Watch-ing

 

To understand

and more -feeling

what life is

within

by prying off 

the transparent face

what is sacred or

true

we can hold

hands

while causing them

to cease 

counting 

measuring deeper-

still

the gears moving

as does the heartbeat

outside the chest

pushed on

by the next,

by the last

place 

held

until loose 

screws

tell no time

has passed,

the past 

is going to come

On the dead man's wrist

the watch stops

telling

a second time.

Image taken October 22 2016 Description; Exhibit in the Karl Gebhardt Horological Collection (Uhrenmuseum Karl Gebhardt), Gewerbemuseum - Nuremberg, Germany. As a utilitarian object, this exhibit is NOT subject to copyright laws. Instead it is subject to Industrial Design Rights; see Industrial Design Right for more information. If this object was ever covered by a design patent, that patent has expired, and thus this image is in the public domain.

Gravitas

It was never about our dumb thumbs.
It was the way we stood up
to gravity
without needing to know what we have
pushed up against, the faceless force
of resistance that throws its weight in waves
that crash out of sight and none mind this weakness
the stacking of back bones.

The clock, the book, ape our names with a smirk and a stick
shows you his ant collections, meanwhile, the snake swallows its tail.

Pounds and heartbeats resist this ethereal oppression
that taunts us to compete with what we have,
as though a winner was ever chosen,
as if hope had more than clipped wings with whimsical wants
and rings only of brass cages,

only light easily escapes our local prisons,
with motion detectors triggered we creep
like suspicion
reflection and persistence and say we are seekers

what gathers as cumulous clouds all comes
back down to dirt before clay
this way something is from nothing

the spinal column rachets and secures its connections
between inside out, an idea, a step in the right foot first
direction of brave, giants leaps of grace
loss of place

higher than vertigo knows
makes me think
there was nowhere to grow
up is out.

I doubt our thumbs
gave us a free ride.
Gravity takes no sides.




Painting by Claude Monet, Heavy Seas at Pourville (1897) in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Sharp Nows

They lived and died this way
worried all the while
about living right
and terrified of dying
and yet full motions
are always only temporary.

Just like thoughts
are born and die too soon...
So they too dreamt the night away
where nobody could say
it was impossible.

Living for today, they say,
be in the moment,
where you are contained
and less than aware
of faces, that look-
like yours.



Image by Howard Pyle (1888), [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.