Ten thousand hours and I am still
no better for the effort
You are no longer the scale to which
I measure the passing time
To passers-by
this is just another rhyme,
“Excuse me,
do you have the time?”
I don’t have a filler line,
I’ve covered your absence
with the dust of dusks,
forgotten the patterns
my fingers would trace
through muscle memory
retainers, gray matter strainers,
plain tae reminders, a box of Maltesers.
I have inked a few thousand words, still
I see more in a picture
of fingers interlaced,
high ISO composition,
the grain feels skin on cornea,
retina cornucopia, I hold on to sand
that runs through my palms and for
a split second it is made clear to me:
the looking glass of hindsight is polished
by ten thousand grains of sand trickling
through the hourglass.
