Our Lives Are To Short
The clock gnaws marrow from the bone,
Its hands are wolves in a quiet room.
I pace the halls of books like a penitent,
Collecting alphabets, equations, broken hymns—
Each one a splinter of fire to brand my palms.
Learning is a lantern, I tell myself,
But it burns both the pupil and the page.
Still, I drink the poison of knowledge,
Measure each drop with trembling fingers,
Because power without mercy is a blade in the dark.
Let the evil ones be caught in their own traps,
Sealed in jars, their whispers locked
Like moths in a museum drawer.
The good should hammer the lid shut—
And yet the shadows leak, they stain the air.
I scavenge disciplines the way crows hoard silver:
Philosophy, astronomy, anatomy,
A perpetual ladder built skyward, rung by rung.
The body sours, but the mind must not sleep,
Not while questions are hissing in the grass.
Don’t hate the players, hate the game—
But I see the board stained with red squares,
Pawns split open, queens reduced to ash.
Still, I move my piece forward.
Still, I mouth the rules until they cut my tongue.
Why are our lives so short?
Because the brain is a storm,
And storms cannot be persuaded to last.
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