the salary arrived. so did the sinkhole.

It is Friday, May 15th, 2026.

Five days since I wrote that all roads lead to rot, and unfortunately, the road has not developed better civic planning since then. It is still the same road, same potholes, same suspicious corner, same emotional drainage system clogged with old leaves, shame, salt, and things I should have said in 2017, 2019, 2021, yesterday, this afternoon, ten minutes ago. I would like to report progress, but progress has not submitted its attendance. Maybe it took casual leave, or maybe it resigned or maybe it saw my life and said, respectfully, madam, this department is beyond my jurisdiction. 

Monday began with a training. Technically, my manager was supposed to take it while I assisted her. Technically, I had prepared everything for her. Technically, I had even pushed her on Saturday to prepare, like a fool with hope and basic professional ethics. She did not. Then Sunday night, while I was busy being poor in the quiet and dark, she sent two texts asking me to join early on Monday to help her out. Help her out. Haha. A phrase so small, so polite, so corporate-y, it should come with its own knife. Monday arrived. Like, always. She started the session, and then, with the grace of someone dropping a dead animal at my feet, very conveniently dumped the whole thing on me. Not last minute. Worse. After the minute had already passed. After the train had left. After the public performance had begun and I was standing there with no rehearsal, no consent, and no escape hatch. And then it continued. Monday. Tuesday. Wednesday. Three days of taking a training I had not agreed to lead. Three days of smiling into the camera, arranging knowledge into digestible portions, pretending surprise labour is the same thing as opportunity. Three days of doing everything. There is a special violence in being competent. People discover you can carry weight, and suddenly the weight becomes yours by tradition. Meanwhile, over the past weekend, my salary had not come. Sunday passed like a badly written insult. The banks, displaying their usual talent for comedy without compassion, debited whatever peanuts I had left as a penalty for low balance. Low balance. The account was hungry, so they fined it for being hungry. What a cruel joke. No, not joke. Joke implies timing. This was just cruel capitalism wearing a clown nose and holding a receipt. Then finally, Monday night, after a long day of unconsensual labour, I saw the money had been credited from my organisation. For one stupid second, I felt relief. A small animal lifting its head. Haha. Immediately, the utility bills marched in like creditors at a funeral. Paid. Paid. Paid. The salary arrived and was swallowed before I could even pretend to be a person with options. Now I do not know what to do with the remaining peanuts. Save them? Spend them? Worship them? Put them under a glass case and label them: Evidence of Almost Freedom? Money does this ugly thing where it becomes both survival and accusation. If I save, I am responsible. If I spend, I am reckless. If I buy one harmless thing, the future clears its throat. If I deny myself everything, the present sits in the corner and rots.¹ So here I am, financially adult and emotionally feral, wondering whether peanuts should become savings, food, joy, phone case, emergency fund, retirement fund, temporarily-escape-from-family fund, abandon-my-family fun or proof that I am still allowed to want. And because the universe enjoys garnish, Thursday started with a multi-team meeting. The three-day training was finally over. My face had done its professional smiling. My voice had carried three days of material it was never supposed to carry. My brain was sitting in the corner like a wet towel. Then our director thanked my manager for working so hard and taking the training. Ha. Cute. Cruel cherry on top. There she was, being publicly blessed for labour that had passed through my throat, my screen, my panic, my preparation, my improvisation, my body, my mind, my hands. I watched credit climb the hierarchy like a well-trained monkey. Nobody thanked me. Of course nobody thanked me. What was I thinking? That would have disturbed the seating arrangement of the universe. The senior must shine. The junior must become (un)human infrastructure. The work must appear from somewhere, like office electricity or women’s patience. This is the social work's corporate version of domestic labour: invisible until it fails, inherited when inconvenient, credited to someone else when successful. I wish I could say I was surprised. I was not. That is what made it worse.

Anyway. Because the mind is a strange animal and refuses to suffer in a straight line, Wednesday night I returned to The Law According to Lidia Poët. The trainings were over. The emails had documented their little theatre of stolen credit. My body was tired in that corporate-social-work way where even the bones seem to have attended calls. Finally, I had a little time to myself. So naturally, I used it to become unreasonable about a fictional prosecutor. Jacopo? No. The prosecutor. Pier. Pierluigi Fourneau. Or, as Lidia called him as her "Young Warner". Or her schnauzel. The prosecutor had me hooked. There is something very annoying about being hooked. It makes a fool of all your intellectual furniture. Suddenly I am not a woman with critical faculties. I am a Victorian fainting couch with internet access. I went researching him. Then I watched two of his other films² that night, like a person conducting scholarly work and absolutely not like a woman chasing the aftertaste of one very specific chemistry. The films had charm. They had their own mood, their own appeal, their own little atmosphere. For a while, they worked. Then the spell thinned. Whatever spark I was trying to follow was not really there. Because it was not only him, was it? That is the irritating truth. It was not only the face, the voice, the posture, the period clothing, the courtroom seriousness, the restrained longing doing its quiet damage. It was the charge between them. The particular weather created when Lidia and the prosecutor stand near each other and do not say the actual thing. That has stayed. It has stayed so stubbornly that I keep rewatching their scenes. Again and again. Night and day. Day and night. Like a devotional practice, except the temple is Netflix and the deity is unbearable romantic tension. By now, I know the scenes too well. The dialogues. The pauses. The facial expressions. The music entering at exactly the wrong-right moment. The way one look shifts the entire emotional furniture of a scene. The way a sentence becomes less important than the breath before it. The way restraint can sometimes feel more intimate than touch. The kisses. The looks and smiles. Every rewatch gives me something else. A detail I missed. A change in expression. A hesitation. A small cruelty. A softness pretending to be wit. A look that arrives half a second too late. A silence that does not know how to leave the room. And, yes, the giddy pleasure. The ridiculous private sparkle of it. I know it is fiction. I know it is choreography. I know there are writers, actors, lighting, music, editing, all the machinery of feeling doing its work behind the curtain. I know I am being handled. I can see the strings. Still, I keep offering my wrists. There is something almost embarrassing about how deeply a fictional almost-love can enter the bloodstream. Maybe because it is safe. Maybe because it asks nothing from me. Maybe because nobody in my actual life is looking at me like that... with recognition, challenge, danger, tenderness, and the terrible inconvenience of wanting. Maybe I latch onto shows because they give me scenes my life refuses to stage. In Lidia Poët, even longing has architecture. It has corridors, offices, courtrooms, gloves, lamps, carriage rides, glances. It gets music. It gets dialogue. It gets a face across the room. My longing gets browser tabs. My longing gets a broken phone case. My longing gets me, sitting here after midnight, memorising someone else’s charged silences because my own life has made desire both dangerous and impractical. And yet, I do not want to mock it too much. This tiny obsession has kept me company. It has given my tired brain somewhere beautiful to go. It has reminded me that I am still capable of being moved, charmed, struck, made foolish, made awake. That some part of me still responds to spark. Still recognises chemistry. Still wants the look, the scene, the music, the impossible almost. Maybe that is why it has not faded yet. The other films were charming, yes. But charm is not the same as haunting. Charm passes through the room. Haunting learns your name.

But the trouble with haunting is that it does not stay politely inside the show. It follows me out. At first, it feels harmless. Sweet, even. A little private theatre behind the ribs. A spark. A charged scene to revisit when the actual day has been all training, bills, stolen credit, and corporate digestion. The brain says: here, look, beauty. Look, tension. Look, someone wanting someone with their whole face while pretending not to. And then, quietly, the floor changes. The giddiness starts to rot at the edges. I know this pattern. I know it too well. The attachment begins as pleasure, then turns into comparison, then into lack, then into a pit with excellent acoustics. Suddenly I am not watching a romance. I am standing outside my own life, watching what it does not contain. No one looks at me like that. No one waits for me in a corridor of consequence. No one turns toward me with restrained disaster in their eyes. No one writes my longing into music. By MDD, I mean both things, because of course my brain could not stop at one acronym. Major Depressive Disorder, yes, the official beast with paperwork. But also Maladaptive Daydreaming, its glittering cousin, the one that does not drag me down so much as decorate the pit and invite me to live there. The daydreaming does not feel like imagination then. It feels like teleportation-relocation. One minute I am in my room, and the next I am living inside a scene that has better lighting, better dialogue, better stakes, better tenderness. I build corridors from glances. I extend conversations that never happened. I replay a look until it becomes a country. And for a while, the body loosens its grip. The real world thins. My actual life goes quiet in the background like a tab I forgot to close. That is where the DPDR slips in. Depersonalization-derealization disorder. Not as a separate disaster, but as the bill for leaving too often. The more inhabited the daydream becomes, the less inhabited I feel in my own body. My hands become props. My room becomes set design. My face becomes a character I vaguely recognise but do not fully own. The fictional world gains texture, and my real world loses temperature. And then the MDD, that old bureaucrat of the soul, opens its files. It begins gently, almost reasonably. See? This is what life can look like. This is what desire can do to a face. This is what aliveness looks like when properly lit. And now look at you. Look at your room. Look at your unread messages. Look at your body. Look at the broken phone case. Look at the salary that arrived only to vanish into bills. Look at the Saturday already being trespassed upon by work. Look at the years. Look at the stuckness. Look at the absence. Depression has never needed originality. Repetition is its main skill. Then the DPDR enters like bad fog. The world gets a pane of glass over it. My own hands become slightly theoretical. My face in the mirror looks like someone I have been assigned to maintain. The room becomes too flat and too far away at the same time. I can hear myself thinking, but from another room. I can move, answer, type, drink water, exist, but existence feels like a badly dubbed film. And the show becomes more real than me. That is the humiliating part. A fictional almost-touch has more texture than my actual evening. A glance between two actors feels more inhabited than my own body. Their silence has gravity. Mine has dust. Their longing has editing, music, consequence. Mine has tabs open and a mild headache. So I keep rewatching, partly for pleasure, partly for proof. Proof that I can still feel. Proof that somewhere inside the fog, the signal has not died. But every proof becomes evidence against me. If I can feel this much for a scene, why can I not feel properly inside my own life? If my chest can tighten because two fictional people stood too close under warm lighting, why does my actual future feel wrapped in plastic? If desire still lives in me, why does it have nowhere to go except a screen? This is how the sinkhole opens. Not dramatically. Not with a scream. Just one more rewatch. One more scene. One more detail noticed. One more minute of being pulled toward a life with movement, stakes, beauty, and someone across the room who sees you as both problem and possibility. Then I pause the show. And my own room returns. My own life returns. The same arrangement. The same stuck furniture of the self. The same body I keep trying to inhabit like rented accommodation. The same old fear standing at the foot of the bed, asking if I enjoyed my little outing. This is why I both love and fear these attachments. They rescue me. Then they show me what I needed rescuing from. They make me feel alive. Then they make my life feel unlivable. They pull me out of numbness. Then leave me with the full bill of having been numb. And I know this sounds excessive. I know sane people watch a show, enjoy the chemistry, maybe make an edit, maybe send a thirsty message to a friend, then proceed with their lives like emotionally regulated mammals. I, meanwhile, open one fictional door and fall through the architecture of my entire deprivation. Very normal. Very casual. Five stars. Would dissociate again. I do not escape reality. No. Never. I just return to it less assembled.

