tick

the parasitical hours
crept into the bloodstream
having hungered in hollow pastures

out of dormancy on bending stems of growth
they have waited for vibrations in the wind and leapt
into the unknown to suck our flesh dry

they leach life through its seconds and minutes
into installments of days and weeks months and years
till nothing remains but our bloated histories

we are the feast on which eternity feeds
and carries itself forward despite us
with our blood and brevity

© BH, 2023

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In 2018, I wrote a poem called Tick Tock which was 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 here.

This year I separated the words of the title to see if I could make a different kind of sense of them. So, 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…