ABOUT THE POEM: At 1:30 a.m. on 5 December 2025, the same 42-year-old man who once begged for unpaid friendship now turns his scalpel inward and outward in equal measure. Years of rejection have crystallised into a single, ice-cold thesis: women do not respect men who refuse to dominate. He has tried the opposite of every “alpha” script—offering boundless space, absolute choice, zero coercion—and the result is always the same: contempt. The nicer he becomes, the more invisible or pathetic he appears. Tonight he recalls a specific woman (perhaps a former lover, perhaps a paid companion who briefly blurred the line) who laughed in bed while displaying her augmented breasts and declared, “They didn’t get this big all by themselves.” To him the sentence is a confession and verdict: her body, her identity, her very self-worth were shaped not by introspection or transcendence but by the crude, transactional attention of men willing to command, pay, or coerce. She is not asking Shiva’s question “Who am I?”—she already knows exactly who she is: a creature perfected by the marketplace, fed and enlarged by every shepherd who knew how to say “stay” and mean it. He, the crow at the asylum window, remains starving outside the glass, punished precisely for refusing to carry a crook.Women don’t respect me.
They have the old cattle instinct:
they wait for the shepherd’s crook,
the clear fence, the decisive voice
that says “this way, not that.”
I arrive without a staff.
I hand them the entire sky to fly in,
a heart spacious enough to call home,
and-worst of all-I give them the freedom
to choose their own direction.
The moment I do,
I become, in their eyes,
incompetent.
Powerless.
A man who refuses to herd
is a man who cannot lead.
She can read the hunger in a stranger’s stare
sliding over her curves from twenty metres away,
yet when hands land on her breasts
she claims not to know whose they are-
cousin, customer, boyfriend, mine-
all the same temperature, all the same weight.
What am I supposed to conclude?
That she does not know herself
any better than she knows the hands?
She is less a woman
than a patient in the soft-wing ward,
rocking, smiling, unreachable.
And I am the crow on the sill outside her barred window,
black-winged, starving,
beating myself against the glass
because desire is the only madness I was ever diagnosed with.
That night in bed she laughed
and cupped them proudly:
“They didn’t get this big all by themselves.”
No.
They were fed by every shepherd
who ever knew how to say “stay.”
She is not looking for the philosophical equivalent of “Who am I?”-
no cosmic inquiry, no Shiva.
Shiva is like a sigma male, who gives equality;
he surrenders and thus he gives permission to open up.
She doesn’t want equality, though; that’s not her game.
She already knows the part she plays;
she knows the script, the price per hour,
the going rate for self-deception.
After rehearsing a thousand excuses
to feel superior-why she couldn’t come,
why she was above the man taking her out,
why he must have something rare to offer-
the truth arrives on the date itself:
“You don’t let me see anything of the world
when we’re out. You just keep kissing.”
As if he were the obstruction
standing between her and the world
she imagines is waiting for her
just one step past his mouth.
His stick, his buffalo.
If I don’t carry the stick,
how is it her fault?
Why should she be blamed?
Bhasmasura is not wrong.
