I was born with a gear in my mouth—
a brass tongue clicking yes to every second. Life wound
me tight with silence. It said, Boy, time is a god you serve
by bleeding slowly.
I came to love the tick,
the way it cut the darkness like a knife through overripe fruit.
Each hour a wound I honed with my breath.
Each minute a prayer I recited backwards.
But last night, the clocks rebelled.
The grandfather chimed midnight at noon. The cuckoo
wouldn't sing. My hands, betrayers, turned
the wrong direction on the dial. And I—I saw my mother
young again, her hands unlined,
her voice a bell that I had forgotten to ring.
Time, ruthless mechanician,
stole me of my ribs and spilled the hours sidelong
like teeth. I attempted to pick them up,
but they disintegrated in the floorboards
into the mouths of the mice who know
what it is to live in the walls
of someone else's past.
I want the dream the clockmaker has when he finally sleeps—
no hands in the world, no face that ages.