Kairosclere

Kairosclere Jul 2021

Nurse.

A man died under my care today.
Several do, tears swirled,
Such is the state of the world
Drowning in dismay.
He held my hands,
The grip of a newborn holding on
To dear life, Will his weapon.
I look at the thin bands
Of his fingers against mine
And see flashes of several before
Which held on with the same fervor
Inevitably falling limp, then their ashes in brine.
There is no structure or integrity
In a mind not allowed to dwell
On circumstances that make your heart swell.
I still look down in brevity.
Since long I have been detached
Lest my heart give out, hiding,
Behind an illusion of my tidings
And clothe myself in denial unmatched.

Kairosclere Jul 2021

Blending.

I sit amidst the bustling crowd
Of children and parents
Under a lazy winter sky
With a book in hand,
Seeing but not looking
At the passing sigmoid shapes-
Brightly clothed, brightly toned
Squeals of joy, few of which
Catch my passing eyes.
I see her in parts, this child,
Her hair, petulant, untamed,
Flying, as though it is a mane,
With enough rebellion against gravity
That matches her scream of joy
As she slides down
Right into the arms of her laughing father.
A small smile peeks over his shoulder,
And my lips tilt in response,
To that one soul who knew I sit here.
I quickly look back down into my book.
I blend in again into a scene
Where I clearly don’t belong,
Except for a smile bestowed
In acknowledgement
Of a timid existence.
I never got to know her name.

Kairosclere Jun 2021

Bland.

I refrained from reading
Books of poetry
Due to a festering fear
Of confirmation
Of my subpar talent.
With hesitation,
I opened my first,
And what an interesting surmise
Our poems
Were all equally bland.

If I go down y'all are going down with me.
*angelic smile*

Kairosclere Jun 2021

A Contrasting Ideal.

To wonder whether
The object of your romanticism
Would never match
A harsh reality;
We say the cup is half full
Or half empty.
I don't know that which is real,
Because I put a rosy filter
Over life's hardships
And cast a darker shadow
Over fairytales.
And you begin to wonder
Where the two things mix
And stay in the sweet middle
Of a contrasting ideal.

Kairosclere Jun 2021

Everyday.

MAJOR TW (mental illnesses)

It feels oppressive lately. Blindly ticking things off a schedule, halfheartedly, just because I want to tick the entire thing, and hence check out the boxes, even if I had dome the things without much consent or interest.

These boxes that I drew for monthly tasks, daily tasks, twenty or so of them to include in my 24-hour day. So, my mental exhaustion was surprising and contradictory, considering I was the one who set those tasks out for myself. It is the 15th of December, 2019, a year is coming to an end, and I feel like so will everything else on Earth. Well, not because I’m a sociopath, but it is a strong gut feeling. I’m standing at the precipice of burnout, having bitten so much more than I can chew.

Every day I take on more tasks, not knowing when to say no when to stop. I think I can juggle everything, but it did not mean that it didn’t drive me nuts.

I have had zero creative outlets lately. And for so long, I sit down wanting to be productive and head out having done nothing. I beat myself up for my inadequacies. I should really be better than this. And yet, my mind and heart are so utterly exhausted. Lately, I have also developed body dysphoria. I cannot look at myself in the mirror without coughing out a little hate.

I used to think I was one of those people who had come to terms with being themselves and loving themselves. Well, I still think I am, but in love with a far away version of who I will be, who I have the potential to be, and not this version of me whose empty eyes gazed back every day. Maybe that is the cause of the hate, holding myself to the high standards I’ve set for myself and always, always coming up short. It makes me want to lash out at a lot of people, and at a lot of minor things. Well, lately, I have been.

But I do not feel any better. I fact, I feel like I’m drowning every day. I feel that I don’t belong. I’ve read that almost all of these symptoms are of anxiety. A friend even pointed out that it might be of depression.

Ask everyone else whom I interact with and they will surely say I’m one of the most outgoing people they have ever met. I’m good at masking; good at pretending. I do not lie, but I deceive, with slender word-plays and elaborate loopholes. Maybe all of this makes me a horrible person. That’s what I have been beating myself over every day, for very long.

Hindsight isn’t an amazing superpower to have. I don’t think I am stuck in place with regrets, though. Always jotting down plans, consequences, and places I will be in if I chose a particular course of action. And yet, you cannot keep devising plan after plan when every single thing you’ve thought would happen doesn’t, or even if it does happen, in some brutal mockery of it.

This does not mean I have stopped. I still make plans. Still, schedule, as if it is a ritual every day. But, I think I have reached a point of a standstill when I can see that not much that I do can change what’s to come.

I mean, why work when you’ll definitely not end up where you want to be? In contradiction, how could you know if you will have achieved it if you just stop trying?

Every thought contradicts itself, and the next, changes course entirely.

What am I working towards? Am I working hard enough?

That is all relative because however hard I try, there will always be someone more talented. An impostor in my own skin, these thoughts don’t leave me alone.

I have knowledge without depth. Ideas and personality formed from a culmination of all sorts of inputs I’ve got in my life. I fear I am not original. Accepting compliments for the same leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. I feel like sometimes, I am not even a real person. Just a shell that manages to tick off the daily tasks.

