Kairosclerosis ✔ [poetry]

cold comfort

28

COLD COMFORT

⸻

used to call myself

a writer, a poet.

spent hours sitting

on the unforgiving couch into the wee hours of the morning,

drowning in dull, continuous clacks of the keyboards,

vomiting words all over the blank pages with a feverish fervent of a religious maniac,

arranging and rearranging,

building and breaking

sentences and paragraphs

with a childish giddiness.

life was all about:

thinking, living, breathing,

writing.

strange, now, looking back,

how my writing career abruptly concluded.

a couple of handfuls of

fake-deep poems,

drabbles,

and a short story that never really gets a proper ending.

i don't call myself anything anymore.

you either live long enough to

make it big,

or finally, understand

you'll leave behind

very little,

next to nothing.

i am nobody:

a statistical number in rigged polls, a blurry face in the crowd;

another soul that scuttles up and down the aisles of life;

a car in ever-flowing and ever-stagnant traffic;

another job resume amongst other job resumes;

i am just another one

of the thousands, millions of so-called writers and poets out there

eagerly hunching in the dark, typing away,

enthusiastically reading their works to a room full of people

equally eager to present their piece of trash.

applauding and smiling and clapping for each other

as if their talent was greater than the flimsy performance they had put on.

i am another forgettable death,

thinking i was something more than the insignificant aimless existence i had lived

and the poetry and story circle-jerking reading sessions i attended.

nowadays, i only write

when i've had enough beer,

enough emptiness inside me

to feel the gravity of my skeleton and bones rattling in my mortal flesh.

i only write when i've had enough of the mundane

and dumbed-down stupor

that was reality.

i only write when the late evening coffee hadn't worn off,

and the neighbour's dogs hadn't stopped barking deep into the night.

i am not a writer, not a poet.

i only write.