Anyway. The phone case is still broken. Of course it is. It has become one of those stupidly faithful objects that stays because I do not have the courage to replace it with something honest. A cracked little witness that's ugly, loyal, safer than confession. I keep thinking about the sapphic flag phone case, still. Not constantly, not dramatically, not like a heroine pressing a forbidden letter to her chest under moonlight. More like an app running quietly in the background, draining battery. A small wish. A small colour. A small yes I keep refusing myself because in this house where I reside, even colour can become evidence. A phone case is never just a phone case. It is a trial waiting for a prosecutor.³ Who bought this? Why this colour? What does it mean? Where did you see this? Who told you? Why are you becoming like this? Since when? Because families are very modern until your object begins to speak a language they did not approve. Then suddenly everyone becomes archaeologist, police, priest, and unpaid detective. So the broken cover stays. The safe thing. The ugly thing. The thing that says nothing and therefore survives. Just like me. I am ugly and I say nothing. And, unfortunately, I survive. I wish I were less good at surviving. This is a terrible thing to say because survival is supposed to be noble. Women are fed this word like jaggery wrapped around medicine. Survive. Adjust. Manage. Endure. Be strong. Be mature. Be practical. Be grateful it is not worse. Be glad you are educated. Be glad you have work. Be glad nobody has chained your ankle to the bedpost. Be glad the cage has wonky Wi-Fi that doesn't work only for you so you have to buy your data separately. And I am glad, sometimes. I am not completely foolish, you know. I know the world is brutal, and I know there are worse rooms, worse fathers, worse mothers, worse brothers, worse sisters, worse uncles, worse aunts, worse silences, worse locks, worse oppressors. And, I know comparison is the national sport of emotional invalidation. Still, knowing other people are drowning in deeper water does not make your own lungs decorative. I am tired. Not beautifully tired. Not aesthetically tired. Not poet tired. Not the cinematic kind where a woman removes one earring and looks devastating under yellow light. I am tired in the spreadsheet way. Rows and rows of small unfinished things. Cells filled with pending. Useless colours marking them pending. Body pending. Courage pending. Departure pending. Desire pending. Honesty pending. Future pending. Life pending. There is something obscene about being mid-twenty-something and feeling already archival. Like I am not living, have never lived, but only preserving evidence for a case no court will ever hear. 
Exhibit A: the broken phone case.
Exhibit B: the body that alternates between hunger and punishment of embarrassment when I do eat.⁴
Exhibit C: the tabs I keep open as if research can become rescue.
Exhibit D: the private list of things I will do when I leave.
Exhibit E: the sentence, when I leave, carrying the entire weight of a religion.⁵
But what if I do not leave? There it is. The honest rot laid bare under the decorative moss. What if I do not leave? What if the box of things I will do when I leave becomes a pathetic, loser museum of the woman I kept postponing? What if all my rebellion remains beautifully theoretical, well-written, occasionally funny, and completely unusable in this stupid head of mine and a copy of it here, in this weird little corner of the world wide web? What if I keep becoming more articulate about the cage and never actually become less caged? I hate that question because it has no manners and it shamelessly enters without knocking and sits on my bed. Today was not even dramatic enough to justify all this. That is the insult. Nothing happened. No grand fight. No cinematic breakdown. No one said the cruel line that would make a clean villain of them. The day simply passed over me with its usual dull hands. Work, phone, food thoughts, body thoughts, tabs, messages, heat, humidity, perpetual fatigue, my mother's devotional songs, the faint humiliation of still being myself in this rotting flesh. Maybe that is why I am writing. Like always. Because nothing happened, and still I feel like I survived something tremendous. Maybe the event is not always external. Maybe sometimes the event is waking up inside the same life and not immediately turning into stone. I keep thinking of Lidia Poët again. Not just the law, the fight, the forbidden rooms. Of course, that is the central point, though. I keep thinking of her forward motion. Even when she suffers, the story lets her move. Or, more aptly, she moves her story forward. She enters rooms, she argues, she demands, she fights, she risks, she desires, she loves, she fails with choreography, and she still continues. Her world resists her, yes, on this screen, it gives her scenes. My life, by comparison, feels like a loading screen. A buffering woman. A spinning circle wearing moisturizer. 

And yet, beneath all this melodrama, some tiny stubborn thing remains alive. Annoyingly alive. Cockroach alive. Government-office-file alive. It keeps making lists. It keeps saving poems. It keeps laughing at terrible jokes all alone in the small, dark room. It keeps wanting pizza, sea air, impossible softness, a room with a lock, a body that is not treated like a public institution, a love that does not require a courtroom, and one ridiculous phone case in colours nobody is allowed to interrogate. This, I suppose, is hope...? Not the clean kind. Definitely, not. Not the motivational-poster kind, either. Not the “everything happens for a reason” kind, which should be banned and replaced with free snacks. My hope is smaller and more suspicious. It looks like keeping the browser tab open. It looks like drinking water after punishing the body. It looks like writing the sentence even when the sentence is ugly. It looks like admitting I want things. It looks like not mocking myself immediately after admitting I want things. Okay, fine, it looks like mocking myself only a little. At 20:55 PM, I am still here. Still stuck. Still carrying home inside me like contraband. Still afraid that my life is not a phase but the whole arrangement. Still saving possible selves in invisible carts. Still not buying the phone case. Still wanting it. Maybe that matters. I hope, it matters. Wanting. Even wanting badly. Even wanting secretly. Even wanting in a house where desire must learn to move like a shameful thief. Rot is still here, yes. But maybe rot is not the only thing loyal to me. Maybe want is loyal too. Maybe the little sapphic flag in my head, the one I have not bought, the one I have not allowed to become plastic and visible and stupidly real, is not only fear. Maybe it is also proof that some part of me still knows colour. Still recognises itself. Still presses its face against the shop window of the future and says, very quietly, not yet, but mine. Not yet. But mine.

As I write this, she, my manager, has texted again. After work hours, of course. Respecting time would be too vulgar, too modern, too dangerously close to recognising me as a person. Some work needs to be done ASAP. As she had already promised it. Naturally. ASAP: the social work's corporate mantra of poor planning, passed down from one panicked person [usually the manager] to another [the underdog] until it lands in the lap of whoever [mostly, the underdog, again] has the least authority to refuse. The funny part is, it is not even my job. Not really. But somehow the inconvenience has found my address. Now I will have to either ask the concerned person humiliatingly late at night, as if I am the villain in their Friday, or ask tomorrow, on an off Saturday, and become the tiny unpleasant notification in someone else’s weekend. This is how bad management spreads its shame. Someone does not plan. Someone does not prepare. Someone does not communicate. Then the failure travels downward, wearing urgency as perfume the gives you a migraine the moment it hits your nostrils, until the most junior person is left holding a burning plate and apologising for the smoke. I hate this part most: the forced borrowing of another person’s time. I hate that I must become the messenger of someone else’s chaos. I hate that I must sound polite while carrying a request I do not respect. I hate that my options are either to inconvenience someone else or absorb the inconvenience into my own body, which is apparently where all unclaimed work goes to die. There should be a word for this. Not burnout. Burnout sounds too final, too respectable, like a candle in a poem. This is more like being nibbled. Tiny bites of time. Tiny bites of rest. Tiny bites of Friday evening, Saturday morning, salary, self-respect, appetite, softness, desire. Nothing large enough to make a case. Everything small enough to be dismissed. Just do this once. Just check once. Just ask once. Just join early once. Just help out once. Just manage for today. Just stretch a little. A whole life can be stolen in “just.” And I know what will happen if I say no. Maybe nothing dramatic. Maybe no punishment anyone can screenshot. Just a change in tone. A slight coolness. A note in the invisible ledger. Not a team player. Not proactive. Difficult. Uncooperative. Needs attitude adjustment. The old words wearing office clothes. So I sit here, at 23:25 PM, writing about being stuck while the proof of stuckness arrives in real time. A message on my phone. A task outside my role. An urgency I did not create. A Saturday being quietly dragged toward sacrifice. And me, still deciding whether to obey, delay, soften, apologise, resist, or perform that sophisticated modern dance called “setting boundaries” while standing on a floor made entirely of consequences. Maybe I will reply tomorrow [that being, Monday]. Maybe I will say, “I’ll check this during working hours.” Maybe I will type it bravely and then stare at it like it is a bomb and then erase it. Maybe courage, for tonight, is not sending the message immediately. Maybe survival is letting one ASAP remain slightly less ASAP. Maybe rebellion begins as a notification left unread. Actually, I read it. Or maybe I am romanticising avoidance because I am tired. Both can be true. Most things that keep me alive are morally untidy.

