Heartbeat

She'd seldom detected the desperate ticking

Of those hands, held prisoner in the mechanism

Of a lifetime.

Yet she heard it smash,

Heard it fall from it dizzying height upon the wall,

Heard the moment the ticking ceased.

The clock-corpse returns to her in those moments

When the world seems to stop yet the heartbeat races,

Compensating for the uncertainty of time.

For though she clings to the faint ticking of her soul,

She is electrified in those tiny moments of memory,

Those tiny fragments of the life she could have had.

Even in her world she cannot resist those ultimate

Cogs as they turn, very much alive, in the midst of reality.

As the days go by, so the electric shocks become mere

Static jolts in her heart. The pain begins to ease,

But the ticking is fainter than before the clock fell.

***

I wrote this earlier in the summer. Apologies for my ongoing overuse of time-imagery! I thought it would appropriate to post it now, with the move to university almost upon me.

It's essentially about how the pain of a moment becomes more and more significant until it has taken up a person's life (and time), but how eventually that moment is free to become just a moment once again, set in time in its rightful place. Yet the person is never quite the same as before. Obviously it's about my own personal experience, and the importance of moving on in life.

Hello, university.

J xxx