The Hourglass-celebrating 2 years on Substack & 350 posts

A sketch of a man like Prufrock. Time hangs heavy on him and his forgotten dreams. I can recall those days.

I have been working on this poem for a year. We visit every week, like some relentless conjugal thing. We slug it out. We take pieces out of each other and we leave marks. Maybe there’s some fondness. I have never done such battle with a poem before. Each week I meant to publish it and each week it said, “F*#@ you. I am angrier and uglier than this. Please stop with the clothes and the make up.”

It’s times like this when I despise creativity, when I ask it to stop disrupting my life and then later I beg it to please disrupt my life.

This is the button for my book of poems, 107 of them.

Painting by René Magritte

                   The Hourglass

                Each dawn begins
            with feet upon the floor,
                 elbows on knees
                   and a soft sigh.
                  In my day ahead
                 I may speak in jest
               when, in the subtitles,
                    I prefer murder.

                    There are days
                    too long for me,
                   hours too strong.
           The minutes bite into me
              swelling with each tick,
               hanging on too long.

                 I may rise late but
             before I've fully woken
              I turn to my bed again
       to retire this great gap of time
               that yawns before me.
     When ever I should finally wake,
              my head I would shake
         to keep any decent thought
             from gaining purchase. 
           Irrespective of mealtime
            I will chew and swallow
              and make an end of it.

                Like the lovely neck
                 of a despised one,
                  can an hourglass
                 be snapped in two,
                at the slender point?
              I would drain the sand
                      onto the floor
         long before the egg is done.
          The temptation is growing
                 stronger than I am.

This song is about as close as I can come to the sound of this poem, with the relentless drums reminding me of the war in this poem. There are echoes of Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and Cleopatra in this poem, if anyone finds that interesting.