Now and again
I turn my clocks to the wall
so their thrum
can dwindle as it will
down the paintwork,
across the day’s occlusions.
Time needs its rest too,
needs to cry silently
in its place of no depth or echo.
It is called on endlessly
to be the potboy of momentousness,
to have age and epoch
tied to its leg
as a tin can might hunt a dog
through thorn and waste.
Forever it must feel
the grit of late and early
pressed deep into its skin
as though it were invented
expressly to be blamed.
Time takes hit after hit
for sins beyond its making.
Which is why it needs
ever and again
to sit with its bedevilments,
to sob in wonder
at why it ever was,
to face itself as a question alone
much as an ancient fingerpost
might accept it points to nothing now
and knows no way.
