Everything Is a Clock

Poetry

Everything is a clock
but not all clocks
are so easy to read.

My body is a clock,
being both the most accurate
and the least discernible.

It moves forward,
ponderous and plodding,
while also receding backward

a shrinking shadow
or an ice cube
left in the sun.

Yes, I'm going somewhere
even as I vanish,
I am the clock

that counts the future
and the past
and all dimensional states

like a simultaneous
system of variations,
an infinite deck of cards

shuffled by the stars.
I am a clock
as is every individual

mechanism of this being,
my heart is a clock,
my brain is a clock,

as each seed
within the apple
holds the potential

of time told by trees
and its myriad fluctuations
of limb, of fruit, of leaf.

Time itself exists,
and yet is only a tool
by which existence

measures itself. The river
of now, of when, of you, of them,
the theorem proving nothing.