musingsonwomenshealth.com

Days
Half awake,
Immobile as old men leaning,
Hours
Stacked in untidy piles
Around the room,
Minutes
Stretched along the walls
Like arms unlinked,
Immune to the pale blue infection
On the window’s breath-
They lounge,
Cow-eyed
In the tedious drag of shadows
Across the floor.
And me?
Forced to spend
What seem like years
Finding patterns
In the ceiling tiles,
I watch the slow dance
Of dust
Settle
On the unhurried tongue
Of sun
Drying on the carpet.
With each blink
I feel time
Physically
Now.
It is an object,
Not as the soundless tick of something
On my wrist,
Or the arbitrary sweep
Of points around a circle-
It is real;
As real as the skin that stretches
With each breath,
Or the weight
I carry with me
On the chair;
It pushes at my thoughts,
Separates
And weakens them.
It sits
Like an anchor inside
My chest
Defying me to move,
Burrowing all the while
Like gravity
Further in.
At times,
It burns,
Swallowed half-chewed,
Force-fed in each breath:
A worm
Eating patiently
Ever deeper.
And yet,
Sometimes
It is a soft grey porridge
Boiling over,
Shadow-coating wordless seeds
I try to plant in that darker bowl
Behind my eyes.
It is a body-bag,
This Time –
Not at all
The process I had thought.
Not a measure.
Not another way
Of pointing North.
It is the monkey
On my back,
A sentence
Never
Finished…