Like Sand In An Hourglass Poem by Nobody Somebody

Light and dust filter into the empty music room.
Tension much,
Slicing the silence.
Views to the art department.
Watching and waiting
In the midday luminescence.

A violin shrieks
It's shaking
And rocking
I unbuttoned the black case and savour the coolness
on my weary palms.

A voice sings flat.
A pianist is labouring scales.
Somewhere,
In the abyss
Of the junior school music corridor

It arrives in floods
My breath disintegrating into the air,
And it gushes.
And flows.
Like someone's smashed
The front
Off an hourglass.
And it claws,
Oh, the sand!
Through the deep crevasses of the piano stool
Chasing the inclinations of the fabric like a snake of beige.
Kissing the floor in the darkness. It swirls and swells.
Like the clothes on the laundry line,
Slowly turning and swaying
In a midsummer's breeze.

Sand warps the world.
A windowsill
'M loves A', crude scratches,
My vision strobes.
And the sand's rising,
rising,
rising it's drowning me
Like the time I got lost in Paris,
Years and years ago,
Searching for someone in uniform,
As Mummy said so
As she was writing her phone number on my arm
In a thick black sharpie
That took weeks to come out.

Expanding.
Into the corridor, it races.
Faces,
drawn to the door
Listen in exultation
Or solemnity, the sand is rising!
I feel it caress my ankles
And fill my shoes-
Mixed with the grainy stuff
From this morning's "long jump"

I stop.
Breathe.
The pressure is withdrawn
Sand falls,
falling,
falling,
falling like sheets;
Imploding into the ceiling
I sprawl over the table
Grains of sand
Flexing the metal
Ripping off my ears
And feeding them to the floor
Like the time my brother
Fed my diary pages
To his friend next-door
Hunched, over my ink-jet scrawl

The door opens
A lunch bell rings
I unzip the black case
Place the metal
As if it were a gift from God

He's middle-aged.
Bearded.
Holding three beginner clarinets.
"Sorry,
"I've booked this room.
You'll have to move"
He looks bored,
And hungry.
I watch,
As the last vine of sand
Releases its tendrils
and slips into place as silence resumes.
I shut the case
With my tormentors and tutors,
always.

Like Christmas
To a haunted house
Like a joker
To a pack of cards
Like pdf sheet music
To the bottom of my bag
Like the melodies that flood rivers
To my clammy fingertips
Like sand in an hourglass
With the front smashed.