Hours and Minutes

Tomorrow is a shrug of the shoulders,
A coin lost down the back of the sofa.
Time is all I have learned and am learning.
So much happens
When nothing is occurring,
Trillionfold incident and accidence
On the peripheries of the senses,
Rhythms too subtle
Except for music.
One hundred trillion cells,
Clocking their destinies,
And the suprachiasmatic nuclei
Pulse with invincible precision,
Even as the corpse decays.
All I know of time is movement,
Ravel’s Bolero in my head,
A single repeating melody and rhythm,
Volume and timbre changing,
From whisper to fortissimo,
Sublime monotony.
The beating of a mosquito’s wings
And the malaria of time
Penetrates the bloodstream;
A tenth of a second-
Is that a moment?
It is all I can grasp...
Bewildered as those medieval theologians,
Trying to calculate the exact time
Christ’s resurrection took.
The so few times,the so few experiences
Of a lifetime(how many more moonrises
Might I notice, let alone see?)
Coded and migrating through the mind,
The alchemical apparatus of the brain...
(Lightning in the locus coeruleus,
Up and down, stimuli of emotions)
Neurons and dendrites
Jungle the spaces I move through,
Ridiculously human,alone and conjoined,
Expert in thresholds
And sad at some point each day.
“Before” and “after”,”earlier” and “later”,-
Bedevil my mind-and the childhood
Ahead of me, behind, all around...