Figurine Poem by Percy Dovetonsils

I wondered if I could still love you
if I were blind and
could not see your beauty

and after what seemed a long time
of neither hearing nor seeing
you
you spoke to me
on the phone
and I couldn't remember what you looked like
yet I still loved you for your bright
and poignant spirit

which is steadily ticktickticking
away from me,
carried inexorably
by social machinations
I'm not strong enough
to stop.

What would I have myself do?
Throw my body between
the turning gears
as if I were a monkey wrench
when you've told me nothing
I could do could interfere?
I'd just be ground up-
a gratuitous crucifixion.

So there you go,
stiff but still beautiful,
swept along on your tracks
toward an entirely separate fate
from mine

like some monumental figurine
in a Swiss clockworks.
I've been told
to leave well enough alone
and who am I to argue?




I'm as mortal as a jellyfish
and don't begin to have the tools
to argue with the working out
of metallic mechanical parts.

You can be hard, you can be tough,
I never doubted that.
I simply wonder what
you'll do with your other you,
the one you offered me a glimpse of
as you made your irresistible circuit
round the tracks of time.