Talkless Time Poem by Michael Ardizzone

I once dared to ask a clock a question but
it didn't answer like the Kennedies with money and
rumbling rockets for lonely moons or handshakes
for Soviets standing cold and fur-clad as they wait
shivering a slight insufferable rhythm of defiance
to the sun and moon as they sweep out seconds
or hours or days hardened not by talkless time
but mirroring the repetition of idiots, stammering

Rugged and alone we cover time in conversation,
slather seconds in stylish phrasing, restate the
insanity of mortal time in rumbling instrumentals
of flesh and motion and bodily fluids that ask
not what you can do for your country but what
time can do for you is kill you dead and leave
not remains, but who would remain when time
leaves the room but those who dare to be
stupidly silent in immortality, to be still and
eerily ask questions of clocks as they stop
ticking or as a heart may not stop beating, as
death is no parenthesis as ee cummings said
but semicolons are jealous and periods have
armed themselves like Soviets with a million
Hiroshimas silently shimmering in the winds of
change or time that relentless and ruthless
butcher of nations of men of poems of secrets
words may end prematurely but time will
ultimately bury, so please don't ask me what
time it is because it hurts to hear the seconds
scream their tick against eternity, useless