Whenever he dares look back at the wheeling face and hands, somehow it’s that time again.
Spectre-Three, Dead-of-Night, the Noncommittal Hour, in shades of ruddy brown: the bedside lamp is all he’s got, and the clock is running down. Too early yet to get up proper, but far too late for sleep—a foregone wheeling devoid of meaning, as the land of Nod sails on.
He cannot think. He cannot sleep.
He cannot stir himself to Action.
And much as Stasis stupefies,
It’s Rage that’s gaining traction.
Today, Tomorrow; To Labour or To Rest. He lies and sits, rinses and spits—anything to break the tension, a move in any direction. And yet the solemn epitaph remains: ‘all the time in a world’s eye, but not a drop for this.’ Shoulda-coulda-woulda, as the zeitgeist demands, and yet so often it seems this is the only Time to hand.
He will not wait, nor can he wake:
The inflection point of Sloth.
And just as Time burns at his heels,
So burns his heart toward Wroth.
His own cold architects opine that impotence is better left unsaid; the Hummer of emotive purge: lame-dog engine, a thing best left unfed. Cyclic and hateful, the spiral’s longest curve, tracking all the forever-lost time in a violent black-hole swerve. What good can he do if he can’t do good on a whim? What stories yet to tell? What crack did Skill slip through, which one of many wells?
The septic snarl he cannot voice,
Much as he’d love to scream:
Far too many sleeping neighbours,
And he prefers his ass unream’d.
But reason fades before the beast and so he broods and mumbles—a breed of slouching idiocy, in a too-accustomed stumble. The walls encroach by fours and tens, the brainpan presses down. Toothless gears and spinning rims, captured in Neanderthalic frown. Cruel Sycorax could not have dreamed a prison worse than drying streams.
HE CANNOT THINK
And STILL he cannot yield;
For the last power known to him
Is the Art he sometimes wields.
But hark—a spark! Is tonight the night? Is that victory he smells? Or will it—fleeting—leave him once again to contemplate his cell? Forget the rage, put pen to page, to catch the idle thought. Capture, study, push-in pin, the butterfly half-caught: immortalised and crystal clear, the agonised slip-grasp he fears, to watch it fly free through muted tears, be caught in hail and disappear.
But easy come is easy go,
And the pen so swiftly stilled;
What fragile flint had struck and lit,
To shatter unfulfilled?
And just like that, the flicker’s gone, the Fog rolls on, and horror shortly follows: the coyer beast, he knows it now, for all the hope it swallows. Is it so simple now to lose his place, and fall so far behind? Can Distraction burrow so far as to become a state of mind? And if it’s so, wherefore then; what fog or gate ‘twixt Memory and Pen?
And so it turns, and it turns again to Blame: the thousand easy pillow-punchers that he can call to name. Welt und Zeit, fire and fight, at work or home, in burning air and muddy loam; the hall of mirrors echoes long, and every lens is crooked wrong. If it’s true that all we see is as the prism—refractions, truths, the hollow, hallowed schism—if the light can bend as it sees fit, why leave us but the darkest shades of it?
Infinitude and Myriad
Uncounted hues of bliss
What hand or roll could we have lost
To end up stuck with this?
Rank indolence, he knows, the reasoning threadbare, and he cannot help but marvel at the struggle it is to care. The fault lies only inward, and down the deeper wind; exhaustion’s but another word for endless selfish binds. The world can burn and so will he, when Time dictates his turn, and he damn well better have more to show than just this mindless churn.
And so he rolls back over,
Horn sets pen to rest.
‘Tomorrow,’ the silent promise
And roiling, bitter jest.
Come it will, and come it may
No betterment in day’s harsh light;
Chances fade with conscious thought
Rage against the dying night.
Eyes drift shut midst sullen fray,
No progress left to mourn
Stillness falls about the walls
As the clock
goes
four.