~ Oizys.

¹ This too echoes: “The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save-the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour-your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life-the greater is the store of your estranged being.” ― Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
² The Mascarpone Collection.
³ Good reference.
⁴ An addendum for Exhibit B: A Hunger Artist by Franz Kafka.
⁵ An addendum for Exhibit E:
When I leave, I will buy the phone case.
When I leave, I will breathe normally.
When I leave, I will decorate myself without fear.
When I leave, I will not explain every harmless thing like it is a crime scene.
When I leave, I will become the version of myself who exists without whispering.

October 16. A note on cowardly rebellion.

The OctPoWriMo Day 16 prompt included this: Possible form: Speak the poem first – use a tape recorder and just speak until you get all your ideas recorded. Listen back and write down the best lines to form your poem. This is a part of a bigger issue which is why I decided to write and address in a separate post. 

Although, it is a pure coincidence I had been vehemently thinking about this since the past few days and it came up today in OctPoWriMo's prompts. But, guess this is a sign and/or opportunity to finally pen them down. Couple of days ago, I wrote a post called Poem: Body & Coda of “A Colorful Checklist at the Checkpoint” + Prefatory Notes + Auditory Afterword. And many other writings on my cowardly rebellion has been no stranger to this weird weblog of mine.

There are a couple of elements to this predicament. One of them is identity. But, I believe it is too soon right to untangle that cobweb of sticky threads of nothingness creating a complicated network of dust, confusion, obscurity, and depersonalization-derealization. The other element (probably linked to the former one) is my voice. Usage of one's own voice to speak and materialize ideas and then write poetry. This couldn't be more un-me. It is my voice or the lack of the voice that has always rattled me. I remember one piece of writing I wrote about my style of writing where I expressed that how banal and vacuous it is. 

It is true. I rarely speak what I write and write what I speak. There is a chasmic lacuna, a profound and cavernous gap, absence, or void that encapsulated the voicelessness and spinelessness in my writing. The vacuum is the materialization of my deep-seated inability to to speak silenced by a deep, overwhelming void. The inner struggle to profusely spread ink while not being able to articulate my true self which is in itself the most passive representation of the unexpressed emotions or thoughts that create a profound emptiness in their voice. This is the metaphorical reality of my writing and my voice.

Probably why I write so much about the "cowardly rebellion" and explore it's acts of quiet resistance, hidden defiance, and a rebellion born of fear or inaction. Instead of grand, heroic gestures, the cowardly rebel focused on internal struggles, subtle disobedience, or the hidden courage of those who seem passive. The cowardly rebel find home in poems like "A Coward's Prayer" by Ani <3 (This slam poem describes a silent, interior rebellion against an oppressive and cowardly authority figure. The speaker admits to being a "coward" in the face of a tyrant but asserts their moral superiority and inner resolve, rejecting the oppressor's worldview while seemingly complying on the surface.) or "Courage in Cowardice" by Ken Mayers (Mayers' poem addresses the irony of a timid character whose quiet retreat is a form of survival and, paradoxically, a kind of courage. The poem suggests that "courage wears a different face, / And can be found in the strangest place."). 

Many such pieces showcase the tension between the fervent desire to act and the vehement fear that prevents it, so the spotlight is mostly on the individual's inner turmoil. Some poems elevate the steadfast endurance of an individual, contrasting it with performative or loud displays of protest only in words. The power found in perceived weakness, retreat, or silence, reframing them as tactical, wise, or even courageous choices. But, two elements used in such poetry is irony and hypocrisy. These poems often use irony to critique both the powerful who exploit the fears of others and the rebels who ultimately fail to act. If I can add another layer to this element, it will be the dilemma and despair. We should also acknowledge our fearful non-action or non-action performances are cosplayed by privileged to use performative rebellion as a form of protest and standing up to tick off items in their listicle of moral superiority. 

I always look up to or better yet, envy people who speak flawlessly, loudly, unapologetically, unabashedly. Their words flow out of their experiences and runs into my veins. My body tries to adapt itself as it's own. But, I know its not. So, the desire for confidence turns into resentment. No matter even if I rehearse their words, poetry, speeches, confidence alone in my room, I am never able to speak them in my voice. It falters. The muscles in throat can tense up. The lesions on the vocal cords like nodules of shame, polyps of inferiority-complex, and cysts of fear interfere with the vibration of my desire and outcomeize a shaky, unsteady, strained sound that is just a puddle of surge of feelings. The voice is lost somewhere in the sea of oxymoron of "cowardly rebellion".

It has been like that. The voice has been stuck there at the nook beside the fiery imagination of rebellion, always suspicious of performance, mothering the skepticism only to use it as a pretext to self-silence. I sit in that corner which offers seclusion and security of oppressors, making it a conflicted and morally ambiguous space. The voice, the means of externalizing this fire, is paralyzed and confined. So, my own silence, my own inability to break free from the corner's perceived security has become my oppressor and it has become the oppressor of my others who are oppressed. A mind is alight with the passion for rebellion, while the physical self remains in a subservient and protected position, thus creating a state of internal dissonance, where the desire for freedom is stifled by the fear of leaving the safety of confinement. 

A classic metaphor for this internal dissonance is a caged bird. There is absolutely zero literary justification need to expand the metaphor but I will. The mind is the bird itself, alight with the fierce and primal instinct to take flight and claim the vast, open sky. The body is the cage which is a solid, secure, and familiar enclosure that provides protection from the dangers of the outside world. The internal conflict lies in the constant, fearful trill of the bird's song that is a cry for the freedom it longs for but has never truly known while its feet remain tied and its wings clipped by a powerful, self-perpetuating fear of leaving its confinement. The safety of the cage, though oppressive, is a known quantity; the freedom of the open air is unknown and therefore terrifying.

So, my writing is essentially a sustained praxis of methodically psychoanalytical voicelessness. I keep circling that line from today’s prompt: “Speak the poem first… listen back and write down the best lines.” Cute. Efficient. And about as natural to me as sprouting gills. My poems arrive like contraband, smuggled across borders of breath; the checkpoint is always the throat. The bell never rings for me, only the metal detector. Yes, I know: I’ve built a tiny republic out of cowardly rebellion. Whisper-statecraft. Interior coups. I specialize in uprisings with no witnesses and manifestos that never clear customs. When I type, the words comply; when I speak, they unionize and strike. The body refuses to be my courier. It sabotages the shipment with tremor and heat, prints lesions in the larynx like forged visas: nodules of shame, polyps of comparison, cysts of “not yet.”  

The tape-recorder method feels like trespassing in a house I own but never furnished. Still, the prompt sits there like a practical oracle: “Measure with your mouth”. I can’t decide if that’s alchemy or accounting. Either way, it demands inventory and I’ve been dodging audits.

Identity is the customs officer that stamps “subject to search”. Every sentence is detained and questioned: “Who sent you? Who do you represent?” I want to answer: the quiet faction… the loyal opposition of the tongue. But loyalty to silence is still loyalty. Irony is the national anthem. I write about rebels who never leave the basement. I write the gulf between “ought” and “did.” It’s a tidy empire of self-contradiction and I am both its censor and its prize-winning propagandist. The hypocrisy is not incidental; it’s the house style. The bird-in-a-cage metaphor refuses retirement

I keep threatening to grant it a pension; then I hear wingbeats against the bars and renew its contract. The cage is weathered, yes, but also upholstered, someone keeps adding cushions of certainty. I suspect the decorator is me.

But, if I did try it, if I did press record. (Fine: I would hide under a blanket first like a child reading by flashlight.) What would come out won’t a poem, not exactly, more like fog warming its hands on a streetlamp. But inside the fog would be these lines I salvage:

listen, I say to the empty room,
the doorframe is a tuning fork; it rings when I breathe wrong.
I am fluent in edits, illiterate in air.
every truth I swallow earns me interest in silence.

I am paying the minimum due. 

When I would play it back, my voice would sound like someone else’s hallway. That’s when I would realize (ALL OVER AGAIN): I have been trying to perform a throat I don’t live in. The act is excellent; the tenancy is month-to-month. 

