Tick Tock

tick… tock…

aftershock
the geological clock
is a binful of decaying atoms no-one pays heed to all that rock
and rubble all that oceanic telling precisely all we have to do
with a time bomb wired and primed bound and strapped to the world

tick, tock,

unrecorded time
how yours and mine
how all the rhyme
is running out and nothing else can tell the bell of freedom when to chime
or tell the first ray of morning to shine its dirty dawn against the sky
or shed its light on all the filth we spilled into the sea

tick-tock

hellos goodbyes
how time flies
no more lies!
come on! we were the ones (the eons) whose half-open eyes
witnessed the end of history when concrete came and the jungle
and the wild tiger made lion-hearted prey for our predator metal
our digging in the dirt as we dug for gold for gem and stone
for thick black oil to flame and grease the open palms of tomorrow

for us all for us but not for all of us

tick-tock - tick

time is at hand
the final grains of sand
silt an empty hinterland

tock - tick

eleven years more till our greed its trickling water-torture knocks at our skulls
in one last sign of madness at our delusion of competence we are just plain nuts
or dolts the stable door unhinged in the way that being human is an illness
a state of mind broken thinking otherwise somewhere truth lies dead and buried
the truth and nothing but the truth so help me god so help us oh god because
beside truth’s corpse every godhead every single one is another rotting stiff as are all
those feeble things of flesh of which we knew but cared so little and now too late

tock

tick-tock

tick…

© BH, 2018

---

In 2018, I wrote this poem, Tick Tock which featured on the now defunct Poetry24 website. Like all poems P24 featured, it was a response to a current news report – in this case, impending climate catastrophe. I’ve reposted it now on its own page.

This year I separated the words to see if I could make a different kind of sense of them. So, if you're of a mind,  Tick and Tock… the former a more philosophical take on time and the erosion of our brief humanity.

The latter, a companion poem, Tock, is also about the temporal nature of things and how we differentiate them, not always accurately. So, we hear nuance where none exists: we see a whole when there are only parts or we see parts but not the whole.

We see difference; we don't see the difference.

Perhaps we're not so bright after all…