Tick

When I wake, my reds are mirrored around

the room. They sway against each other on

white washed walls, like kaleidoscope pieces

of the heart, beating away from me with

second hand accuracy. Tick, they say,

then fold into each other; tock, they scream,

 

then bounce back to disjunction. It’s a tide,

pulling against the sandy shores, casting

seashells into expansive depth. I watch

two dolphins dive through icy, bloodied waves,

singing joyous hymns as dismembered clock

hands harpoon their bodies, thrown from above.

 

I am within and without this room of

crumpled color, the formless red fragments

pulsating with me as the frail locus.

Yet as I twirl and twitch through disheveled

bed sheets, I fantasize of watching from

heaven, this tornadic realm set to the

 

rhythmic ticks of time. It’s the melting snow

going split, going splat on frosted squares

of concrete. Purity burnt through, shredded

by the distant sundial gleaming bright,

cranking higher like an oven blasting

wax men till they burst, real horrorshow like.

 

I breathe and bleed and feel with my feeble

pulse. I drink the nectar of a ripened

life, taste the juice, suck the hollow pit. And

still I can’t shake the tick, the tock, the crunch

of the clockwork gears grinding in my heart.

They squeeze me to a pulp. They bleed me dry.