They said success was a ladder.
Mine was a frayed rope, climbing greased Everest

They said success is a journey, not a destination.
Mine had 27 hair pin bends leading to a cactus garden.

They said success is the best revenge.
I just ate calorieless cakes and checked the scales.

They said success is a crown.
I wore a paper hat from a fast-food birthday party.

They said success opens doors.
Mine led to glass windows on the 12th floor.


My life wasn't a success story, but a scavenger's parable,
With duct -taped dreams and footprints on electrified cable.

He resembled Abraham Lincoln in views and looks,
a jawline carved from principle,
voice like a verdict that never needed volume
and I followed him like a nation follows myth.

He was my assigned mentor,
but I choose him for my infatuation.
I studied his pauses more than my syllabus.

I traced words dressed in restraint
and sent through an unmarked number for weeks.
But he knew my cadence,
the way I break a sentence,
the metaphors I reach for
better than I knew myself.

That day,
clouds were shedding incessant tears,
my purple umbrella and his yellow raincoat
were not a match made for this weather.
I stood outside the library, clutching my diary
he stood holding his helmet.
A whisper reached my eardrums
through the hurricane winds-
'People who come together for minds
do not exchange hearts.”

The building behind me, its shelves,
its silence, its sanctity crumbled
into my chest.
The heartquake wasn't loud, just exact.

Wet slippers took my drenched heart
to an ice cream parlour.
Ordered a parfait for a perfect shakeup.

My thumb still remembers his number,
But knowledge has tied it into a fist.

He took my heart like a free sample
tasted, smirked, then shelved it.
I scorched his hands,
Now, he shops with mittens on.

Ghouls and gentle folk,
the Festival of Forgetting begins.
Gathering round the bonfire
of buried truths, to roast ashes of remains.
A tradition older than outrage.

Celebrating the pious art
of inherited blindness,
where moral thoughts are disabled
and performance of paralysis begins.

Costumes of children bobbing for clean water
in barrels of charity,
Vendors hawk replicas of scented rubbles,
for guilt -free consumption.

Footages are watched to flinch stylishly,
placards paraded with rhyming slogans,
pleas are sock -stuffed by chimneys
of "everything-not our-problem".

When the ceremony ends,
they hang their conscience like
pressed coats at the door.

The tortoise waited at the finish line,
Hare rushed with heart thudding.
The jungle exploded at the speed of love
Race was never the point.

Red clot threads obsidian veins,
summoned by ruptured chambers.
Walls convulse to a maze of memory.
It pulses at the wrist,
exiled from the heart.

Dida packed a brass comb
and the deed of a house
she would visit again and again -
only in her nightmarish dreams.

Platform walls were splattered
with fresh red signatures of delay.
The train was late because the
conductor's throat was slit.

Clock hands were frozen at fifteen past twelve
She stacked herself in a compartment
with three bodies and sacks of rice.

She was busy counting the flies,
one crawled into a boy's eye,
seven clung to the huge belly of a woman.
The limbs of an old man were twitching,
shooing them away.

The iron wheels shrieked one last time
before the land parted ways,
and a girl in ripped banners was shoved in,
her knees black with crusted blood.

Outside, the station dogs howled.
Inside, time had been murdered.

Comb's teeth dug in the palm, mapping.
The rice sacks leaked grain by grain
like a funeral procession.
The DEED was done.