So, I try to be the most genuine person anyone has ever met. Earlier comments about hiding parts of myself notwithstanding- I hide only the darkest parts of myself. The side that will make people pity me. The side that is so swathed in the darkness that the glimmer of hope that people speak of, there is zero hope of even encountering it.

I have a pile of books waiting beside me, yet, encountering them is the last thing I want to do. Well, I do not know what I want to do. Always stuck in a negative spiral of emotions and I fail to see the way out. Not always, no, but on days like these, when nothing seems to go right.

Maybe it is easier to say “this will pass” and look forward to a future than deliberating, as I have been doing for countless days, but ignoring and wishing these thoughts away doesn’t do much to silence them.

It's funny how well I seem to pick apart and arrange, categorize and analyze what’s going on inside, but in reality, I sit with a blank expression, scratching away conflicting thoughts trying to make some sense of them.

Small blessings, that the tear-stains on my pillow are near-invisible.

THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION
I REPEAT
THIS IS FICTIONAL
If you relate to this, I am sorry.

Kairosclere Jun 2021

Indivi(duality).

I tremble at the very thought
That knowledge is a vice
As long as its not learnt,
Not imposed upon,
Free thinking individuals
Are a bane to the society
Because they say things
They actually mean
Unlike those that connive
And cheat and con
With their truth-seeming lies
To make the world spin
Just with the weight of their guilt
That nobody ever accepts
The taboo to simple truths
That requires a magnanimous courage
To even comprehend saying it:
They are of no benefit,
Individuals with a mind of their own
Simply because
They never cease to disagree to mediocrity
But aspire to influence
To inspire the heroic in man
Who might as well choose
To abscond the path to their greatness
And instead seek salvation
Without realising that both
Are one and the same.

ISTG THIS IS THE LAST ONE FOR THE DAY

Kairosclere Jun 2021

IN THE THROES OF WOE, BY AN UNRELIABLE NARRATOR

I sat down
Trying to write a script-
Something to awe,
Before you decide to draw
This entire joke to a close-
And I think my hands
Moved of their own accord
Some ghost possession, I guess,
Or maybe I just wanted to write about ghosts
Anyway (read twice)
There was this human
Who turned Fae-
Argh no, scratch that,
Too cliche,
This Fae, she turned human!
Ahh see now that the story begins to weave!
I mean, I guess,
I weave the story
Or rather
This ghost guiding my hand.
He seems the same type as Casper, though,
Except with the creative range
Of a twenty year old
In the middle of college,
And lost all his imagination.
Words- WORDS!
Ah woe is me, she cried,
Because in a world where
She was supposed to be immortal,
She was stripped of her pride.
And there the straw ****** dry,
No creative juice these days
The ghost came by.
(Because he was intangible?
And anyway couldn’t consume
All that gave our meat sacks
Ill deserved pleasure?)
I pat the ghost on his head
Like an affectionate pet
And ask him to go on,
Because even though trash,
(HA, GOLDEN)
The only reason I was writing
Was through his pen.
She used to be a goddess in her own realm,
All powerful, all mighty,
Beautiful, very pretty,
(here we both are stuck-
To catch words, flowery,
That they would attract the best of bees,
To pollinate, and pass on the word,
Of this unfinished story),
And we keep the pen down
As an attempt
To at least attract wasps-
But now,
She gave up what she treasured most
For a love
That promised itself until eternity
Into this man
She had looked all from afar
And decided
It was either him or nothing at all.
I turn to him,
Yes, the friendly
Burnt-out college dude,
“Wait, isn’t this the plot
Of every major fantasy?
Or are you just channeling yours’
Through me?
All the time wasted on assignments,
And I become your bard
Guiding through a weird
Fanfiction?”
I don’t get an answer,
Obviously, because,
As I said, he is intangible,
Beyond words, beyond form,
A presence
That might not be here at all.
(I also cannot see him
Shaking his head
As I type word after word, muddled,
As he chews on imaginary bread.)
But somehow the words erase
(I know this because of the
Frantic clicking of the backspace bar
And a cursor
The seems to have forgotten
All that was written
By the predecessor-)
Written over minutes long,
As though my will does not count
Into all that he had planned.
So we begin our charade again:
Him, channeling all his pent up anxiety
Over ghost college-
Ah I think the
Math assignment due
Did everything but spur him on
To finish this poem,
And his lack of creativity
Into this newfound hobby.
She went on to confess
Her undying love
For this man, mortal,
And he looked at her
Long and lost,
And said,
“Who are you?”
Sounding so similar to
All those I had
Tried to speak to-
Ah! The trauma!
Woe is me.
There are shitposts
And there is poetry
The artistic skill required to
Merge them both
Is just treachery
To everyone who possesses a brain.
And when I am just
On the verge of pressing the cross
Not one that will lead to salvation-
But definitely one that will
Liberate the reader’s sensibilities
My mouse moves,
Saves the file,
And mails it to you instead.

If you sat through the previous one, why not another lmaoo
I do love tormenting people.