failing goddess,

mid-delirious symphony of self-adoration,

caught not by skill, not by cunning,

but by gravity itself: the inexorable weight of vanity.

Glory. Fury. Hubris.

Caught in her own glittering trap.

Insults ricochet. Pride snaps. Scorn entangles.

The ocean whispers dryly:

Some tides you ride. Some tides ride you.

And the fisherman?

Still rowing. Still counting fish. Still alive. Still human.

Still absurdly, impossibly unbothered.

A slow, secret smile curls at the edge of his blemished lips.

Divine burns oceans, melts glaciers.

Mortals row on.