Time

Where did you go?

One day, you disappeared;

Cleared the future to air

Till unaware

I stared at a face greyed by your decline.

Unkind and faded,

Deep fault lines hide jaded

Dreams that once lit my eyes,

Departed.

Cries languished, dry-hearted

And anguished, now,

A famished stare;

In search of time no longer there.

How did you pass?

I recall

When you were infinite somehow.

Me a child and you, always now.

Eyes tinted clear with childhood,

I understood

That you were both

Motion and stillness, no

Notion of passing only lasting

With no ends

And no beginnings,

Bringing life through change yet

You remained the same.

When did you start

To move without my knowing?

To impart that exchange where you

Morphed to flowing,

Perhaps, excitement;

Bold teens incitement

Where unseen worlds would

Unfurl with your lightness,

And motion, here, still no notion

Of loosing, but living

And giving

You to hours that seemed like mine;

To mellow wastes time,

You were a friend of mine;

Fine and light each day.

I’d never dreamed you’d be finite one day.

When did you thin

At the edges?

Begin to wedge our choices to narrowing bands

And tie our hands away.

When did you start

To steal the light? To mark

Unknown paths with dark, growing

Overcast with every hour passed.

When did you make me older?

Turn youth intoxication sober, cause

Worlds to grow colder

Now a dampened flame, you

Make each day the same

And amidst the grey of unlit days

You drift away.

When did you make me fear you?

When did you sew notions of

Life being fleeting,

Of youth retreating

And old age defeating

The both of us?

When did you grow thin?

Now you begin to whisk the seasons

Into blurs, to

Drain freedoms into dirt

Your hands invert,

And limits come defined,

Subverting years behind

Enclosing minds and,

As you fade, you quicken,

Thicken, non-abating;

I watch you overtaking me,

Forsaking doors of opportunity,

Too late.

Locked.

Clocks speeding and

Sunlight bleeding into dusk too fast

The days last

Only a breath.

In and out,

In and out.

The last light almost out.

Where will you go?

With this last light, you’ll disappear

Like you, were never really here,

Perhaps, were only empty atmosphere,

And yet, as you near

I recall,

When you were infinite somehow.

Me a child and you, always now.

Do you remember? I hear you say,

Now somehow

With your eyes shrouded grey,

And light of day retreating,

You’ve come to think that I am fleeting,

But you’re forgetting

What you knew then.

When, you saw both motion and stillness,

Felt no notion of time passing only lasting,

You knew,

That when each day faded to dark

With the night, we did not part;

That these endings were only

Eternal returns to the start.

Epiphanies

Remember your epiphanies,

On golden leaves and still breezes;

Silent mornings where motion freezes,

You watched the shapes of life form

From shadows. Dawn

Light had risen, torn

Ladders of perfect gold: warm

Magic through windows tinted clear by childhood.

Eyes wide,

It was clear that dawn survived only.

There was no fear and no loneliness,

No young and no old

But death was beautiful.

There could be no cold

But dawn was stillness.

And where there’s no motion there’s no illness,

No notion of wrongness

But all of life is timeless,

There, one can’t know less

Than everything.

Through that window,

You blinked.

And in a moment it was clouded.

The world had risen, shrouded

Child’s eyes with wild lies

About motion. About time passing

And youth not lasting

And fear of this notion

Of growing old without meaning.

You were told that life is fleeting,

That the dawn comes and goes

Bringing shadows back home

And that in death,

There is no beauty left.

Remember your epiphanies,

On silent mornings where motion freezes:

You know that life is only true in stillness,

That death is not where beauty leaves us.

Hopes and Lies

'I don't believe in your hopes and your lies.'

Said the Universe to I.

Those ambitions and dreams, which, clinging you,

Strive each day, trying for greatness through

You're efforts, yours alone - you see,

But you don't have the view of me

Who see's you not as one but all

And yet, despite your wisdom, you call

Yourself 'I' and others 'they'

As though some void of difference lay

Between you and they. And not just

‘They,’ but all things other than you must,

You think, be separate from 'you.' This 'I'

Which casts itself apart from all else. Why

Think you that your hopes and lies

Differ from the birdsong, or the skies

Which darken by night and lighten by day

And each plant, each gust of wind; why say

You, that there is more importance thrust

Upon your hopes and lies than on each gust

Of air that weaves across the sky?

Oh man! One day you will learn that you are I.'

Old

I am old. It seems. Life groans at the seams

And I can’t, quite, recall those fleeting dreams

I used to live by: mine are simpler now

And not filled with tomorrows. Somehow,

Life flipped: like a coin from rising

To falling; from that slowness to surmising

speed: faster as the time seems to snap

Its reaches, draw life inwards, drag me back

To where I started - and it’s denser here

Beneath the weight of all my years:

A weight that’s both a fear and friend,

It brings both comfort and the end.

Time Again

I did not know then what I know now;

That time flows outside our grasp somehow.

I thought that I could take it,

Mould it to my own and make it

Something solid that would last.

Suddenly, it passed.

I watched it; first an adamant partaker,

Tried to drive it and control it,

Til a frustrated forsakor,

It had swallowed all I gave it,

Taken all my dreams and turned them

Into memories - with no future to lend.

There, I settled a spectator;

Watched it flow towards the end.