Clock

I sat at the edge of a clock for three hours. Watching the time tick slowly by. The blinking of my eyes never ceasing but somehow, I see everything with no clicks of slide changes. I'm sorry that I don't have enough to give my poetry what it needs to live, to breathe, to love, to exist. I'm sorry that I pull my words up from my core out of my lips with only a weak thread that might snap, I'm sorry I have to force every word, I'm sorry that it doesn't come natural, I'm sorry that I don't actually write I just force my thoughts into words and shove them out of my mouth. Stumbling and alone and afraid. I'm sorry that I do not have enough words harnessed from the dictionary to speak of things that need to be spoken about.

I dearly apologise that my poems are not flowers that spring from ink that I fill the pages with.

The clock hands are still ticking. I'm writing an apology to my poems, to my writing, to my blank half-started pages, to my countless untouched notebooks and that goddamn urge to buy more. An apology for the fact that I cannot control my words enough to say what flits around my throat, never truly escaping. Never truly gripped by both my hands and pinned to the page like butterfly wings.

No, not pressed flowers but jagged shards of things that you will not notice until you slip and find your hands slick with red from the words that stick into your chest. Unfitting things that do not make sense together, all stuck messily with pink glue, like a young child hastily doing a jigsaw. Shoving piece into piece over and over and ov— until all the pieces look like one colour and nothing really looks right anymore. So yes, I am sorry to my stories but honestly they all look the same to me now, never first person, always a breakthrough, always somehow ending better than the start, always striving to be like that song that gives you goosebumps.

And never, ever, coming close.

I will take a break from ridiculing my poems to watch the clock hands move again. Focus on the movement. On the rise and the fall. The circling pattern that captures my attention. The rise and fall of your chest. The feeling of your breath on my skin as you pull me away from the clock. Whispering that my thoughts need to slow, focus not on external but the internal, focus on my own chest rising and falling.

So I do, for a while, I focus on my breathing, on the rhythm of life and all things green. I notice the patterns in the seasons and in the tiles of your mothers kitchen floor. But most of all, I notice the constant ticking of the clock. Of how every home has some way to measure that ticking and how everyone lives their lives by it. How can I not sit still and get lost in the ticking, how can I not think about my writing but stay unmoving. I've become addicted to counting hours, watching the seconds fills my stomach with fear. Dreading how fast I can lose track of the time. I have so little time. These ideas for writing in my head are so much bigger than myself. The half-started notebooks leak blood, my hands are covered from all the ideas I pinned to the page in vain, nothing but a crime scene. And I have fled the sirens to sit at the edge of a clock. A dictionary in hand and tears to wash the blood away. Fighting this urge to lose myself in the ticking once more, finding that rhythm in everything I do. In the sound of my typing, my pen scribbling on rough paper, in my chewing and talking and breathing. In my heartbeat.

From now on, I will take that ticking, harness it and use it for myself. Not as a reminder of how fast time moves, but as a reminder that everything I do matters.

The bad things take up time— just like the good.

But the thing with the ticking of time is that it's always moving forward, the hands of a clock never sit still to dwell on the past.

I will jump off the side and land on the ever moving hands that whisk me towards my future.