time lost and time found
Where will you be in the hidden hour tonight? Caught between pillows, making sense of wrongs and right? Or are you left with simply air, the sort that’s thick and plain, to drift apart and drift between the wooded copse in misty brain…
It’s not to ask, but to know too much. It’s not to think, but to hear too much. And when the hour is over, you’ll not be back again…
He’ll check the clock on an electronic timewave, ticked over, dictated by fluctuations in unctious waves of radioactivity. Time taps through, in discrete dischord. Time passes by, in leaps and bounds. He wants to pause, to stop a second. To rewind the tape, to when lines were less creased and spiders had not the time to spin their webs. Paused in time, he’d cut the tape and stitch himself in, and whisper, gently, five words into her ear.
” ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ). ”
Maybe this time, in this reality, she will listen. she will not turn away. Maybe this time, in this reality, she will remain, instead of later being a distant memory, sitting in the background of a photograph, sealed under clear cellophane, and bound along with countless others, between thick black cardboard, hidden away. He keeps her there, for safety. For history. For remembering to forget. But never being able to completely…
Wishes rush back to that moment, years ago, consigned by the demons of thought and time, to inhabit the damp caves, encrusted with moss and the blooms of unsunned air. To a place it is unwise to tread, without fear, without danger of finding onesself backwards in years and forwards in manners and…
And it could have happened. Could have. Might have done. Was this memory planted and grown by greenfingers? Snipped and pruned and rounded into blossom by lady lie? Memories serve correctly and yet still deceive.
This year, he’ll have forgotten to remember. That hour, stolen by the clouds of the ides of spring is being returned tonight, by fortuitous magic. It makes no sense, but time will be found, and disappear into a gap between hours, which will be re-recorded again. And again. Until we make it right.
Catch back that hour. Whisper the words which may disappear the next time the clockhands sweep through digit after digit…
We may not be young, but the night grows younger by the minute.
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