So, I hugely distrust my voice. My unreliable voice. My impudently aloof voice. My evasive, contemptuous, indifferent, dismissive voice that gives me the cold shoulder, turns its back on me, walks away from the conversations, and stonewalls my rebellion. And, as an counteract, I pretend that distrust is depth. I pretend that tape cares about my myth of incapacity. 

And yes, before you ask, I know the fix. I know the gospel: “Open your mouth. Record. Transcribe. Revise.” I know it the way a locked door knows the shape of the key. Knowledge does not equal passage. Here’s the ordinary audit I keep failing. Assets: Imagery, analysis, stamina, ridiculous devotion to metaphors that should’ve retired three drafts ago. Liabilities: Air. Air. Air. (And a suspicious surplus of self-surveillance.) Notes: The auditor is me; the handwriting belongs to fear; the signature belongs to nobody. When I try to speak a poem, my breath insists on choreography: it wants counts and cues and certified exits. It wants a fire drill, not a fire. The mouth (BLESS IT) wants to be a museum docent: “To your left, a feeling. Please don’t touch.” Meanwhile the page is a smuggler’s cove, dim and loyal; it keeps my contraband thoughts salted and safe. No wonder I keep worshipping the misdemeanor. Let me be ugly-honest: I’ve built a theory to excuse the tremor. I call it the ethics of reticence. It goes like this: If I speak, I might be wrong in public; if I write silently, I am wrong in private, which is cleaner and can be composted into craft. (So, look at me while I greenwash cowardice.)

And yet, and yet, the prompt is a dare that knows my legal name. Press record. Measure with the mouth. My first reaction was to lawyer up. My second was to duck under that blanket (hello, flashlight, old friend) and risk it anyway. Spoiler: the voice that arrived did not knock. It leaked. It had the temperature of embarrassment. It sounded like someone else’s hallway with my shoes on the mat. What came out first wasn’t language; it was weather. Mist. Interference. Then phrases condensing on the streetlamp of impulse: the doorframe is a tuning fork; it rings when I breathe wrong // I am fluent in edits, illiterate in air // every truth I swallow earns me interest in silence // I am paying the minimum due. They’re not heroic lines. They’re receipts. The mouth keeps such excellent bookkeeping of shame. 

Here is the part I didn’t want to write (but this diary behaves like a blood test; it tattles): the voice is not neutral. It has been colonized. Every time I open it, a committee convenes: posture coach, rhetoric cop, protector, saboteur, child who learned that quiet is the one-size-fits-all armor. They vote unanimously to table the motion. “Next meeting, perhaps.” Minutes recorded. Meeting adjourned. Poem postponed. No wonder I fetishize the cowardly rebellion. It’s governance I can run without a quorum. Secret bylaws. Secret ballots. Everyone wins because no one shows up. But the tape does not care about my secret parliament. The tape is procedural. It says: Begin. So I tested a new praxis: not “Speak the poem,” but “Let the body speak around the poem.” What does that even mean? It means narrating the physics, not the thesis.

I said: “The tongue is a reluctant bridge.”

I said: “The throat keeps customs hours; it hates my paperwork.”

I said: “My ribs are a reluctant cave choir; they will not sync.”

I said: “I want a bell; I’ve brought a fork.”

Somewhere in there the bird-in-the-cage started heckling. Of course it did. It’s on retainer. But the heckle sounded different... tired, maybe. I suddenly saw the upholstery I’d added to the cage (pattern: certainty, piping: sarcasm). Suddenly, I was embarrassed not by fear, but by taste. Imagine being caught decorating your own confinement like a boutique prison. Mortifying. So I tried a micro-mutiny: not an aria, (DON'T BE RIDICULOUS) just a check-in with the body without asking it to perform. I borrowed a tactic from those mindfulness apps I pretend to despise: “Name five things you can hear.” Fine. Fan. Street vendor. Fridge gossiping about ice. A neighbor’s laugh tumbling down the stairwell like loose change. None of these sounds cared if I sounded “like me.” And for one detached second, I realized: the voice I’m guarding is a brand, not a person. No wonder I can’t wear it in public; it’s dry-clean only.

Let me file another uncomfortable report: I envy the loud. Yes, I said it earlier. Here’s the update. I don’t just envy their confidence; I envy their waste. The luxury of being imprecise out loud and trusting repair later. The confidence that a messy sentence won’t cancel the speaker. They burn fuel I hoard. Then they get where they’re going. I’m here, calculating mileage for a trip I never take. And yet (third yet, final yet, the yet that unlocks something): there is a species of courage that looks exactly like clerical work. Not the banner, not the bullhorn, but the minutes. Press record. State the date. Read the roll. Approve the previous fear. New business: one breath that lands. Old business: the same doubt, but let’s not grandstand it this time. Action items: pick one line from the fog and let it live with the windows open.

So, in the spirit of consequences and not just commentary, I acknowledge my radical suspicion. I notice the way I sit like I am about to be graded. I never name the room. I never read sentences you already wrote. Out loud. When the shake arrives, I interpret it. And I romance it. Like it is a metaphor. I try to salvage one line you didn’t expect to go bad and quickly put it in the logbook before the critic wakes up. So, I stop before you get good at it. My "best lines" are never the cleverest ones but they are the ones that survived contact with oxygen. And, every poetry, word, entry I write here feels like a contraband parcel smuggled past the throat’s checkpoint. And, the poem is the checkpoint, and passing is always the goal. Presence is not. For now, I will keep my republic of whispered coups if I must while I hope that if I relapse into the upholstered cell (HOPE I WILL) at least I’ll have left a light on. Not an anthem. A pilot. The kind that burns small and steady, even when you’re certain you’ve turned everything off.

The mouth shall be used for experiments, not proofs.

The voice is leased, not owned, and defaults are not moral failures.

Lines that tremble count as lines.

Breath gets to be a verb.

(Context for future-me: This riffs off the Oct 16 prompt: apostrophe, the tape-recorder gambit, the domestic haunting. It’s a continuation of that mango-and-kettle scene, except the ghost this time is the microphone itself. If I keep doing these mouth-first drills, maybe the “cowardly rebellion” graduates from interior sabotage to exterior practice: less spectacle, more stamina.)

~ Oizys.

Poem: Body & Coda of “A Colorful Checklist at the Checkpoint” + Prefatory Notes + Auditory Afterword

Prefatory note (for the body):

“Tum Kaun Rang Ho?” is a performed poem by Sabika Abbas Naqvi (Kommune, Spoken Mumbai 2020). The title means roughly “Which color are you?”. A question of identity, affiliation, and how society codes us by “color” (religion, caste, gender, politics). The poem’s spine is a serial question: “Which color are you?” that keeps shifting target and context. Repetition as pressure tactic; identity as a moving target. (Watch the performance beats and crowd response to feel the escalation.) “Rang” operates metaphorically: communal labels, skin shade/colorism, political flags, even festival colors; one word, many traps. That polysemy is the poem’s power. It’s built for the mic with measured pace, pauses that let the audience answer (or fail to). This fits Naqvi’s project of reclaiming public space through poetry: the audience becomes a participant of the livelihood of poetry, rather than a perceptive spectator only. As the “color” demand narrows a person, the poem keeps re-widening: memory, body, shared streets, care. It argues that fixed labels are too small for a living human. (Consistent with her protest-poetry ethos.) “Tum Kaun Rang Ho?” weaponizes a simple question to expose how identity is policed and then refuses that policing by multiplying meaning, audience, and voice. Watch it for cadence and escalation; write with its question-mark spine.

[BODY] A Colorful Checklist at the Checkpoint

Poet: They stop me at the mouth of the lane, ask for proof of sky.
Crowd: I open my throat; they measure it in inches—kaun rang ho?

Poet: My grandmother stitched borders out of lullabies and salt.
Crowd: Your visa says silence, your stamp says hush—kaun rang ho?

Poet: I carry a pocket of rain; it refuses to enter their forms.
Crowd: Clouds don’t count, only papers count—kaun rang ho?

Poet: I learned my alphabets from railway walls: A for azaadi, B for bread.
Crowd: C for curfew, D for deny—kaun rang ho?

Poet: They paint the town in slogans, then call us the graffiti.
Crowd: We scrub slogans from our lungs—kaun rang ho?

Poet: A temple bell rings; even echoes show their IDs.
Crowd: God is held at the turnstile—kaun rang ho?

Poet: My mother’s bangles clink like ballots no one counted.
Crowd: The ballot box stays sealed—kaun rang ho?

Poet: The factory hum is a hymn with oil on its lips.
Crowd: Pay stubs vanish; night shifts stay—kaun rang ho?

Poet: On the school blackboard, the lesson is erased but the chalk remembers.
Crowd: Fingers go white; histories go blank—kaun rang ho?

Poet: They argue that hunger is apolitical, then tax the ladle.
Crowd: We serve the queue our ribs as plates—kaun rang ho?

Poet: I wear a scarf of monsoon; they prefer drought chic.
Crowd: Dry wells get ribbon-cuttings—kaun rang ho?

Poet: My friend’s name does not pass the metal detector.
Crowd: The beep learns to pronounce fear—kaun rang ho?

