How To Tell Time

Hello readers! If you are out there... Here is another one of my poems, started a while ago but newly finished (or nearly finished) during NaNoPoWriMo. It is a companion piece to 'How To Write A Poem' and 'How To Be A Body' which I have previously featured here on this blog. This is the roughest of the three, and I think a bit too pedantic. It tries to imagine the fixture of Time in our lives as a living thing, by describing it in seemingly unnatural ways. It is surely a rough draft, like all of the other poetry I have posted here, but I want to get it out there and see how it looks on the page/screen. Here it is:


HOW TO TELL TIME
Time is an animal, driven by instinct alone. He is no tame thing. You cannot say anything to him to make him listen.

Time is a tide, an inconstant constant. Coming and going as he pleases. It is said the urge toward form leads us closer to God, but he cannot be formed. Time takes no shape, moves according to his own rhythm. It is no rhythm at all, but an entropy dictated to us, ours to decipher.

Argue with him though you may, you will never tell time anything he doesn’t already know. He has everything but he pulls still more with him into spaces unknown. Its strange truly, how it all works, how a moment can only come once but gives its slant to everything after. Don’t bother fighting it.

You can’t smell him or see him but you know he’s always there. Always has been. You can feel him and he can feel you. He is already a real thing, even though he is all imagination. He lives in the air and in the trees— pulsing, pushing, killing. You can’t forget him, so stop trying to.

Time has no master, except his own momentous weight. Which must keep going.