T I M E

You’ve tried this one before–
it’s late and the lights are bright
In front of you are eyes, bleary, upon themselves
half-shut against confrontation,
face to face with your reflection
It’s just you in the mirror
same as you always are,
familiar face in a familiar place 
You’ve looked at it often enough,
though your description would be least accurate of all
the way that strangers sometimes see you best– 
but we should know by now, right?  
and it all starts to shift like candlewax,
swirling subtly, strangely–
you’ve looked a little too long,
it sharpens like stone into faces of gargoyles on tower walls,
and now the eyes that you look out of
seem unreal
Shardlike, they pierce through
the fabric
of your dimension.

snap
        out

you start, and the room returns
settling down, so very still
that it starts to sink through itself
and things begin to slip
before your very eyes, 
transforming, distorting– 

Time makes everything  u  n  c  e  r  t  a  i  n 

like 

when you were so sure of the path
that was laid out for you, not by something abstract like life –
you didn’t need to know what
because it was a simple series of steps, school college work
that you’d take more easily than your legs had yet learned.
At some point the train seemed to be derailing
because the tracks had all flown into the sky
but then you realised it’s more like an ocean, anyway
With an imaginary shore. 

Sometimes

at least,
time tells  

like 

meeting someone that seems just right
you could maybe write a whole novel
and with every little bit they give you,
the pages wilt –
hardcover biography, to paperback, to magazine
in which the images are all pretend, and dead leaves on the roadside
say more than those words could ever mean
if you don’t step on them first –
because the closer you get, the further you drift
and with every door you open,
another world chasms between you
voids you’ll never bridge. 

but that’s alright, 

because by now you already know
that it gets harder the longer you hold on,
it’s easy to say
get a grip
to your reflection in the middle of the night, 
catch the catatonia before it catches you
you might have to say it
several times before I hear you,
get a grip
get a grip
get

        a
  
                     g
                                r
                                           i
                                                       p




But say it too many times 
and the words won’t make sense anymore.