Poet: I asked the streetlight if it witnessed the beating.
Crowd: It flickered like a lying oath—kaun rang ho?

Poet: The camera loves order; the edit loves amnesia.
Crowd: We crowd the outtakes with truth—kaun rang ho?

Poet: I plant a sapling of questions; boots trample the punctuation.
Crowd: Still, commas sprout, asking for breath—kaun rang ho?

Poet: A rumor arrives on a motorbike, helmet full of hashtags.
Crowd: The timeline burns; the well goes dark—kaun rang ho?

Poet: The sea refuses their borders, keeps braiding strangers into shore.
Crowd: We name each wave after a witness—kaun rang ho?

Poet: I hold up a mirror to the checkpoint; it detains its own reflection.
Crowd: Even the mirror is searched for bias—kaun rang ho?

Poet: Last night I dreamt of a flag stitched from children’s drawings.
Crowd: Crayons don’t salute; they bloom—kaun rang ho?

Poet: If color is a prison, I’ll take the spectrum as a file.
Crowd: We rasp the bars to music—kaun rang ho?

Poet: If names are checkpoints, we’ll rename the street to “Everyone Arrives.”
Crowd: Roll call: present, present, present—kaun rang ho?

Poet: And if the mic is seized, we’ll sing to the lampposts.
Crowd: The city will learn our chorus—kaun rang ho?

Poet: They shut the internet, say it’s for our safety; even grief buffers.
Crowd: Our messages deliver tomorrow, our wounds trend never—kaun rang ho?

Poet: The census knocks politely; the questions come with fences.
Crowd: Who sleeps inside the box?—kaun rang ho?

Poet: A queue outside the ration shop bends like a question mark.
Crowd: The answer is stock-out, the stomach votes—kaun rang ho?

Poet: The river files a complaint against the dam in silt.
Crowd: Fish sign it with bones—kaun rang ho?

Poet: A uniform asks my tongue to show its birthplace.
Crowd: Accent becomes evidence, vowels frisked—kaun rang ho?

Poet: The algorithm ranks our faces by compliance and lighting.
Crowd: Shadow becomes suspicious, dusk detained—kaun rang ho?

Poet: A siren marries a headline; their child is panic.
Crowd: We swaddle it in context—kaun rang ho?

Poet: Dal and rice in the pot, caste still in the water.
Crowd: We skim and it returns—kaun rang ho?

Poet: They police our plates, count spices like contraband.
Crowd: Our kitchens pass the border checks—kaun rang ho?

Poet: A farmer folds his field into a petition.
Crowd: The tractor learns to speak—kaun rang ho?

Poet: The city builds statues taller than public clinics.
Crowd: We measure height in missing beds—kaun rang ho?

Poet: A textbook sheds a chapter at midnight, grows a footnote bruise.
Crowd: Syllabi march in lockstep—kaun rang ho?

Poet: The newsroom swaps verbs: fired becomes resigned, protest becomes traffic.
Crowd: We keep the old dictionary—kaun rang ho?

Poet: A ballot travels farther than an ambulance tonight.
Crowd: Sirens run on promises—kaun rang ho?

Poet: Heatwaves write their manifesto on our tin roofs.
Crowd: The ceiling fan canvasses sweat—kaun rang ho?

Poet: The landlord paints over mold and memory in one coat.
Crowd: The rent stays unaffordable, the cough returns—kaun rang ho?

Poet: They say the market is free; our wages are on parole.
Crowd: We unionize our breath—kaun rang ho?

Poet: A drone draws a halo over the rally.
Crowd: Saints of surveillance, pray for us—kaun rang ho?

Poet: The court calendar blooms with adjournments like late monsoon.
Crowd: Justice comes with an umbrella—kaun rang ho?

Poet: My city speaks many names for the same bruise.
Crowd: We answer to all of them—kaun rang ho?

Poet: If a gate is a question, we’ll answer with a bridge.
Crowd: Footsteps file the paperwork—kaun rang ho?

Poet: If fear is policy, mercy is our civil disobedience.
Crowd: We pass it hand to hand—kaun rang ho?

Poet: If home is contested, we’ll pitch tents of lullabies.
Crowd: Night watch, shift change, cradle—that’s us—kaun rang ho?

Poet: When they ask again, I hold up a bowl of light.
Crowd: Drink first, then decide—kaun rang ho?

Poet: The oven hums curfew songs at dawn.
Crowd: We proof our patience like dough—kaun rang ho?

Poet: Flour dust rises, soft as dissent, covering price tags.
Crowd: Inflation tastes of unsalted rage—kaun rang ho?

Poet: The recipe asks for sugar; the ration gives none.
Crowd: We stir memory instead—kaun rang ho?

Poet: A mother measures protest in teaspoons, not decibels.
Crowd: Her ladle is her loudspeaker—kaun rang ho?

Poet: Rolling pins lie like truncheons, but we use them for rotis.
Crowd: Kneading becomes negotiation—kaun rang ho?

Poet: Gas leaks promises; cylinders wait for subsidies.
Crowd: Flame still remembers hunger’s dialect—kaun rang ho?

Poet: The market bans coriander in the name of austerity.
Crowd: We season the air with rumor—kaun rang ho?

Poet: The neighbor’s smoke alarm mistakes samosa for sedition.
Crowd: Every aroma is suspect—kaun rang ho?

Poet: My apron stains testify better than affidavits.
Crowd: The kitchen keeps the minutes—kaun rang ho?

Poet: A recipe crossed the border, carrying cumin and memory.
Crowd: Customs confiscate belonging—kaun rang ho?

Poet: The pantry’s last jar whispers revolution in pickle-brine.
Crowd: Fermentation becomes manifesto—kaun rang ho?

Poet: When the power cuts mid-bake, we call it rationed light.
Crowd: Candles rise like witnesses—kaun rang ho?

Poet: The oven’s timer outlasts the government’s promise.
Crowd: Ding! We serve accountability—kaun rang ho?

Poet: The table becomes parliament when everyone’s fed.
Crowd: Debate begins with bread—kaun rang ho?

Poet: And if tomorrow burns the loaf again, we’ll still bake.
Crowd: Resistance smells of yeast and faith—kaun rang ho?

Poet: The dough remembers whose hands were tired.
Crowd: We stretch it thin like rationed hope—kaun rang ho?

Poet: Aprons hung like flags of unfinished wars.
Crowd: Each stain has a manifesto—kaun rang ho?

Poet: They said it’s just cooking, not politics.
Crowd: Ask the grain who paid the tax—kaun rang ho?

Poet: I write my dissent in turmeric; it glows long after washing.
Crowd: Even soap bows to color—kaun rang ho?

Poet: Spoons clang parliament into the sink.
Crowd: The drain overflows with bills—kaun rang ho?

Poet: Hunger queues outside the kitchen door, holding voter ID.
Crowd: We ladle equality in whispers—kaun rang ho?

Poet: They ban words the way they ban meat.
Crowd: Silence fries in leftover oil—kaun rang ho?

Poet: The oven clock ticks louder than news anchors.
Crowd: We bake over breaking news—kaun rang ho?

Poet: Gas cylinders roll out like promises before elections.
Crowd: Empty metal is the new anthem—kaun rang ho?

Poet: I barter recipes for rent relief.
Crowd: My landlord eats democracy twice a day—kaun rang ho?

Poet: The grocery list reads like an obituary.
Crowd: Items die before payday—kaun rang ho?

Poet: Our tea leaves predict policy changes.
Crowd: Sugar rations the sweetness—kaun rang ho?

Poet: Bread rises, wages don’t.
Crowd: We eat the air for breakfast—kaun rang ho?

Poet: In this kitchen, we unlearn obedience.
Crowd: The ladle leads the march—kaun rang ho?

Poet: We break the fast with defiance.
Crowd: Amen, aameen, aamin—kaun rang ho?

Poet: When the state confiscates our spices, we season with story.
Crowd: The tongue remembers—kaun rang ho?

Poet: Every recipe I know begins with mourning.
Crowd: Every meal ends in promise—kaun rang ho?

Poet: The street asks for feet, not opinions.
Crowd: Asphalt audits our breath—kaun rang ho?

Poet: Posters sweat in rain; the glue won’t lie.
Crowd: Our palms learn the grammar of paste—kaun rang ho?

Poet: A policeman writes my height in a notebook of rumors.
Crowd: Tape measures learn ideology—kaun rang ho?

Poet: I carry names of prisoners like contraband vowels.
Crowd: Mouths become safehouses—kaun rang ho?

Poet: The march counts in heartbeats; my pace stutters like doubt.
Crowd: Courage drafts behind the loudest drum—kaun rang ho?

Poet: My half-room follows me outside, folding its corners into shade.
Crowd: The chair tries to sit me down—kaun rang ho?

Poet: The mic asks for a spine; mine sends a maybe.
Crowd: Maybe doesn’t move barricades—kaun rang ho?

Poet: A camera circles; the crowd becomes a caption.
Crowd: We refuse to be alt-text—kaun rang ho?

Poet: My body signs a waiver I can’t read—sweat for ink.
Crowd: Skin remembers curfews better than diaries—kaun rang ho?

Poet: A drone draws a curfew on the sky with light.
Crowd: Stars file a formal objection—kaun rang ho?

Poet: The rumor factory runs three shifts; fact-checkers walk.
Crowd: We pace truth like unpaid rent—kaun rang ho?

