What Turns the Clock

A poem about what is wrong.

What Turns the Clock

Tragedy turns time's hands, tick-ticking to terrible trips through torrents of tears,

While we waste, we weary wanderers without wisdom or wonder.

How horrible, how horror-stricken, how horrified and handicapped,

Youths yearn for youth,

For freedom found in fame and fortune, in friends and f***s not given,

Looking, losing, and lusting for lies labeled love, listed life, lifted down.

Our Reality is realized relatively, robbed of reason and robed in its renunciation.

Do the dying dream so much of death and destruction, of doom and damnation?

Our steps speed to songs selling sin as sainthood to sheep in sheep's clothing.

We crippled cowards cower in "can't" and "could have," close, closing,

On glory and grace, grasping instead grimness and grime, gutter-minds, gutter hearts.

We invoke isolated intellects to insanity, inanity inviting infamy.

Because baseness becomes us, we become bereft of beauty.

Author's Note

We waste our time drugging ourselves with the tragedies we fool ourselves into accepting. And what a waste it is, for each moment brings us closer to the end. We are without the reverence for life that makes life worth living. Look at this dreadful absurdity: young people obsessed with finding something that they already have, searching for it in all the wrong places. We accept the twisted untruths of our culture, such as the love we see lowered to the basest of its meanings. Do people on the verge of death obsess so much over what is killing them? And yet, we do not fear that which destroys us; nay, we glorify it! We are sheep who believe ourselves wolves in disguise, and hide behind the idea that we could be great, if only we could be bothered to try. The truth is, we have tried, and we have failed. We have searched for glory in the gutter, and have found only trash. And here I stand, maddened by this stupidity that brings us all down. Maybe we deserve it. Maybe ugly looks good on us.