Keeping Time
A Poem
The year is 2026
I live by the airport, and spend my days beneath the moaning skies, living by the soothsayers in my pocket, watching the propaganda machine grind on my TV screen.
Blood in their mouths, there’s blood in their mouths.
The year is 2026
I live with my friend
I sit on his porch, and watch the people walking by beneath the palm trees and the darkening sky.
They walk in right angles, left and right, on the grid we laid in these hills and hollows.
They wait at crosswalks, headphones on, gridlocked in their minds, walking on the grid, whiling out their hopes of progress in a gridlock government.
I sit on my porch, in my routine, in the time-blocked hours of the gridlocked day, thinking through the same few problems I come up against in the gridlocked maze of my life.
The streetlights flash and the cars glide past, pieces of the modern world born from minds inclined to leave their mark.
The day turns in its nested hollow of changing light.
The day does not know the year we assigned to it.
Neither does it know the growing laws and decrees we attach to our forever-ledger of moral assignment, the unrolling bill of our gridlocked abilities, section 503 (c), §83.0204, numbers and drivel, coded to preconfine us, because we are madmen, all of us, and we do not know where or why, ever, but can serve somebody who keeps the time, somebody who stopped asking questions years ago after realizing that we are all deperate to keep the time as it whiles through the hourlgass of the sky, each of us fading away particle by particle, chained to the remaking rock.
We are all just keeping time, so we hold it in our pocket, and we welcome the machine that will tell us where or why, whether we believe it or not, that is to say, whether we profit from it or not.
//Minutes and seconds, fractions and atoms, digits, fingers to count on, numbers never ending, cataloguing, data points, circuited streets for the energy god, squeezing the earth in its electrical coils, and drying up rivers and unchaining demons to darken the sky//
The year is 2026, but the problems are the same, and people walking by with the same knotted hearts.
Poetry? This is code for your program. Markings and dye, scratched for your processor.
My body rejects the machine’s programming and the time our gods keep, I live by the sacred clock.
The birds turn the day with their digital clicks, and still the swallowing sea pins the ground to the earth’s roiling core.
I turn in the waves, pinned to the seafloor of the shallows.
That’s where the timekeepers would hold me as they divorce the sun from the sky, and coil us in circuitry, new bricks stacked since Babylon, the first empire.
Still the waves crush and grind the shore, as the trees pull water and glow in it, and the sky’s lights play their song.
But I turn the same, left and right, running into the same corners in my life, trapped in my own maze, despite my praying.
The evangelicals would condemn me from their own maze, as they spiritualize the heart of the machine.
I am a pagan, too, but at least I act like it.
Still we all are blind to the time, as the broken stars which we once spoke to cry out in unintelligible code that we are killing ourselves.