When Time Loses Its Nerve

What Happens When the Future Loses Its Authority

For the past few months, my nervous system has been living through a private storm. The war in Iran, the fear for my family, the helplessness of distance, and the ordinary demand to keep functioning have pressed themselves into my body in ways language can barely hold. I found myself returning to Macbeth’s bleak speech about time, death, and meaning, because despair has a strange intelligence when one listens to it closely. This poem is my attempt to stand inside that darkness without letting it become my master.

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To morrow, and to morrow, and to morrow,

repeated until the present grows unbearable,

until now becomes a blade

the tongue circles but will not touch.

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

time stooping, limping,

dragging its robes across the floor

of the unwilling heart.

To the last syllable of recorded time;

where the sentence closes

regardless of whether the reader

ever learned mercy.

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

memory, a firebrand

that guides by burning the hand

that dares to carry it.

The way to dusty death.

dust not as ending,

but as form stripped of its insistence,

bone humbled into belonging.

Out, out, brief candle!

the breath blown thin,

surrender mistaken for extinction,

light learning it was never the source.

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

a silhouette mistaken for the self,

movement confused with being.

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

anxious ownership, clenched time,

the tragedy of calling the hour mine.

And then is heard no more.

sound dissolving into the vastness

that held it all along.

It is a tale told by an idiot,

mind untethered from love,

narrating to avoid listening.

Full of sound and fury,

grief disguised as thunder,

sorrow wearing armor.

Signifying nothing.

nothing as the open palm,

the uncarved silence,

the doorway emptied of idols.

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