Time

And Tide In Waves

Waves lap at our toes tick by tick
And we just can’t stop falling for
The hour hand’s insidious trick;
Melted chessboard’s eroding core

From those wretched quartz lips,
Second by second, slow,
A sundial’s ichor drips

We’re all buried up to the brain
While earwigs march along the plain
Past windmills made of hopes unclaimed
Stars bleed from galaxies unnamed

From the mind’s soup rises a beast most vile
All drooling, its seven mouths eat their fill
Counterfeit crowns ajangle with dank spleen
Yet far worse still, in chains beneath that hill,
There ticks a phantom wreathed in threads of guile

Rejected breath
Inverted death

Three hands with twelve sets of teeth fracture a shingle
Opening the roof to depraved euphoria
Through which an unsteady stream of chained faces pours
As sense — common or otherwise — crawls on all fours
Ahead of this writhing phantasmagoria
Far above, overseeing it all, a single

Eye