Kairosclerosis ✔ [poetry]

viscid

23

VISCID

⸻

we're born like this.

into this.

into claustrophobic confinements of flesh,

into maelstroms of anger and sadness

rattling inside empty brains.

into whirlwinds of pride and ego

morphed, shaped, nurtured with care and calculation

by the wrong hands, wrong touches.

into indefinite dreams and needs we cannot

define nor explain.

into a generation of idiots unable to speak

unless somebody tells us what to say.

we're born like this.

born automatically sorted into nomenclatures

that churn us from machine parts to old cogs,

born a waste product of an industrial complex,

a writhing mass of discarded metals in the junkyards.

born bowing our backs and kissing the toes

of self-appointed gods and saints.

we're born like this.

into a definite, distinct, disoriented

wrongness of dependency and illnesses.

into a great, abrupt clarity of a downfall,

balancing the line between perdition and empyrean,

born easily broke down and frightened,

born into a quiet violent apprehension,

born a free-falling equilibrium,

born blind, deaf and muted

in more ways than one.

we're born like this.

laying on our bed,

last day of our lives hovering over our heads.

we're born dying,

yet not dead.

stumbling and grappling through

the darkness stretching ahead.

we're born into colours of rage and joy

an identical dull, dirty, dishwater brown-grey shade.

we're born into this casual, derisive fatalism,

this nonchalant jaded mannerism.

born weary and wrinkly, cripple and ruin,

born a husk,

in our birth,

and in our death.

we're born like this.

stripped bare,

thrust into these feeble irrational moralities

our parents tuck in the pockets of our chests;

into these impotent delusional compassion swarming at

the back of our maimed, twisted minds.

born thinking we can be greater, grander than

our fat bodies and plastic beliefs,

crammed inside tiny cists of cement blocks and inflation.

we're born into this

where good times that feel like insects

chittering inside our empty stomachs,

and bad times that feel like dopamine

crawling into our split-opened veins.

we're born like this,

and we'll die like this.