A tiny tickle seizes and stays and punctuates an otherwise dull
work-a-day
With sudden horribly long moments of fury and tears choking over the
urges to sneeze
Till I am sure they have all been annoyed by my semi-controlled gag
And I announce the opportunity to slip down the hallway
Innocuous by its emptiness and wall-to-wall snoring around each corner,
With a hacking studied mellow-dramatic I-would-work-if-I-could-comrades
cough, cough, cough The insect florescent-lit bathroom, only sterile in
its conception, offers a reprise from niceties And I Am, free to flegem as
I please in a cool outside moment that belongs to me Part stollen, part
pre-ordained. The day buzzes by my suda-head
And the illness burns away like vapor,
Like the last panic attack I had
My brand-new voiceless laser-printer incapacitated
Left to the mercy of the automated system
I wondered as I waited forever if they also make bombs?
“If you are calling about a nuclear warhead, press TWO- now.”
Time, long and pithy, measured in teaspoons or oceans.
Still looking at the clock
Five more minutes past
five more minutes past
five hundred and only five more minutes past
Can I go yet?
What if I went early?
If I think about dinner will it go faster?
If I work harder will it be faster?
A pinch in my neck from wishing hardens my resolve to 4:30,
Temporarily.
The happy train races to my night dance class
Wild, loud, African drums that drone into the depth of their heritage,
That release a rolling ring, an announcement to surrender and our bodies,
All strangers move in units of revelation that this Time, Every Wednesday
marked in inch-square boxes, The dance is reborn in us, borrowed from an
unknown and distant mother To our fertile spirits. The class rides fast
and high punctuated by sudden moments of bodily Pain, The pain of knowing
today’s limits.
The drums the drums we are the drums and ringing in the swelling
klanging
I reemerge, left at the scene of the accident I passed at 65 on the
Highway,
Miles in minutes, and I stretch an uneasy neck into it.
My watch! The date, so late in the year!
All the malleable days gone! Quicksands of time.
The ordinary and extraordinary the greedy and kind and tortuous sharing
the same goal That we, the hapless incidental, deny and grow for. That
which we can’t don’t and won’t see coming. Humanity in barcode for the
Great Consumer The century a river, end touching beginning and middle
accelerating the sound and fury and dish washing and lawn cutting and
war-making toward an unwritten and anxious End.
Trepidation is the word Millennium.
So many pebbles in a slingshot. So many gods. So many kinds of time.
-Christa Bianchi
