Dear the Personification of Exams

You have finally come around
Should I treat you like best friend or archenemy?
Your arrival is always accompanied by ambivalence.

Perhaps an elderly, fatherly figure?
The mischievous author putting his protagonist
into yet another rite of passage,
to colour the whole bildungsroman
blacker, redder, whiter?

Or a warden.
You lurk in my calendar grid
Imprison me behind the bolded bars
Will I ever see again the light of day?

Well, yes, I know I will
But around you the fabric of Time twists into a loop
A moment with you can be gruellingly interminable:
Eternity in three weeks.

So here I am paying tribute to your existence
When I should be doing something else.