Clocks Tick, But…


When the clock’s hands travel,
Does its inner workings wonder,
As it watches us watch its timeless movement
We subtracting time remaining
It knowing time has no limit?

Perhaps it sees us gaze at numbers
Like tenacious landmarks in stop motion orbit,
Digits holding like lonely sentinels
Guarding the fixed passages of life’s journey.

We watch this precise start and stop of perpetual movement,
Challenging distance and time,
Wanting immortality to be a possibility,
Thinking life might end,
But what if existence knows not a demise,
Only a change in form?

How innocent our youth,
Apprehensive our adulthood,
Anxious our aging experience
Wanting the end to be but a new beginning.

To avoid disappointment,
To embrace the unknown as wisdom-in-waiting,
To console loved ones and their anticipation,
To persuade and convince doubting is waste,

Might that be self-defeating?

Could there be…

Hands that travel,
Measuring time for the living,
While preparing the passing over
As not an end,
But a subtle modulation?

Could the denial of the beyond as forward,
Prove a losing dispute with the cosmic empirical,
To reject evolution’s lineage in progress,
That primal place from where life came,
And will return,
In yet another form.

Lest we forget,
We are matter,
Matter cannot be destroyed,
Its existence knows not end,
We have but to prepare for the next iteration.

Looking ahead,
Me, a rock,
You, a bug,
Dad, an extraterrestrial,
Mom, something that isn’t even defined yet?

Clocks tick, but…

For many,
Mortality’s end is only to see a dark hallway,
Or a cliché tunnel of light.
For some of us, however,
No frills and sanctimonious knowing does it,
There’s merely trust in eternity’s continuance.