Writers Jam

the world is burning not only the kind of fire that splits wood and swallows homes but the other fire, the invisible one that drips from the corners of the brain that gnaws at the roots of thought like a rat nesting in the skull. the fire outside - red, sprawling, tyrannical is only the reflection of the one inside, the one that eats language that turns words into smoke before they leave the tongue. every sentence is already ash by the time it touches air. cities crumble like wet bread, bridges snap like spines beneath too much memory, monuments sweat molten tears and in the midst of it, the living shuffle forward, faces streaked with soot as if they were half-statues waiting to be buried by their own shadows. i see mothers wrapping their children in sheets of flame because there is nothing left unburned. i see lovers pressing their lips together only to taste cinders, kisses that scar the mouth into silence. i see a man dragging his coffin behind him, mistaking it for a suitcase while the fire whispers - you will need this soon. even the stars have caught fire, they flicker above like candles sputtering in wind, reminding us that the sky, too, can be devoured. the moon is no longer a moon - it hangs like a charred coin, a payment to the void. Inside me the fire multiplies. veins hiss like oil. each rib becomes a torch. the heart itself burns not with passion but with something slower, more brutal - a kind of cosmic fever, a disease without cure. to breathe is to inhale embers to exhale a prayer already blackened. the world is burning. forests cough black lungs oceans sweat themselves into saltless puddles and glaciers slip away like secrets we were never ready to hear. animals vanish mid-sentence, their bones spelling out a language no one has time to translate. everything smolders. everything forgets how to live. and then there is me in my small, overheated room, pretending my universe is not collapsing only revising for a mid sem tomorrow. my notes look less like knowledge and more like tinder. every page wants to burst into flames, every word glows like a coal i cannot touch without blistering. how do you memorize theories while the horizon itself is screaming how do you underline a textbook when the margins smell like smoke? the fire outside melts glaciers, the fire inside melts me, slowly, pathetically as i try to remember whether entropy increases in a closed system when clearly, it does. this room is proof. perhaps that is the comedy of it all: that we are told to study as if grades will extinguish rising seas as if an ‘A’ can rebuild forests. tomorrow i'll sit in a classroom, pen trembling like a candle wick while the world outside burns with its own syllabus. tragedy because it is unbearable. comedy because it is absurd to balance an apocalypse with an exam timetable. maybe that is all life ever was: one long mid sem taken in a burning world. people walk but their shadows walk faster, stretching, becoming wolves that bite at their heels. in every step lies a funeral. in every gesture, a confession. the fire translates us into skeletons before death has the time to intervene. what do you call a world on fire? a pyre? a womb? a theatre? maybe it is all three. a pyre where history is cremated, a womb where despair is born again and again, a theatre where the actors continue to bow long after the audience has fled. and still, the fire does not roar. it whispers, intimate like a lover pressing its mouth to your ear: all that you cherished was kindling. all that you feared was fuel. even your silence especially your silence- burns best. the world is burning. and i, too, cannot decide if the smoke filling my lungs is from the forests outside or the forests inside my skull.