And now this is the day by Isabelle Cross

…When I have nothing but

Time.

Dripping through my fingers,

Pooling around

My ankles, gathering in great wide swaths

Around my waist.

Too thick to move around in.

It clings to me like that too-tight dress

I wore to Sunday school when I was eight.

With the cicadas humming in the too-bright air

And the scorching sensation

Of a lesson in salvation

That still burns my tongue to think of.

All this Time

Sits around me

Like that still, dead air;

An eternal Sunday afternoon,

A land-locked daydream

That you will never wake up from.

I am sorry that I cannot gather it up

And make something from all this Time.

It has broken my fingers but left my mind intact.

So think then, I say to myself

Think yourself a nice, pointed dagger

And plunge it into the very heart

Of Time

Make it bleed like it makes you bleed, the way you have bled

Until all your flesh was washed away and you are nothing but blood

Dried out in an old brown puddle on the windowsill.

But if Time could bleed

I don’t think it would give me back

My thoughts, the fabric of my fingers, the flesh

It gnawed off my bones. I think if it really could, it would bleed air

Just air and air and

Still more air,

Folding down layer upon layer, one on top of the other

Until I am suffocating.

And still I would drive the knife in harder

Hoping that somewhere there is something to Time

Something solid, that once I struck it

Would make it all

Finally let up

But

It never does.

I know who you are here for.

You did not come for me, and so you pass me by

Filling the room with more dead air in your wake.

I wish you would take

All the air from the room

But you’ve left me with too much air

And when I choke, I know

That I will choke

For all eternity

In a Sunday afternoon

With the cicadas and the too-bright sun

A land-locked daydream

I will never wake up from.