My Biological Pocketwatch
A poem about mental time dilation
I have been winding my watch
in so many ways,
turning it in every direction, every state,
changing it (always changing it)
back and forth,
forth and back
noon to one, one to six
that not even I dare ask:
“Dear sir, what time is it?”
For I know, he will shake
his head in fury,
and say unto me:
“Must you destroy another clock,
Must you destroy another’s
time today?”
And I shall wonder,
is it 7 a.m.,
or 8 o’clock, but of what day?
Is it Monday, or has Friday just begun?
For the shorthand keeps spinning,
wondering where the big hand has gone
maybe the future, perhaps the past
one of us is in the present,
but which one,
I dare not ask.
Have I destroyed the multiverse
by stepping on a leaf?
Have I ruined its infinite nature,
with bewildering grief?
Again I sit in existential dreams,
wondering honestly: “what time is it?”
I should not ask, though again
my curiosity must pry,
To tear open the lid,
at the mystery deep inside,
Consciousness — that entangled lie
inside manifolds, ready to deny
No longer am I relative to myself or
that elongated cone of ephemeral light
For this clock, to which I have run
over and over and over again
farther and farther and farther,
it tends to seek,
a moment I have yet to meet.
I have been winding my watch,
far too many times,
back and forth, four to nine;
an hour to the next, a day to a century,
without purpose or end
It all seems to disappear,
transient worlds and eidolon days
lost inside my watch,
Inside bewildered hands of springs
I see it bending, perhaps even ripped
sending me to places no mind should glimpse
yielding answers no rational mind
could interpret.
O! how I wish I could repair
this wicked clock and start again
to see my love waiting on scarlet horizons
as my train approaches thee
instead, lost moments in hand
I stand forevermore watching,
watching, ever so sadly,
This empty life move on by,
without me.
© Bradley J Nordell 2020
