Kairosclerosis ✔ [poetry]

to death

09

TO DEATH

⸻

you've been thinking about your death a lot

thinking about dying,

often. lately.

there's a fragile correlation between

living to die,

and, dying to be alive.

as you start dying, the moment you're alive.

you'll examine the ceiling fan,

trying to figure if it could hold your weight,

thinking about the two minutes it would take

to black out from strangulation

the shuffles of memories

of regrets

playing at the back of your conscious,

begging you to change your mind

at the very last second

before you die.

you'll shake your mother's sleeping pills onto your cupped palm,

how much is too much?

how much is enough?

don't want to be in a chemical coma

stuck: half-alive, half-dead.

something about the painlessness,

the ordinariness

of falling asleep and

never quite wake up.

terrified you.

you'll past the suicidal phase of your life pretty quickly, you know.

aren't brave enough to follow through,

aren't depressed enough to make it happen.

but you'll keep thinking about it still.

violent death,

peaceful death.

metaphorical deaths of the soul,

the brain,

the heart.

the death

the hell

everybody desperately want to escape to,

escape from.

dying is no longer an obsession,

it's just a tick,

a reminder,

as you grow older.

you want to choose how to die,

when to die.

want death to be

your magnum opus.

why die, like those

half-formed fetuses that never able to claw out of their mothers' wombs;

babies whose soft skull fathers crushed while they were wailing?

why die, like those

naive kidnapped whose organs were traded around for million bucks;

poor bastards pummelled to death, believing their wise words would sway the mass?

why die, like those

senseless pigs that went down with a stroke before they even turned sixty;

warm wax corpses lay waiting for the tumorous cancer to feast away the body?

to die

it's better to die the way a cosmo squeeze shut

than to die

like a snuff of flame.

it's better to be found on the streets, gutted open,

than to be found

on your deathbeds, like millions and millions of others.

it's better to die with

thousands mourning your death for the briefest blip in history,

becoming a bizarre godlike figure,

revered and trotted around for clout

becoming a notable part of this ancient civilization,

hundreds of years from now.

it's better than dying

knowing only some would mourn your death,

knowing most wouldn't,

knowing you'd be missed maybe a few times a year,

likely forgotten after the dirt had packed.