The dust of my days descends in decay
as the sand slouches in the hourglass
leaving life so dizzied, dusty, diminished, & drained
I keep trying to turn time on its head
and reset these strained & stagnant sands
but each new today just trickles down
into another tepid tomorrow
and adds to a horrid heap of so many
yawning yesterdays
which forever fester
in this interminable hourglass
All my dead and dying days depart
in betrayal of the same betrothed dream of life
which is repeatedly ravaged & raped
by a plethora of promiscuous nothing-nightmares
that seduce me every which way but well
and seed within me so many
sad and stillborn
"somedays"
and all too many
"maybe next times"
But all my unborn ambitions remain resilient
surviving this endless onslaught of abject abortions
They keep kicking at this hourglass-cage
trying to escape from this shattered sense of time
by sending shards of this cell to scar my soul
so I might see how the sand that turns to glass
is the same as the soul & skin which turns callous
to harden and contain both life's-blood & pain
and in spite, they keep the dust to dust of days
from being muddied & un-dried by all the
blood and tears in this refrain
Still the sand sifts through sand
as glass grates against glass
while my sandstorm of thumos
stirs the ever unsettled & stranded sands
and sends me into a rage of senseless circles
where I dizzily do unto my self
what's long been done to us all
grinding to the last grain
what could never, long remain
This is what passes for life in an hourglass
where no sand can return to any solitary shore
where wild winds & waves could carry them away forever
with all the unseen scripts of secret dreams
the castaways bottle up in desperate messages
they send like atheistic prayers, surging out to sea
to drown under the deepest tides of truth
which have swallowed whole the world
with all the unasked wishes
and wishless genies
which still wait for the wishes of others
to wake them from their dreamless slumber
in their cloistered, little lamps
Life in an hourglass
is the prisoner of measured, portioned time
Where the gridlines of a calendar
are like the bars of a cell
Where the spinning hands of a clock
point to nothing beyond the same repeated circle of numbers
that would make each day amount to the same innumerable nothing
Where dreams are defiled by alarms
scheduled to wake us with clocks which know no wonder
and steal the soul from needed slumber
-alarms that do not alert us of the true danger
of restless, dreamless, waking
that leads us 'round, & 'round, & down
with all the other delirious dust that drains
to the bottom of the the bottomless glass
as it forever takes away what's never there
the life inside an hourglass