Hours are not spent well in lethargy

nor in deep-seated exhaustion

Hours are rarely spent

more – lost

I live in a state of competition

Each breath a race to completion

I have almost spent more time

crying than sleeping

But my resume will be beautiful

Reflect: I am clawing over the gaping maw

the pitfalls of failure, of burning out too soon

I don’t have the minutes to breathe

the air is thin on this Godwin Austen we built

I’d still summit with my lungs collapsing

I hold in this brittle absence of warmth I made

where my joys drained out into obligation:

a ladder rung towards those burgeoning heavens

where the oxygen is honeyed sweet

tinged acrid by ozone

and Nike will smile sphinx-like and proud

For now I am drinking

the chalk pastel fumes

and bunsen burner lights

Talent is unattainable as it become the scale

the colors have never been so vibrant

I try, yet

Script. Running letters, rushing water, ink in motion

My craft is lovely – I am not so fine for it

I am ink boiled down

globules, mucus: it does not run well

the time taken

I cannot keep up

My dreams are out-lapping me

Ambition, love, ambition

fake the talents you don’t possess

Cheapen their worth –

inflation in the face of the girth of expectation

paint all you do in jewel tones even as you drown

the more that you have, the better

Don’t pause and leave your fields fallow

the seasons are quick

It is not so far now

I will approach that great leviathan – presenting

what I almost could have built,

in the cherry red ink I siphoned off my veins,

the eldritch horror I assembled with every mercurial hour

Pleading, am I enough?

It will not dredge the void I insisted upon

nor erase the hours I spent hefting a reverent ideal

I’ll chant ascension in glory glory glory

Though I am no more than the sum of my parts

The answer

will be mundane

Take that as it is