Poet: Sirens herd the evening toward a fenced conclusion.
Crowd: Night negotiates parole—kaun rang ho?

Poet: The river carries placards made of soggy cardboard prayers.
Crowd: Even water chants on beat—kaun rang ho?

Poet: I press my ear to the pavement: it hums with detained footsteps.
Crowd: We memorize the rhythm for roll call—kaun rang ho?

Poet: Someone live-streams fear; comments arrive faster than help.
Crowd: Hearts react; bodies must—kaun rang ho?

Poet: The algorithm prefers tidy tragedies with soft lighting.
Crowd: Our pixels refuse makeup—kaun rang ho?

Poet: I post a paragraph when a presence was required.
Crowd: Screens don’t hold lines—kaun rang ho?

Poet: My timeline scrolls like a prayer wheel stuck on grief.
Crowd: Amen becomes refresh—kaun rang ho?

Poet: The interview reschedules itself into oblivion; courage waits in the lobby.
Crowd: Clipboard of excuses, pen out of ink—kaun rang ho?

Poet: I fold a leaflet into a paper crane for a child at the barricade.
Crowd: It learns to fly against water cannons—kaun rang ho?

Poet: The checkpoint stamps my chest with a pending status.
Crowd: Lungs appeal the verdict—kaun rang ho?

Poet: Graffiti peels, but the wall keeps the scar tissue.
Crowd: City as keloid witness—kaun rang ho?

Poet: I queue at dawn for a glimpse of a courtroom door.
Crowd: Justice opens at lunch—kaun rang ho?

Poet: A bus stop becomes a seminar on survival and synonyms for wait.
Crowd: Attendance marked in dust—kaun rang ho?

Poet: I practice saying STOP louder than my scrolling.
Crowd: Thumbs are not megaphones—kaun rang ho?

Poet: The chair I escaped shows up like an accomplice in my spine.
Crowd: Posture confesses the alibi—kaun rang ho?

Poet: We pass a kettle through the crowd; its whistle chooses a side.
Crowd: Samizdat of steam—kaun rang ho?

Poet: A mother tapes a photograph to the sky with a string of prayers.
Crowd: Wind becomes witness—kaun rang ho?

Poet: When the chant falters, we borrow breath from the ones inside.
Crowd: Their silence carries syllables—kaun rang ho?

Poet: I learn that shame is a curfew I put on myself.
Crowd: Keys rattle in the ribs—kaun rang ho?

Poet: If the street is a syllabus, tonight is cancellation class.
Crowd: We add footnotes in footprints—kaun rang ho?

Poet: If the city is a throat, we will not whisper through it.
Crowd: Volume is a right, not a crime—kaun rang ho?

Poet: And if tomorrow they paint over our voices again—
Crowd: We’ll stencil the echo, then sing through it—kaun rang ho?

Poet: The letter returns wearing black bars where the verbs were.
Crowd: Even affection is redacted—kaun rang ho?

Poet: Your qaidi number fits in my mouth like a stone.
Crowd: We learn to speak around it—kaun rang ho?

Poet: The jail calendar blooms with tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.
Crowd: Adjournment seasons the year—kaun rang ho?

Poet: Courtroom clocks run on a fuel called meanwhile.
Crowd: Meanwhile fattens on our hours—kaun rang ho?

Poet: The remand sheet creases where my hope would fold.
Crowd: Paper cuts outlast the session—kaun rang ho?

Poet: A judge asks for silence; my heart files an appeal.
Crowd: Bail argues with its shadow—kaun rang ho?

Poet: I press my ear to the glass of mulaqaat; it fogs with longing.
Crowd: Condensation as affidavit—kaun rang ho?

Poet: Your handwriting paces the margin like a caged animal.
Crowd: The comma learns lockdown—kaun rang ho?

Poet: Books arrive with spines broken by suspicion.
Crowd: Pages serve time in quarantine—kaun rang ho?

Poet: The prison gate stamps our names with visiting hours.
Crowd: Love shows up on schedule—kaun rang ho?

Poet: A pigeon carries the rumor of a better magistrate.
Crowd: We bribe it with crumbs of patience—kaun rang ho?

Poet: Production warrant, transfer van, a necklace of handcuffs and road dust.
Crowd: Kilometer after kilometer of maybe—kaun rang ho?

Poet: The FIR spells you like a stranger; even your vowels wear helmets.
Crowd: We do roll call on the tongue—kaun rang ho?

Poet: A witness forgets, a file misplaces itself, a date goes missing.
Crowd: Memory cross-examines bureaucracy—kaun rang ho?

Poet: I stitch a quilt of photocopies; it fails to keep us warm.
Crowd: Xerox has no body heat—kaun rang ho?

Poet: I count your days by the mildew on our balcony.
Crowd: Rain keeps better records—kaun rang ho?

Poet: The warder weighs our fruit parcel like contraband tenderness.
Crowd: Oranges plead not guilty—kaun rang ho?

Poet: A lawyer sharpens arguments on the edge of my sleep.
Crowd: Dreams submit affidavits—kaun rang ho?

Poet: When the verdict delays, the sky turns courtroom gray.
Crowd: Clouds confer in chambers—kaun rang ho?

Poet: Now the body: it remembers curfews stitched under the skin.
Crowd: Scar is a syllabus—kaun rang ho?

Poet: My shoulders carry safety instructions nobody wrote.
Crowd: Posture as policy—kaun rang ho?

Poet: They legislate my hemline, tax my laughter, index my breath.
Crowd: Permission slips for joy—kaun rang ho?

Poet: A streetlight audits my silhouette; I refuse to itemize.
Crowd: Gaze is not governance—kaun rang ho?

Poet: I stamp consent on my pulse, renewable daily.
Crowd: Touch must pass customs—kaun rang ho?

Poet: The mirror testifies: hunger and hope share a rib.
Crowd: We count both like calories—kaun rang ho?

Poet: I name each bruise after a policy that caused it.
Crowd: Index of injuries, ISBN pending—kaun rang ho?

Poet: My feet negotiate potholes and patriarchy in the same route.
Crowd: Asphalt learns to listen—kaun rang ho?

Poet: Blood keeps its own archive; it files a monthly protest.
Crowd: Pads are not parliament—kaun rang ho?

Poet: When I run, the city recalibrates its threat matrix.
Crowd: Stamina becomes statement—kaun rang ho?

Poet: The clinic door measures pain in deductible units.
Crowd: We pay in breath—kaun rang ho?

Poet: I refuse the diet made of docility and doubt.
Crowd: Muscle votes yes—kaun rang ho?

Poet: I write NO on my spine in permanent posture.
Crowd: Vertebrae as placards—kaun rang ho?

Poet: If the state patrols the kitchen and the street and my skin,
Crowd: We patrol each other with care—kaun rang ho?

Poet: And if they ask again, I unzip the day, show them a beating heart.
Crowd: Count this color first—kaun rang ho?

Prefatory note (for the coda): Kamla Bhasin didn’t “invent” azadi so much as learn, adapt, and amplify it. The chant, "Aurat ka naara: Azaadi. Bacchon ka naara: Azaadi" ("Woman's slogan: Freedom. Children's slogan: Freedom"), was first raised by Pakistani feminists especially within the Women’s Action Forum during the Zia-ul-Haq era in the mid-1980s. Bhasin picked it up across the border and began improvising it for South Asian feminist rallies; she’s widely credited with popularising it in India, notably at a 1991 Women’s Studies conference at Jadavpur University and later at One Billion Rising gatherings, expanding the call from patriarchy to a broader demand for freedom from all hierarchies.

[CODA] “Azadi” (for the same poem)

Poet: If color is a question, our answer is a verb.

Crowd: March is a grammar—kaun rang ho?

Poet: If kitchens and courtyards and streets are one long sentence,

Crowd: We refuse the full stop—kaun rang ho?

Poet: They ask our shade; we offer our share.

Crowd: Bread splits even—kaun rang ho?

Poet: They count our breaths; we count each other.

Crowd: Roll call of pulse—kaun rang ho?

Poet: From patriarchy—

Crowd: Azadi!

Poet: From all hierarchy—

Crowd: Azadi!

Poet: From unpaid kitchens and priced lives—

Crowd: Azadi!

Poet: From borders drawn through bedrooms—

Crowd: Azadi!

Poet: From algorithms that grade our faces—

Crowd: Azadi!

Poet: From adjourned tomorrows and remand calendars—

Crowd: Azadi!

Poet: From shame sewn into skin—

Crowd: Azadi!

Poet: For bread, breath, books, bodies—

Crowd: Azadi!

Poet: If they ask again, “kaun rang—”

Crowd: Azadi!

Poet: If they paint over our voices, “kaun—”

Crowd: Azadi!

Poet: If the mic is seized, the streetlights dim, the checkpoint laughs—

Crowd (unprompted): Azadi!

Poet: Then this is my color, our color, the chorus we refuse to surrender—

Crowd (hold, louder): Azadi!

