LIFE | PROSE POEM | PROSE
Run, Hang, Slip
Full circle
I don’t have time. Time for me, time for you, time for anything.
It runs. A construct on which I hang my life. I prised open my eyelids, crusts of sleep needling the tender skin.
It hangs heavy as the sun, knifing its way through the jagged rectangle suspended between the curtains. I lie, fixated as the shaft of light slides. Pinning me to my bed, hopes and dreams long erased by torpor.
What was I thinking?
It slips. Through my fingers, like sand. Water. Opportunities.
I stare out the kitchen window, anchored by sound. Washing machine rocking, spinning, churning thoughts beating a rhythm inside my skull. The sun, a white disc hovers over the mountains, at its zenith, the day half gone.
Tasks not completed, obligations not fulfilled, joy not noticed.
Mist suffocates the valley below. It never burns away, caught in the trees, heavy with foreboding. I am beneath its shadow. I carry it with me, along the tracks and switchbacks, past the carcass, a bloated sheep sodden and submerged, weighed down by misfortune and failure.
It hangs. Suspending me from its pendulum, never quite close enough, always too far away. Out of my grasp, out…
