The challenge from napowrimo today is to write a poem that busts you out of your comfort level with line breaks. As my poetry goes, I typically lean toward the long and skinny, the mid-length blocky-thing, or the prose poem. I am uncomfortable with wild variations. So let’s do that then, shall we?
Time’s Wild Variations
Yesterday
at the lunchroom table we talked about how, as we get older, time seems to get
mushy.
It’s either that our memories
are beginning to fail us
or
that we simply experience time now in a different way, mostly and sadly,
faster.
A huge swath of time will go by and we will reflect on this or that event and think,
shit,
that was just yesterday. But it was not yesterday; it was a year ago, or two years ago.
And that song I loved and heard for the first time, it seems, only months ago,
was recorded in 1994.
And the trauma of 2001, while as new in my mind as the scent of freshly cut grass, is nearly and already two decades gone.
We
remembered
when
as children,
we sat under
a tree
in the morning sun
on a summer’s day
that seemed to go on and on in a kind of glorious forever,
whereas now, summer vacations are over and done with in a single
blink
of
an
eye.
We don’t like it.
But there it is.
Time is not on our side, Mick.
It appears sometimes to be ganging up on us, cornering us, chasing us around in circles.
We thumb our noses at time.
We tell time to take a hike. We tell it,
go
to
hell.
michael jarmer 