[Fixed the line spacing. Don't know how that got screwed up.]
"Timepiece"
Scene One [written 8.15]
Last Thursday night at 12:15
I took bus number seventeen,
intending to ride home from Loserville
and rest my weary feet.
I stepped aboard the vehicle
provided there to transport me;
I paid in change the driver's fee,
and turned to seek an empty seat.
To my astonishment, I found
nary a lonely soul around;
at this late hour, all that remained
(beside myself) was one old man
who sat pensively gazing out the window
contemplating.
I stepped forth down the aisleway,
past empty one through empty twenty-two
and stopped across the way
from this old man: seat twenty-three.
As I made myself comfortable,
I gave him the old once-over
to sort through all his eccentricities.
The man was aged beyond his years
(it showed through in his greying beard)
and draped himself under a tattered cloak,
shading his features. He
was grasping in his left hand cautiously
a willow walking-stick,
atop which was positioned a timepiece,
showing one hand pointing
to twelve and one to three.
I thought this an odd thing to carry
on one's person, but said not
a word (for fear I would disrupt
the fellow's focus). No, instead
I (keeping to myself) laid back
and took this opportunity
to close my eyes and rest my mind
and slip into a dream.
When I awoke, the bus was moving
still, and he still next to me;
but the peculiarity
that instantly stood out to me
was that his cane's timepiece showed still
one hand reaching for twelve
and one for three.
Scene Two [written 8.17]
I knew the bus had been in motion
long enough to pass at least
a few minutes of both our time;
and yet, here this man's clock seemed to
be stuck, its hands both
incapacitated. So (politely as I could)
I tapped him on the back --
he turned to face me, green eyes glowing
with a silent energy
that seemed it never could be extinguished --
and I expressed in brittle words
that there perchance could be
a problem with the workings
of the mechanism nestled in his grip.
The consequent response that left
his lips was not at all as I foresaw:
he simply chuckled to himself
and then assured me that
in fact the thing was running
just as smoothly as could ever be expected.
"See," he carefully explained,
"it's meant to tell the time.
It tells the time is 12:15,
and at this moment 12:15
is just the time it haps to be;
thus, no problem presents itself to me."
I, puzzled by his earnest words,
reached down to lift my pocketwatch
and to compare the image on its face
with that I swore to be
mistaken. Sure enough I found
my own watch thinking it to be
12:32; and this I showed off
proudly, as to prove he was at fault.
At this the old man softly grinned
and shook his head before addressing me:
"Son, knows your watch the time ?
Or does it simply know how many
times the secondhand has cleared
its sorry little orbit ? It knows
nothing of the movement of
the cosmos, or the balance of
the preordained and that yet to
be chosen. All it knows is how
to tick away one second to the next,
with no regard for any changes
that surround its silver frame.
Do me a favour, son, and take a look
outside your window there."
And so I did.
Scene Three [written 9.5]
I turned my head to see what this
peculiar stranger wanted for
my eyes. I wiped some condensation
off the glass from earlier
that day when from the sky had fallen
tears of cosmic pain, and there
I spied a lonely heart on his
way home from somewhere he did not
belong, a mother and her daughter
mid-step up the stairs to their
front door, a hurried woman with
a newspaper as cover from
the rain, a few more clumsy silhouettes
etched into night's dense, deep blue
canvas, countless parasols
in hand. I saw these figures, but
I saw them only as an image;
zooming by, but motionless,
a snapshot of their lives, and every
detail, each expression on
their faces, each position of
their limbs, characteristic of
a single freeze-frame moment in
their temporal existences.
Even the raindrops, as I looked
more closely, were, though liquid,
frozen stolid in the breathing
glacial air. I couldn't help but wonder
how the weather would react
if I unlatched the window and
invited my appendages outside.
These idle thoughts of curiosity,
however, quickly left
my head to be replaced with shock,
befuddlement at how this feat
could have been wrought, at what manner
of spell could have commanded this
entire world, presumably,
(save one bus what contained my friend
and me), to stop its actions and
surrender its mobility upon the spot.
[To be continued ...]
