Time Piece

 

I exist

In this instant

 

The time is now

There’s only so much time

Where did the time go

Time goes by

Quickly now

Shifts to then

 

There was this time

In this one hour

When I felt real

 

Three blind mice

Running behind

Didn’t get there on time

Up the clock each day

Wasting hours away

 

Forget to set the clock

All the time in the world

Forget to flip the switch

Turn back the day

Hold on tonight

 

And that is time

 

Time is up

One last time

Parting frozen moment

Seconds tick so loud

When the alarm sounds

 

I hear a heart beat

My time peace

 

LT

Variations on Time

1. Time Out

 

I sit on a bench as cars, buses whirr by, light from the sky

crowning them in sharp shine. Children on scooters, bikes,

skates, they go by too. I watch their shadows change as the

day shifts, watch them pass, headed east, headed west, headed

somewhere I am not, and gone just like that.

 

Morning opens its door just a crack at first, letting

light seep through only the bottom before allowing

it to spill over and finally sucking it all back. Each day

the same on that bench, but each missing something

from the one before. A subtle loss that leaves a ring in

the ears, the sound grows heavier, fills the cavity in the

chest where breath goes.

 

Cars whirr by in new models, children grow up and make

children, day always cracks dawn overhead then dissipates

into nostalgic breeze. But no day is like that first one when

light rolled in so bright it  blinded everything in sight and

promised brilliance.

 

 

2.

blades of nostalgia cut the air against my skin, this decade old vision of my hair long and me kneeling over against you in black and olive tones has worn thin at the edges. all this time and it is still there and i wonder why i painted it to begin with…

 

 

 

 

3.

I wake up to time having already slipped away

slid through crevices

that I am not quick enough to guard.

Synapses that creak

that I am too lazy to mend

and I wonder why I do this to myself,

why not just wake up and get on with it full force

hold on like I’m sifting for precious jewels

 

 

 

 

4.

How many lives are buried in our palms lifetimes

of lines lines of lifetimes, hidden narratives that

continue to play themselves spin themselves

like tops spun by the ghost fingers of past and

future selves simultaneously?

 

 

 

 

5.

Time takes everything with it, Time’s a greedy child that packs the world and its infinite everything into his Radio Flyer and pulls it fast behind him into adulthood until Time dies

 

 

 

 

   

 
   

time passes. i keep waiting for time to heal this wound. grief. when i am happy my heart beats like a hummingbird, my blood flows freely through my veins. each platelet healthily rushing along. no plaque or clotting in sight. when i was a little girl, 8 or so, my aunt took me to solvang. it’s a little tourist town in california that’s all danish and hans christian anderson themed. very cute. there was this stall selling oysters where you could find a pearl. she bought me one. i didn’t know then that every oyster had a pearl inside. i thought i had picked a one-in-a-million oyster. my only knowledge of oysters, truth be told, before this was from the alice in wonderland cartoon, actually. but i had never won prizes at fairs, so this seemed to be a lucky occasion. she had them put my pearl in a silver ring. i thought it was the best thing ever. we went to anderson’s split pea restaurant in buelton on the way home. i put a bit of all of the toppings from the platter in the center of the table on my soup. back then, the brown, pea soup and yellow interior seemed amazing, almost magical. close to disneyland. time would make it tacky. age would make it sentimental, wonderful, again. this memory, every memory, of her, is tied up, locked up, in that phone call. the call years later from childhood. telling me that she’d killed herself. and for years after that i’d simply not answered my phone for fear that every call would bear news of death. of another abandonment. another failure on my part. blocked numbers, still, are best sent straight to voicemail. you never know. ignore all calls, think of pearls. time will tell.

time capsule

this song is a time capsule.  i am fourteen years old. rhinestones in my hair. Celebrity Skin. slinky silver chainmail dress. cheap combat boots. i dream of holden and charlie the wallflower and a pizza boy. first deck of tarot cards. first year of high school. i quit writing books and start writing poetry. my bedroom is huge and purple. i make collages on my bulletin board every week. odelay odelay odelay. i stare at a light blue volkswagen beetle and wish wish wish until it’s mine. my mom wants me to take home ec, but i take art instead. i go to dances and don’t dance. my two best friends are boys and they come over every friday and we drink mt. dew and listen to rage against the machine. the heartache is years ahead of me.

me, age 14

twenty-eight. i listen to “malibu” and think about digging out the rhinestones and eyelash glue. thrifted combat boots and walmart dresses. i have a husband and a crush on charlie’s best friend. i finally know how to read the tarot. i am writing books again. my volkswagen doesn’t run anymore so i drive a stupid blue saturn with three doors. my bedroom is small and red. i paint every week. i still don’t dance. my two best friends are (different) boys and we eat Indian food and listen to the kills on sunday afternoons. and the heartache is finally years behind me.

Looking Back

Spheres

I seem to have become one of those people who is always looking back. I like to sift through memories as if they were a collection of things that I had had the time to card catalogue. Some of them are water stained, with most of the important details blurred into ink hieroglyphs that I can no longer read, but those colours! The colours of the memory still fill me up until I can almost taste the potency of longing; sometimes it tastes like beer and liquid honey, other times it tastes like milk and sugar. Some of them have crass words scrawled across them in black ball point pen, in a moment of quick, teenage anger. Some of them are shrouded in smoke, or blackened at the edges. Some of them never really happened at all, but I let them feel their way in around the edges of duller moments.

If it were up to me, time would not move so linear beneath my feet; I just wouldn’t allow it. It would surround me as a collection of spheres, dripping with all the richness my indulgence in nostalgia could afford, and I could move in and out of them as freely and easily as I wished.  Each one would have its own distinct colour palette and wavelength of light, and as all the components of that sliver of time begin to leap into waking life, the cerulean blue would change to dusk violet, and the violet into a soft green the colour of mermaid hair. I would be overcome by a feeling of being poured into something, a wide round space the size of a small planet, Pluto perhaps. I would be left to enjoy that feeling, the feeling of being a weightless, boneless mass, for a moment or two.
And then it would all just tumble out, from the sphere as it breaks apart above my head like split fruit, and I would let it wash over me, and I would live it again. And again. And again.

Let’s Do the Time Warp Again!

because let’s face it, this movie is amazing