Sense of Time

 

Being in a coma can play

havoc with your sense of time. It can

turn your eyes from brown to blue. It can

grow hair on your belly, it can get you lost

between bedroom and office. If you are to

live in extra innings, you’ll have to watch the corners,

step around bad things, ignore insults and welcome

loving hands that sculpt you in your chair. Being

refrigerated and put to sleep, dropping out of time,

you have to save your humor and guard it, a precious

trove to bring out as needed, white strips on the

road flying beneath your vehicle, eat them up, wake

to a busy underground world, where people in

body bags keep passing by, tilted toward you know where.

Where half the people in your life have gone, dissolving

your sense of time, which was never supposed to have

an end.

 

 

George Bowering (Canada, 1936) source, Poetry (April 2017), with an artwork by Edith Dekindt on show at Venice Art Biennale until Nov 26, 2017

Leave a Reply