Kairosclerosis ✔ [poetry]

AFTERWORD

"Kairosclerosis" (noun) is the moment when one realizes they are currently happy and begin to consciously try to savour the feeling—prompting their intellect to identify the happiness, pick it apart and put it in context, where the happiness will slowly dissolve until it is an aftertaste.

The word invokes a very specific loss of fleeting happiness. The broader concept refers to a brief, abrupt change in emotions between the highs and lows of life, between the many monotonous stretches of boringness—which people experience, but never consciously articulate or describe.

Those kairosclerosis, or transition emotional periods, are not memorable. They don't linger long enough, lost amongst spikes and dips of more extreme sensations. Kairosclerosis is a mix of everything—fading happiness, arising sadness, suppressing anger and simmering disgust. Yet, they feel like nothing at all. For once one's intellect carefully analyze the emotion, the current emotions suddenly feels unexplainably faked, false—superficially nurtured and maintained.

Perhaps kairosclerosis is the strange, out-of-body detachment after one's conscience recognizes the groundless, meaningless flickering emotions running through them. The causation to why they are happy, or sad, or angry, or disgusted, is no longer as significant as they are originally perceived or presumed. There is no longer an outstanding emotion that the conscious mind could anchor in. The abrupt self-awareness sows doubt into the experience, making the mind question whether they are really feeling what they are feeling, or they are experiencing some sort of secondhand, expected emotional reactions.

After all, what makes the extreme sensations any different from identical strands to the numerous eventless moments preceding and following their life—when they are all seemingly born out of nowhere and are not meant to last forever anyway?

The poetry collection, Kairosclerosis, dive deeper into the human psyche as it bends under the mundanity of life, exploring the range of emotional combinations and the empty state of neutrality itself.

The pallid prose and repetition, the undefined atmosphere, the unreliable narration occupied these poems, combined to create surreal, strange human creatures that do not understand themselves any more than the readers could. Some personas are idealists, some are nihilists, and some are tired. Inspired by Charles Bukowski, Phillip Larkin, Carl Phillips and Edward Thomas, these poems showcases anonymous identities, whose greatest epiphany comes to them with a cruel calmness and acceptance, and a contemplative understanding of their own insignificant fates in relation to others, to their immediate surroundings, and to the world at large.

Each of the five sections are anchored by an interconnecting storyline. Through stories of a deteriorating friendship, a narrator trapped physically and mentally in one place, a mundane political backdrop, suppressed individualism and a search for ordinary appreciation for life, Kairosclerosis explores the intricacy within sadness, neutrality, fear, anger and happiness. Reality and the raw, rough side of life are loaded with grotesque images but are also reduced to mere shimmers out the corner of their eyes. The mortal suffering caught in glimpses, never full. At best, the incongruous elements create a dreamy, nightmarish utopia mental and physical landscape. At worst, the poems are simply self-pity and observations of daily nothingness.

Thank you to everyone who read Kairosclerosis. I hope you enjoyed it.

See you on the flip side.