Across the ages
And beyond the power
Held in the hands of time,
I leap upon every number
From 1 to 12 on the clock,
Counting the years in between
As I skim over my life.
Reaching noon, I skip past,
Taking care to touch upon every second
Until I reach my current age
At six o’clock p.m.
There I stand defiantly
In the face of time
And every minute preceding,
Painful moments in my memory
Grinding and turning slowly
Like rusted gears in my mind
That bitterly replay the same hours
Over and over again.
This is what I have become:
A broken clock held bound
By the spell of the past,
Unable to let go with the hands
That spin backwards in my eyes
As my clockwisdom is an ignored tick
In my hollow pendulum heart.
With each repeated moment
I am dragged further into the past;
The future chimes forward,
But I am left to the build-up of misery
On my time-forsaken gears
And my inner unworkings
That don’t function as they should
And continue to rotate
Over the same cursed seconds.
My mind is so far gone
And lost in the repetitive rhythm
Of my sorrows, regrets, and grudges
That I can no longer be fixed
Without my age-old routine crumbling
And leaving me in a heap
Of wasted minutes too tarnished for use.
Yet, despite my worthlessness
I am not swallowed up
By the void of timeless despair,
And as my eyelids flutter
Over another broken moment,
I catch a faraway chime from my heart
In a lapse between the milliseconds
And my world grinds to a stunned halt.
My eyes widen and the hands inside them
Freeze their backtracking momentum,
The hourly digits they point to
Beginning to slip and fall
Like tears down my face;
And as the rigid clockwork
That refused to let me move on
Collapses inwardly within me,
I finally whisper the words
That were waiting inside my heart
To give to the past and all its crushing pain,
“I forgive you.”