Showing posts with label seconds. Show all posts
Showing posts with label seconds. Show all posts

Friday, January 17, 2020

Counting downward


How many times
         have I worn a watch
(consistently)
         until it stopped
being consistent
         so I stopped wearing it
?

Why try
to rely
            upon such fragile devices
(like butterfly wings)
             that beat on deaf ears
while years
go by
like hours

?

Like most of us
I check the phone
for answers
to more than
Hello?
(without a pulse
that I can count)

How fast was it All
going
by day, by night
             -impossible to tell
ourselves or the others
without a second-hand
account.



Artwork by Winslow Homer, wood engraving, 'Another Year by the old clock' c. 1870 in Public Domain.

Sunday, November 20, 2016

Second helpings


It would be asking too much
if someone said
wait one-thousand-milliseconds,
one hundred jiffy's,
a billion nanoseconds, or a Fermi
but really that sounds silly,
so seconds it is to please be quick-
witted, reactive to surfaces
as echoes and sound is also a wave
that warbles along at seven hundred
and sixty
miles per second,
superficially.

Just so you know, it is all calculable by
a minuscule measurement of  radiation
and reach, emitted by caesium (-133),
tiny things we cannot see nakedly
invaluable like love and currency.

Honestly, you should know also
that it takes 6 full grown alligator
seconds to gain any kinetic benefit,
by stretch or strain,
of any muscle-through release or gain.
And all should plan appropriately,
it takes twenty-one seconds to pee-
really
on average
you have been warned
seconds and faith
take quantum leaps.

In one unjust second, a bullet barrels by
two thousand five hundred feet
while a snail sidles over a puddle
cruising 1 chasmic centimeter
and in that same moment
we swallow, we make thoughts,
we blink, we take it in, more than oxygen-
we reminisce wanting more from before...

the world changes drastically for one
second, and
again,
firsts are never enough
for any one
Now.



Painting by Johannes Vermeer, (b/w 1655 and 1667) 'The Art of Painting' in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.


And then...

  Change is like that strong smell of cut grass or chopped wood that stops you still. Patterns, a symbol can be an illegible sign,  at first...