Time [And How It is to Be Collected]

Grandfather, your voice has become hollow,
A wood-warped frame leaning
In the shadows down the hall.

And what of this ‘way of worn carpet?
Whispering, your slippers make their friction
The comfortable creaking of floorboards, a song
As you make your clockwork journey
From the bathroom to your bed.

Dust is collecting upon your pillowcase
Like a bottoming out hourglass, if only
There were a way to know for sure
When the room should be turned on its end.
The sheets parachute down to the ceiling.
The flip clock, still tumbling an hour too late,
Is hanged by its own cord, swinging
Like a pendulum without an anchor.

Will your meaningless possessions fall
Through a narrow neck
Into a mirror’s reflection
To begin Anew
In a shadowed parody of an Afterlife?

But there is a strength that lies within memories.
The seconds, minutes, hours spent by your side
And likewise a thousand other hands
Have softly brushed by your numbers
Only to come around again, to witness
The air rushing across accumulating candles
On cakes long squared and divided
And dispersed
Amongst the yellowed photographs
Of so many smiling, frosting-flecked faces.

If you could hear them now, their bursts of canned laughter
Would remain fragmentary and maddening
Like the number of spent matches used to light the candles
And the burn marks on a hand accidentally touching flame,
Vision without creation.
Laughter without a joke.

And so, Grandfather, the sun is at your back
Your once erect figure, a pedestal
In the season of youth, how bravely
You laughed at your sweeping shadow, central
To your own kept time.
Look upon it now
Witness your own aging hands, a pair
Of crippled claws desperate in their attempt
To collect the receding ground.

It is a fruitless attempt, for soon it will be dark
And night is the revenant
The clocks cannot occlude.

And as we lose the trail of a thousand stone cogs, winding
And pushing and supporting each other,
The varying sizes, the ringing, flicking tongues
Of silent alarms like the beating
Of our tired fists against our hollow wrung hearts
Remember that the steps we take forward
Are our only fated movements, a procession
Celebrating a wake.

Ten callused relatives drunk on the fear
That we might have buried the past prematurely.