Afterword with notes I do not want framed: 

I am a cowardly rebel with good handwriting. I am writing this to remember, not to be forgiven. I sit in a half-room that has memorised my weight. The chair is an accomplice: it leans, it hushes, it pulls me back from the door with the soft authority of habit. Outside, women are screaming poetry into the afternoon with mouths like lit matches, throats disciplined to thunder. Inside, my voice trembles under sunlight and makes do with typing. The sun is a witness I keep trying to recuse. It refuses the bench. I inventory my fear like groceries. Turmeric for courage stains because the soap doesn’t remove it, only moves it around. Tea leaves for prophecy because they keep telling me nothing I didn’t already dodge. A ladle for announcements as it taps the rim, asks, “today?” I say maybe. Maybe is delay dressed as care. Maybe is my most fluent language. Maybe buys me another hour in the half-room, where rebellion is a draft and the mic is a rumor of steel. I watch their poems arrive like ambulances with siren-first and purpose clear. Mine arrives like a ration line: it waits, it inches, it apologizes to the person behind it. I have been postponing courage the way people postpone dental visits knowing exactly what is wrong with the mouth, unwilling to open it for sharp instruments and brighter light. Call me a coward if you must; the name fits like an old sweater I refuse to throw out. It has pockets for excuses. It’s warm. It smells faintly of deadlines missed and dinners made on time. But I cook politics into everything. I salt the dough with names I cannot say aloud. I write dissent in turmeric on the chopping board and slice through it anyway. I season rice with small angers, let them steam shut under a lid. I have learned that kneading is a kind of negotiation: you push, you fold, you wait for the rise that may or may not come. The oven hums its civil service exam. I fail with full attendance. I fail at shouting, but pass at feeding. Somewhere I read that nourishment is not apolitical; so I underline it with oil. The half-room is not only fear; it is also archive of that fear. The window keeps minutes and the kettle keeps secrets. The apron testifies it. Each stain is a committee report: tomatoes on policy, smoke on budget, turmeric on memory. I file them carefully on the hook behind the door. If there is ever a commission of inquiry into how I lived, call the apron first. Apron will tell you. It keeps better minutes than I do. I have never seen the street. Because, it asks for feet, not opinions. So, mine hesitate, then ignore errands. I have never seen the barricade. It asks for volume. So, mine shuts with the throat, which never forwards the request to the ribs, which are still busy holding in a lifetime of just-in-case breath. The mic, when it does come near, smells like other people’s bravery. I pass it along as if it were too hot to hold; later I brew tea alone and tell myself the tea is also a speech, just quieter and more hydrating. I know the prison calendars that say tomorrow in every square. I know the visiting-hour arithmetic. I count the mildew on the balcony like days owed to someone I would love. I remember the first time my name trembled at a checkpoint and how I laughed about it later, privately, the way people laugh after a near-miss on a staircase. I keep a private list titled: THINGS I WOULD HAVE SAID IF I HAD STOOD UP. It is long, it is brilliant, it is useless. Next to it, another list: THINGS I ACTUALLY DID. There is bread. There is proofreading. There is not showing up at dawn to hold someone’s bag while they shouted. There is not writing their bail application draft. There is some sending of links, and cash, and casseroles. There is never body heat, because when can I ever bear to leave the half-room? I outsource courage to couriers and casseroles. I am not proud. But I am not absent [I HOPE], it is a hope I keep telling myself like a lie. So, I have learned the choreography of "small rebellions" (note: they are still small, very small, always small) which now I think, might be a well-behaved, unraged brother of "weaponized incompetence": seatbacks that straighten when a slur enters the air; a door that opens to a stranger with paperwork; a phone that becomes a lighthouse for a moment and then a kettle again. I have learned to hold a sign in the kitchen, where the audience is onions and they always make me cry. I have learned that shame is a curfew that lives under the skin; some days I grant myself parole. Call me a cowardly rebel and I will set the table silently knowing it will be a blue moon before that changes. I will write the names in the margins because the center column is dangerous. I will mispronounce bravery in public and practice it in private until it knows my mouth. I know what the women outside are doing to the sky; they are teaching it decibels. Envy is my shadow’s tutor and gratitude is my homework. Bless them. I know that they will also shout my name into the permission I cannot yet sign. and scrape the rust from the gates with their vowels because they can and they are doing it. Some afternoons, the light grows unbearable and the half-room shrinks. On those afternoons I stand, I put on shoes, I let the chair sulk. I count to three before I open the door. I step into the corridor with the fragile authority of a mushy bowl of soup carried for myself: spillable, necessary, trembling, moving. If courage is a muscle, mine is still in physiotherapy. It can never carry the pot. It can never hold a banner for two intersections. It will always return to the half-room and write what it saw, not as alibi but as ledger. Receipts, not epics. Never epics. I will never be the loudest in the square. And I will be the last to leave the kitchen light on, and I will never change the door that is locked. But, I am still writing it. Because I don’t want the half-room/kitchen to be romanticized or glorified. I want the fear, the shrinking, the self-inferiorizing, named without sugar. And. I don't want any praises. No consolation prizes. No gourmet metaphors. Just the thing itself. Let the record show the tremor. I just want to write it down. I am not proud of the half-room. I am not proud of the chair. I am not proud of the Wi-Fi, the drafts, the safe angles of courage. I am a cowardly rebel because I am scared. Fear is fluent; I am always learning its accent to answer back. Because the siren in my throat drowns me before I start. Because I watch the women with lit mouths and I shrink in the glare, and that shrinking feels like being cut out of my own outline. I inferiorize myself on schedule. I rehearse disappearing. I compare my pulse to theirs and call it evidence. Do not pin a medal to my typing. Do not turn my soup into symbolism. Do not rebrand hiding as “holding space.” It is hiding. If there is nourishment here, it is for me, not the movement. If there is light here, it is the kind that exposes dust, not doors. I am a desk protestor because the desk is heavier than I admit. Not because the desk is noble. Not because the desk is necessary. Because fear is a talented jailer and I sign the register. I feel emasculated, by which I mean: disqualified from the theater where courage is credited. Yes, I know the word is messy. That is the point. I feel smaller than my own name tag. Envy is a metronome: tick, their poem; tock, my silence. I hate that I measure myself like that. I hate that I lose. I don’t want your absolution. I don’t want your ergonomic pep talk. I don’t want the beautiful myth where the quiet one is secretly the hero. The truth is simpler and uglier: I am afraid of the street and the street knows it. I am afraid of the mic and my hands know it. I am afraid of being seen failing at bravery, so I fail in private where it stings less and lasts longer. I will not call this “care work.” I will not call this “strategy.” I will not call this “baking politics.” Today it is avoidance. Tomorrow it might be effort. I am allowed to say that. I want to be outside. I want to be counted among the loud. I want my body to stop negotiating against me. I want to stop wanting and start going. So here is the only pact that isn’t a poem: I will stand up when the chair feels like glue. I will step outside before my reasons ripen into excuses. I will be counted badly rather than uncounted well. Badly still counts [I HOPE...]. I will tell on myself when I hide. I will not let a metaphor escort me back indoors. If I return to the half-room (and I will), let it be from weather, not from fear. If I write again (and I will), let it be about what I risked, not what I plated. If I fail (and I will), let the failure be public enough to teach me. Let embarrassment be the tuition, please! I am a cowardly rebel. Full stop. Some days that is the whole sentence. On other days I want a different grammar. When the women scream poetry, I will try to join the consonants. When my voice fractures under sunlight, I will keep it there until it learns. When the gate asks for volume, I might carry my small voice to it like water: spillable, insufficient, honest. I hope. And, I know. Begin anyway. No laurels. No consolations. Just a door, and a body, and a choice. I will keep making until it stops feeling like fiction. Witness: this sentence stepping outside.

~ Oizys.

I wish I had a voice.

(Sometime in the last weekend of August - First weekend of September)

I wish I had a voice.

I wish this sound trapped inside me screaming just came out. Just escaped the inferiority complex within me which keeps my voice attached.

The interview email came and I accepted it and they postponed it without further scheduling the night before. I have been writing by hand, preparing for that interview that never got scheduled yet, as if shaping letters on paper could shape my future. It is a good feeling though. Ink drops pressed on my palm. But instead, I have been busy tracing the case of the political prisoner, the morning came and I waited till the afternoon and saw the news, he is not getting out.

I keep spiralling into his case, his life, his family. Going as far back as possible. Where was he born. His house. His street. His family. His grandparents. His parents. His friends. His co-prisoners. His brothers. His co-revolutionaries. What he had done. What he has been doing. Where was he born? Which hospital? What time of day? Was it raining? What was the name of the midwife who delivered him? Did his parents cry with joy, or were they already fighting? What color blanket wrapped him first? Who visited the hospital? Which car brought him home? What road did they drive on? What trees lined that road? What did his childhood room look like? What posters were on his walls? Did he chew pencils? How did he start reading? How did he learn all those languages? Did he secretly cry at night? What was the first lie he told? The first secret he kept? What did his handwriting look like in grade 2? Which teacher scolded him hardest? What lunchbox did he carry? Who sat next to him on the bus? Which street did he ride his bicycle on? Who were his neighbors? Did he ever break a window with a cricket ball? Which girl broke his heart in school? Did he walk home slowly after, or run to hide the tears? Did he scribble her name in the corner of his notebooks? What songs did he listen to on repeat? Did he write then too? Does he still have them? How did he grow into a man? What shoes did he wear for his first job interview? Who was the boss who first saw him as talented? Or lazy? What were the meals he skipped? The drinks he downed? The mistakes he buried? Who held him at his weakest? Who betrayed him? Who laughed at him? And now… his family, his house, his brothers: who came before him, what they carried, what wars they fought, what secrets sit unspoken in their graves. His grandfather’s hands, rough with labor. His grandmother’s lullabies. The unbroken chain of choices and accidents that led to him: standing, breathing, alive in my orbit. And then I look at his present: what he’s doing now, what he’s hiding, what he’s showing. His letters, his words, his periods. His sighs in empty spaces. His dreams. His ghosts. His sins. His every breadcrumb. It’s bottomless. The more I dig, the more the soil caves in. 

