Time Collapse (a poem)

Time collapse; murder clock
Ticking, each click and knife clack echo like cold steel
Dream, myth, a promise here
Blood eyeball yellowed, physical fears
Chamber of clocks, bright merciless
Wrinkling time, my skin is baked
Midnight the ringing barbaric
Noontime the sun blazing
Twilight hours recorded and shared
Sun rise in east, sirens shrieked
Time crash in undulating waves
Reach out to grab, ride into quickening future
STOP – RETREAT – DO NOT PASS GO
Motorcycle crash, child cascades from 40 floors
Time collapsed, swallowed lives
Baby born in desert sunlight
Old man murdered in God-forsaken River
Blood rinse in salty water, wounds open
Clock strikes the hour, I have frozen in city nights
Watching faces deformed malignant
STOP – the child says in the park
RETREAT – my lover says in the dark
DO NOT COME HOME – the clock ticking
TIME HAS COLLAPSED
AND THERE’S NOWHERE LEFT TO GO

Unbreakable (a poem)

to say we were lost boys would be cliché

but clichés have ways

of cementing truths into language

like hard red suns that scorched West Philly & warm beers we guzzled ‘till we couldn’t walk straight & time went missing like a thief

who stole my innocence

& we packed into an old sedan on a road to nowhere &

perhaps, if time is not linear, this had to happen &

if free will is a myth, we had no choice in the matter,

merely swigging, smoking, fighting in adolescent wastelands

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