The Grandfather's Clock

[Inspired by a dream on the night of the 27 January 2023]

The omen muses in her split pediment seat,

In time for subconscious hauntings to meet

And greet –

Within the silent space of spruce wood solitude,

Unviewed,

Above the moon dial -

Promising to leave lives of vice erstwhile.

The pendulum bob,

Whilst squandering time does sob,

In surreptitious sadness.

Midnight madness.

Her spherical sun rocks in its own acute silence,

Causing unintelligible violence

Within its sleeping soul,

Whose fissured flesh pierced by her finial,

Chokes on Omeprazole.

Such tortures insoluble.

The room alight in cinematic hues,

Sets fire to its paralyzed electrical fuse –

Wired wrongly with mania and misery,

A being crafted by her witchery.

Macabre modern carriers zoom by –

Becoming its lost and local firefly.

Whilst speeding amongst an artificial glow,

Shivers of time-warped wonders shall bestow

The gift of amity to its conflicted brain;

A civil war for the inherently insane.

Eyes fractured within the side glass,

Grimace in brutish brass.

A simple smile of sadistic seclusion.

A perfect illusion

Of truce,

Or a conveniently covert method of unconscious abuse.

Time ticks on in artistic continuity,

And so, it wakes to something beastly –

A conscience.

Although cruel and unrelenting,

Upon the clock, she sits lamenting.

Trapped in abysmal time,

She watches it reach bedtime,

So that she can play once again –

And send Goblins to its imaginary glen.

She smiles when it cries

And dies when it dies,

For she just embodies the tragedy of time –

Societies feared paradigm;

Our coordinated crime.