Steve Zak | + Follow Poet |
Free verse | + Fav Poem | Comment | Email | Print |

Time

Time 

                                     Through A Crack in Time

The door swings open, the street silent at this early, inky black hour. The trees reach their limbs out to caress you, a jasmine fragrance hangs in the air as you step outside.

Down the entrance steps, your feet touch the solid pavement.
You move quickly, with purpose, pushing back against the cool morning breeze, certain of each step forward until….

Without warning the pavement disappears, and you are swallowed by a crack in time, suddenly being carried away by the unending river of all time. 

Just moments before, you were walking alone on the street; now you are isolated in a capsule, bearing witness to a dazzling spectrum of memories spread across the horizon. 

You are unable to focus your eyes on the flashing images in this eternal
galactic hall of mirrors that distort everything you had finally come to accept, until you disappeared through a crack in time.

You are held captive in a dimension that unexpectedly emerged from an infinite number of possibilities, combining to form the perfect permutation of every imaginable outcome.

It had finally begun to make sense to you, but now a life filled with purpose knows that everything that was, is no more. Time has been compressed into a square block with a defined end but no beginning. 


Now you realize that we live in the time we create for ourselves and all the tomorrows are through one of a billion doors to be opened. Yesterday is still somewhere out there, the doors closed behind you.

You look around knowing that somehow today has become tomorrow. You are living on a parallel plane, unable to explain where your time has gone and where you were before stepping through a crack in time.

With an abrupt suddenness, as quickly as it has appeared, the crack in time is sealed shut, forever. It is only now that you understand it will all be over before it has even begun. 




                                        Time and Time Again

When the measure of your time is about to expire and you stare at the cusp of forever, will you think of turning around and trying to salvage all your yesterdays?  Or do you realize there was some structured sense of what cannot be altered but now understood?

Time has been an intractable companion, but it does not easily explain the subtleties of what should have been the absolute way forward on your journey. Only instinctively it may convey which doors to walk through and which doors should remain closed. 

In the end, you know tomorrow is overrated and it is better to use all your time today. Perhaps time is really an endless loop, and we live our lives over again, repeating the same mistakes each time. Or is it true that everything that dies will one day come back, time and time again?

Then, in the blink of an eye, you find yourself back on the street where it all began in the early morning mist; back to where you stepped through a crack in time. And now, you realize it will be over before it has even begun, while you try to hold on to what time you have left.

Copyright © Steve Zak | Year Posted 2018

Please Login to post a comment