And it never ends with him. When the spiral exhausts itself, someone new arrives. They seep through the cracks of my skin, sit beside me in silence, judging, smirking, as if they know my every thought. I daydream them into being until they take over the room. I start curating myself for their gaze: how they would hear me, how they would know me, how they would approve of me. I birth them in my mind, and then live in the shadow of their invented judgment.

I feed my inferiority complex with such maladaptive daydreaming about people who are revolutionaries. Excavating their lives until I can physically feel myself sitting next to their 10-year-old selves. My mind latching onto them as a proxy for its own stuckness, with this meticulous, relentless mapping of his story versus the hollow, fragmented, delayed mess of my own. People who burn and burn and do not stop burning until the world feels their fire. And, right now, he is the fodder.

And here I am, inhaling their smoke second-hand, choking on words I never even manage to say. My voice buried under my ribs while theirs echoes in courtrooms and cells, in manifestos written with their blood and their hunger, their demolished houses and their desecrated tombs. Sometimes I pretend I am one of them (half-a-martyr in my fantasies) my name whispered in a protest chant, my silence mistaken for strategy instead of fear. 

But the truth is less romantic, mostly banal: I refresh the news, dig into archives, collect fragments, imagine dialogues that will never happen. And, he? He sits behind bars, every fibre of his being refusing to pay the cost of his defiance. While he studies, reads, writes, connects, helps people, perseveres. I sit behind my screen, in my half-a-room, my time paying the cost of my avoidance. We are not the same, but my mind insists on tethering me to him, like if I shadow his suffering long enough, I’ll inherit his courage, his knowledge; like if I just inhale every morsel of information about him, I'll become even half virtuous as him.

I don’t.

I only inherit the weight. The heaviness of knowing, and the shame of doing nothing with it. The ever-growing, voracious, venomous, visceral inferiority complex. And maybe that’s why my voice refuses to come out. Because it knows it is not worthy. Because it knows all it can produce are broken echoes of someone else’s fight.

But still... something inside me rattles against the walls of my chest. A sound trying to fracture its way out. A noise that could, maybe, one day, become a voice.

Or maybe not. 

Maybe I am destined to keep researching people who had the audacity to act while I only have the audacity to think. And maybe my “thinking” is nothing more than a sophisticated form of running away, dressing up my avoidance in the language of solidarity. I can convince myself that watching a trial from afar, translating a press release, reading every single footnote in an old report is in itself an act of resistance. It is not. It is me, stuck.

The interview that keeps getting postponed is a mirror of me. Postponed without further scheduling. A future that never arrives. A possibility that dies in the waiting.

And so I sit with the prisoner’s story, weaving it into my own. Pretending the chains on his hands explain the knots in my throat. Pretending my silence is solidarity, when it is just silence.

But maybe silence, too, has its record. Maybe somewhere, somehow, even this unspoken sound counts. It keeps score.

Even if it doesn’t... at least I wrote this down. At least I gave the noise inside me some place to live, if not outside, then here.

And now I am sitting here again, typing when I should be studying or working or atleast looking for a new job, typing when I should be moving forward with something, anything, but I keep convincing myself that tracing the lives of other people who fought harder than I ever will is “important.” Important for what? For who? I don’t know. It is not like my interview tomorrow will forgive me for knowing the birthdate of a man rotting in prison on the other side of the world. It is not like my interviewer will give me points for memorizing the way his ailing mother cried when he was denied parole.

I tell myself this is research, this is awareness, this is solidarity. But really, it is just procrastination wearing a martyr’s mask. I have been writing too much by hand, pretending to prepare for that interview that never got scheduled yet, pretending that neat notes equal progress, while I drown in everyone’s history but my own. And even in that, I am never alone. I keep birthing new figures, conjuring them until they sit beside me, watching, snickering, rewriting me. I curate my words, my tone, my very posture as if they were in the room, measuring me. They are never real, but they control how real I am allowed to feel. And when the mask slips, all I see is me: failing again, wasting again, running again. Why am I like this? Why do I keep filling my head with other people’s suffering instead of facing my own emptiness? Why do I let their cages feel heavier than the chains I’ve built around myself?

The truth is, I don’t know. I only know I’m tired, and guilty, and terrified of opening the exam paper tomorrow with a head full of history that has nothing to do with me.

But I will probably keep scrolling tonight. Keep searching his name. Keep letting myself drown in everything except what I am supposed to be doing.

Maybe one day I’ll call that a voice. For now, it’s just noise.

I should stop now. Before I start imagining how many people will outlive me without ever knowing I was here.

Noise that pretends to be thought. Thought that pretends to be resistance. Resistance that pretends to be survival. Survival that pretends to be life. It folds and folds until I can’t tell where one excuse ends and the next begins. And all of it feels heavier than the silence I started with.

I should stop now. I really should stop now. But the truth is I don’t want to. The truth is I would rather keep spiralling than face the blank page of my textbook, the blank page of my future, the blank page of myself. The truth is the prisoner feels more alive in my head than I do in my own body. The truth is maybe I don’t want a voice at all... maybe I only want an echo.

And maybe this is the echo.

And maybe this is all I’ll ever have.

And maybe that’s fine. And maybe it isn’t. And maybe I’ll keep saying maybe until it loses all meaning, until the word itself becomes just another kind of noise. 

Maybe maybe maybe maybe maybe. 

Even they sit here with me, the ones I birthed, staring as I unravel. My ghosts outnumber me.

Until my mouth fills with it, until my head fills with it, until there is nothing left but the sound of a word that never decides, never commits, never arrives.

And still I can’t stop. I can’t stop circling his name, his case, his prison walls, because if I stop looking at him I will have to look at myself, and I think I would rather die than do that.

And so I stay here, in the repetition, in the delay, in the comfort of knowing that tomorrow will come and I will fail again, and tomorrow will come and I will spiral again, and tomorrow will come and nothing will change, nothing will change, nothing will change.

And I don’t know if I want it to.

I should stop now. I should stop now. I should stop now.

But I won’t.

But I won’t.

But I—

Because stopping feels like admitting there is nothing beyond this. Because if I stop, the silence will be too loud, louder than the noise, louder than the scrolling, louder than the prisoner’s name, louder than the sound in my chest that refuses to come out. Because the silence will remind me that I am not him, I am not them, I am no one, I am nothing.

And so I stretch the words like a thread about to snap. I stretch them thin across the night. I stretch them until they cut into my fingers. I stretch them until they cut into me. I don’t even want answers. I only want the ache of asking. I only want the heaviness of turning questions over like stones, again and again, until my hands are raw. I only want the punishment of staying awake with my own unfinished sentences.

And maybe that’s all I’ve ever wanted: not resolution, not freedom, not even a voice, but the exquisite torture of circling the wound and calling it living.

Maybe this is living.

Maybe this is dying.

Maybe there is no difference.

And if there is... oh, please don’t tell me. Let me stay here, tangled in the noise, swollen with the ache of it, swollen until I burst into nothing at all.

nothing

at all

nothing at all nothing at all nothing...

the page stares back

the page opens its mouth

the page swallows me

I am

I was

I am not

Interview tomorrow

(cancelled)

case yesterday

future never

handwriting without a reader

questions without an answer

voice — no voice — no voice —

just

noise

noise

noise

my chest rattles my chest rattles my chest rattles—

let me out

let me out

let me out

or don’t

or don’t

or—

or don’t

or don’t

or—

o—

—

…

noth

ing

not

i

ng

breath.

breath.

breath.

stopstopstopstop

(still going)

sto—

st——

s

—

SCREAM.

silence.

SCREAM.

smaller scream.

smaller—

s—

…

hands shaking.

h a n d s

shak—

can’t hold it

can’t

can’t

CAN’T

CAN’T

c a n ’ t

…

void.

VOIDVOIDVOID

echo.

e   c   h   o

echoechoechoecho—

STOP.

no.

STOP.

NO.

no—

n—

—

Some couplets that I kept reading throughout the time I wrote this post:

"हज़ारों ख़्वाहिशें ऐसी कि हर ख़्वाहिश पे दम निकले,

बहुत निकले मेरे अरमान लेकिन फिर भी कम निकले।"

("Thousands of desires, each so intense it could take my life,

Many of them came true, yet still — far too few.")

- Mirza Ghalib

"ग़म-ए-हस्ती का 'असद' किस से हो जुज़ मर्ग इलाज,

शमा हर रंग में जलती है सहर होने तक।"

("The sorrow of existence, Asad, has no cure but death,

Yet the candle keeps burning, in every hue, until dawn.")

- Faiz Ahmed Faiz

~

I think they are still watching me. I don't know what to do. I just know how to scream "STOP" in my head. Please go away. Please.

- Oizys.