Long Hand

The long hand sweeps, dials time for me.
Oh, the hours, they hardly matter;
Slow by comparison.

Time’s long hand counts minutes
Even as the second hand, the spindle hand,
Ticks off instants, too small to see.

And the minutes bring me to my knees,
As if in prayer, to stop their passing;
They are the clock-watcher’s bane:
The time-keeper’s crop remorselessly whipping.

Keep up. Keep up.
On life’s clock face
Its mustachioed smirk
Its keyhole eyes
Follow my every step, every mis-step.

Time and motion.
By the numbers, by our blessed numbers,
We are hounded: stop-watch, start-watch;
Life’s coffee spoons superseded by numbers
Anonymously ticking.

And the hours divide into segments,
Money’s-worth, tuppence-worth, moments.

The supervisor’s grin; the overlooker, scrutinising,
Eyes the statistics of the working day:
A few seconds astray and the job is undone.

Begin again. Begin again.
Shoulder to the wheel; nose to the grindstone.
There is no wheel and today’s acridness
Is the heat-stench of micro-processors.

Run before the wind time makes as it passes;
How it whistles through cracks in our competence;
No-one can resist, not even the architects
Of the everyday, measuring our worth
Against clocks in offices and workrooms.

The long hand sweeps in laborious circles, promises
Never to stop only seeming to pause when we glance away.

The long hand tells its own truth about days and efforts,
Threads entire lives till they are wrapped and bound.
Spend it, waste it, let the masters hoard it, ration it,
Keep the weary tied to it; for master or minion, clock faces
And digits on a screen count without reckoning.

In the end,
When everything done is gone and time slips by unnoticed;
We will all walk free.

© BH, 2016

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Of course, I’m obsessed with time, having been made a slave to it. The more so now, when my lot is to darg with every second measured. It started when a fast train could carry an accurate watch, properly set  in Greenwich, North to the provinces. Thus time-keeping came to define the Age of Enterprise. Now we are thirled t it to the exclusion of all else.

Sometime later, I’ll come to the pervasion of revenue protection…