Talkless Time (Expanded) Poem by Michael Ardizzone

I dared to ask a clock a question but
it didn't answer like the Kennedies with
rumbling rockets for lonely moons or handshakes
for Soviets that stand cold and fur-clad shivering
a slight insufferable rhythm of defiance,
sweeping out seconds or hours or days
hardened not by talkless time; their wristwatches
crudely imitate the repetition of idiots, stammering

Rugged and alone I wander through a conversation
drowning out the seconds, covering time in stylish phrasing,
restating the insanity of mortal time in propaganda
posters hung from the sides of Liberty Ships:
the hull's steel is good it was hastily made 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
no remains, but who would remain when time
ends its shift? those who dare to sail the
stupidly silent sea of immortality, to be still and
eerily ask questions of clocks as they stop
ticking or waves as they stand still, now mountains

as death is no parenthesis as ee cummings said
but semicolons are jealous and periods have
armed themselves like Soviets with a million
Hiroshimas: shimmering reflections of change
writ large in smoldering wood, blasted concrete;
we may kill by harnessing nature but time is
the most ruthless and unerring butcher
of nations of men of poems of secrets
words may end prematurely but time will
ultimately bury;

please don't ask me what time it is
because it hurts to hear the seconds
scream their tick against eternity, useless