Transient Prisoner

By Patience and Christopher Rupley

My thoughts contain
a tick-tock eternal,
a reminder that
the arrow of time
is my friend
and my enemy,
piercing me wildly,
relentlessly

until my body
gives in or up,
I can’t quite tell,

because the tidy clock
with its neat little ticks
keeps reminding me
of the gone,
and asking me
to focus on
what will be.

These immutable moments
capture me,
yet refuse to concern 
themselves with 
my monotonous mortality,
and they trudge along 
at the same steady rate,
although my blind perceptions
envision a change of pace,
I know not their ways

or their reasons, 
for this over and over, 
this day-to-day, 
or why these ferriswheel-hands 
keep spinning without
a thought for me

My feet keep faltering 
in their illusions 
of freedom, 
in their defiance 
of duty, 
of the minutes wasted 
in waiting 
for something
to fulfill my finite 
futility…

(This is a poetic collaboration between myself and the amazing Christopher Rupley. Please be sure and check out his blog by visiting his blog here.)