Then—
a laugh erupts,
unaccounted,
a wild subtraction spilling across the page.

It fractures the sums,
shakes loose the decimals,
sends the ledgers stumbling.

For a moment,
the numbers scatter like startled birds.
The room tilts.
Order falters.

The laugh lingers,
hollow but alive,
a margin note that refuses erasure.

-

Ali Ridha Khan

✈️ Support my research: BackaBuddy
📖 Read my debut poetry anthology: The Ledger and the Body

Columns collapse,
numbers scatter into insects,
gnawing the margins.

At the bottom line:
not profit, not loss—
only the body drained into ink.

The page trembles,
as if to tear itself free,
but closes instead.

-

Ali Ridha Khan

✈️ Support my research: BackaBuddy
📖 Read my debut poetry anthology: The Ledger and the Body

Subscribe now

Every day, someone performs a small miracle here.

A story about kindness, resilience, “learning through failure.”

A CEO who “leads with empathy.”

A middle manager who “found purpose in burnout.”

A consultant who “just wants to make impact.”

LinkedIn has become the church of corporate redemption — a confessional for people who still believe capitalism can be kind if we just post about it enough.

Let’s be honest: the corporate world is not kind.

It is a machinery of extraction — emotional, intellectual, and bodily.

It smiles as it disciplines you, congratulates itself for inclusion while underpaying the very people it includes, and markets burnout as leadership.

HR will call exploitation a “learning curve.” PR will call silence “brand alignment.”

What masquerades here as vulnerability is performance.

Every “I failed but learned” post is an audition for attention.

Every “act of kindness” story is an algorithmic sacrifice, offered to the gods of engagement.

The corporate world does not care about your well-being, your dignity, or your rights. It cares about optics — the appearance of virtue without the cost of change.

So the next time you scroll through a post dripping with gratitude, humility, or “leadership lessons,” remember:

You’re not reading sincerity.

You’re reading marketing copy for the myth that work still has a soul.

End.

-

Ali Ridha Khan

✈️ Support my research: BackaBuddy
📖 Read my debut poetry anthology: The Ledger and the Body

The ledger lists no surplus.
Every dream is collateral.
Every night a warehouse emptied.

The pillow is chalk-dust,
the mattress a receipt.
The body scratches tallies on the ceiling:
///// ///// /////

But the columns never add.
The page curls in fatigue,
ink smears into blackout.

Inventory complete:
zero rest,
negative dawn.

- Ali Ridha Khan

✈️ Support my research: BackaBuddy
📖 Read my debut poetry anthology: The Ledger and the Body

Subscribe now

Debt gnaws at the corners of the page,
a black mold spreading through margins.
Every digit drips tar.
Every promise is counterfeit light.

The body signs the receipt in blood,
skin stamped like counterfeit currency.
The shadow grows larger than the wage,
looming across the wall,
a creditor without a face,
its fingers sharp with subtraction.

Payday does not deliver.
It confiscates.
It counts the pulse,
it audits the bones,
it repossesses sleep.

In the ledger of hunger,
the body is always marked deficit.
And the shadow lingers,
long after the wage is gone,
long after the meal is finished,
long after the body is broken open—
the shadow remains,
demanding more.

- Ali Ridha Khan

✈️ Support my research: BackaBuddy
📖 Read my debut poetry anthology: The Ledger and the Body

Subscribe now

The body becomes a misfired calculator,
joints grinding like jammed gears,
spine warped into a ledger line.

Figures crawl across the surface:
+9 hours, –1 meal, +3 overtime, –2 dreams.
Numbers bite, gnaw, refuse erasure.

The auditor has no face,
only teeth of zero.

Overtime skins itself,
ledger ablaze,
pages twisting into smoke.

- Ali Ridha Khan

✈️ Support my research: BackaBuddy
📖 Read my debut poetry anthology: The Ledger and the Body

Subscribe now

Sketches pile up —
unfinished lines,
half-formed gestures,
dreams abandoned for tomorrow.

The paycheque steadies me,
thin as a rope,
binding me to bread and light
while dangling the question:
what for?

Tiredness builds its own house inside my body.
Bone by bone, brick by brick,
it turns rest into scaffolding.
I carry fatigue the way the city carries cranes—
temporary, permanent,
always in repair.

And still,
purpose hovers like an unfinished sketch.
Not the purpose stamped on contracts,
not the deliverables traded for breath,
but the kind that wakes me differently,
that lets sleep arrive as a guest
instead of a thief.

Because sleep is not surrender.
It is resistance.
It is the quiet theft of hours
from a system that calls us its property.

The exhaustion I wear is not natural.
It is engineered,
designed to keep us compliant,
to turn fatigue into the architecture of survival.

But purpose refuses the ledger.
It is the sketch left unfinished,
the dream untaxed,
the collective whisper that our worth
is not measured by wages,
but by the lives we make
when we dare to rest.

So I close my eyes—
not to escape,
but to reclaim.
To dream beyond the paycheque.
To sleep toward a future
that cannot be bought.

-

Ali Ridha Khan, 28 Aug 2025.

✈️ Support my research: BackaBuddy
📖 Read my debut poetry anthology: The Ledger and the Body

Often masquerading as an acquaintance,

a friend, a passerby - memory reinvented.

Always musing in the background;

sparking magic like knee-jerk reactions frightening,

overwhelming and confusing.

Love is the amazing discovering of wanting nothing

and everything all at the same time.

Love is nothing without understanding, ineffable without you.

By Ali Ridha Khan

-

I have late night conversations

with the moon. She tells about

her sun and I tell her about you.

She says her Sun is radiant, warm

and bright. I say you radiate warmth

and light. Her Sun kisses the skin of

many, warming their hearts and dressing

their souls. Your kisses warm my heart and

permeate my soul.

The Moon wonders whether we’re

talking about the same person, she

asks “Do you miss her when she’s

gone and long for her return?”

“Yes, yes I do”

By Ali Ridha Khan

-

War starts

It never ends.

The battle is over,

Treaties signed.

True war begins,

a war against, within yourself.

War that eats you up;

digesting your morals, values -

blurring your principles.

Killing you from the inside.

Coercing thought, dreams – a damning asking;

“Why did I survive?”

Concludes

This is true war:

“War I fight on my own.”

By Ali Ridha Khan, 2013.

To suffocate my sadness.

To repress my disappointment.

To drown my emotions.

To hide my hurt.

I bury it at all so deeply. All this hurt. All this pain.

I can only rely on myself. Who is there to trust?

I am sufficient.

End.

By Ali Ridha khan