It's Like Clockwork

Note: I tried to do this thing this year called Escapril, where you have to write a poem based on a prompt every day in April. I finished the first nineteen days of it without hesitation, but got plagued with the delta variant during the last 10 days of the month. It's funny how I wore a mask, sanitized my hands a copious amounts of time and stayed cooped up in my depressing room only to have my energy completely knocked out. At least, I withstood it and came out sane, so that's good, I guess. This poem was meant for day 23 (23rd April), the prompt was clocks. I associate so many feelings with clocks, it's hard to express all of them. This poem captures one of them, Time just passing away, incessantly. Even though I wrote it when it wasn't April anymore, I still like how it turned out. This, right here, is the most self-aware piece of writing I've ever done. I love how meta this poem is but it definitely could be better, Especially the rhyme scheme and how utterly inconsistent it is. But alas, what can I do, now?

Tick

A second passes

Tock

A minute passes

Tick

An hour passes

Tock

A day passes

Tick tock tick tock tick tock

A week, a fortnight, a month, a year, a decade, a millennium

An eon

Tick

A paralyzing fear

Tock

A never ending feel

Tick

What are you doing with your life?

Why do you waste your time, idly?

Writing pages and pages on end

About themes that

No one reads.

Tick

Why do you spend a lifetime over-thinking?

Every little thing

Tock

Enough with this lack of confidence!

I’ve been waiting for fifteen years

And you’re still the same person

Tick

Stop thinking of yourself

You self-obsessed excuse

Stop being insecure

And do something of use

Tock

I can’t solve this sum

It must mean I’m dumb

Why has god given me a brain this stupid?

And does god even exist?

STOP, THERE’S NO TIME FOR THIS

Tick

I will spend the entirety of my days

Being sad, dismal and stressed

Because for as long as I live I’ll never be free

My brain won’t let me breathe

I want to be free

Tock

God, you and your

First world problems!

People are struggling with real things

And you’re crying over your brain not being “free”

The audacity!

Tick

Why do you do this?

You’re not Whitman, Dickinson

Yeats, Poe, Blake

Frost or Wilde

What you write is mild

You’re just a stupid child

The stupid child gets up

And she looks at her table

She sees monuments

Of books, binders

The last time she ate was yesterday night

She forgets about water, more than she’d like

And she’s not special, is she, now?

Because if the camera zooms out and pans over every child her age

All of them are in the same state

But no one shall take them seriously

Until they do something drastic, of course

Then maybe someone will look

Concernedly

For all the wrong reasons

Admittedly

Tick

You’re a speck

A speck of dust

That the universe flicks over

Tock

The never ending

Ever expanding

Universe

And then there’s you

.

.

And just like that a whole new day’s gone too.

And just like that a whole new week’s gone too.

And just like that a whole new year’s gone too.

And just like that a whole new lifetime’s gone too.