The Watchmaker

I am the watchmaker
The dotard who knows
No springs or gears
Who measures the time
With sobs and tears

No head to comprehend the mechanisms
Instead a heart, beating with melancholic precision
Each ‘tik’, sound of a small crackle of my jaded heart
Followed by a ‘tuk’ of my fallen tear
Crowning, the hardheaded king of cedar planked floors

At the beginning of every second my eyes
Pregnant, bearing the child of denial
And at the end, knowing painfully
The second was laboured in full
Purest tear-child born
Indeed this child so very silent, so suddenly aged
And indeed the one crying
Only I the watchmaker

The watchmaker
Who sculpts the elegant bust
Of every sad human moment, chiselling
The marble of his running tears
Stone-cut by the immeasurably sharp slit of his own eyes
Placed on the solid frame of betrayal
Memories made from vapours of nothing
But so hard indeed lasting for so long

Chimes of my sobs
Pendulum of my heart though broken
Swings with such exquisite precision
Aristocratically stands on the cold corridors of destiny
Keeping the time for nobody and nothing
Except when someone’s heart breaks
Feeling the cold stinging steel of betrayal’s blade
Suddenly starts the tik-tuk
Measuring the foaming boundaries
Of each second of denial
Bubbles bursting away
Peculiar sub-second pleasures

Indeed it takes well trained
Well-taught craftsman
To handle the short-lived
Fast perished rolling tears

Masters bequeath this art
In empty classrooms
At the guild of destiny
For chosen unborn eyes, drowned
Betwixt the billows of unshed tears
Harshly smashing into the fjords of happiness
Washing away, wave after wave
Darkness layered upon darkness
The pleasures and fortunes of the unborn
And when in time they are born
Their bliss lying dead
At the sandy bottoms of
The sea denial

And my master the Hebrew girl
Who exchanged with the Nile her newborn
In return for a watch expanding the cosmos
Tik-tuking a mother’s sorrow
Tik-tuking her son’s triumph

Though people thought the Nile
Devoured her enemies
The unborn eyes witnessed
The Pharaoh drowned
By the fast eddies of her countless tears


© 2003-2002,  Dara Shayda