Off-hand and low-key
Noticeboard missing
Reads the dismantle of clocks,
Marking time has been declared
An antiquated concept.
It is impolitic, apolitic,
And after all, apatriotical,
To announce death
Just as it is, the invention of words.
From now on, poets must resort to rhyme
And meaning
There will be no poems to mark the toll of old age.
My age. The ticking away of old men in pressed shirts.
And I wonder how I will die, still,
And I wonder what they'll say of me. Of I.
Will mine be the first death since they banished clocks?
Will my sentences get shorter and shorter? And what will they say?
The misconstruer of words is no more. Yet how can I not be?
In the absence of time, I must be ever-present, though ephemeral,
Weigh about the same as a small plastic bag filled with dust.
Will my children display me above the fireplace, or inside the pasillo
Take my place beside the grandfather clock. Will policemen knock down doors
And confiscate from mine what is rightly theirs?
I would hate to think of my death as an earmark of trouble.
If I am a crude reminder of bygone times, then by all means, bypass me.
I like to think, however, my children will be rebels. That they'll learn to tell
The time by seeing how their hair's grown in shadows and dying sun.
If time is no more, what will they make of the sun? Imagine old shaking hands
Hide the sky under old crinoline. Laugh before that, also, is outlawed.
Will the memory of me spell danger for my children? Should I have raised them to be else,
Not raise their heads or voices, not remember their father, to be somebody else's children?
I sip my bitter cup. I let the fridge door fall shut. Paddle over to the window. Stare directly up into the light. Feel my end dare near.
Writing in my kitchen, I happened to catch sight of my reflection and wrote this. Just as an aside. An addendum. In the corner of some other story. In my messy kitchen.
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I liked the line 'a small plastic bag filled with dust' - felt like the heart of your poem. A metaphor for existence. And after all that philosophising about weighty issues you finish brilliantly on that 'sip my bitter cup. I let the fridge door fall shut, juxtaposing the mundane and bringing us down to earth.