Twelve Poem by D A Phinney

The sun rises and splashes buckets of golden paint against your window
Until it breaks through in a crash of hazy color
And you awaken feeling the wet warm seeping into your sheet
Flowing onto your skin and painting you to life
You are twelve and you float out of your bed and fly into your clothes
No! Mother, no breakfast, no time! and you slam the door so she won't care
You vaguely remember you are on your way to school
But you have bought a little time for staying outside
(Time has come to live in your head and won't be evicted
No matter how annoying, but just when Time moved in, you cannot say
Not so long ago there was no Time and you had all the time in the world
Now that you have Time there is never enough, you hurry, you cannot find the time)
So now, at last, out here, the sun has you, has laced you with its golden gossamer wires
And you run and whirl, the Mad Marionette dancing the sun dance
As the sun laughs and pulls you along with its ethereal filiments
You are possessed, playing with light among the leaves and grasshoppers
You pick up the pebbles the sun has pointed out to you
They warm your hands with the heat of an ancient fire
They have light in them and special colors, secrets, and magic
They are hidden in your pockets when you enter the shadow of the school
Inside you are restless at first, being tugged at by the sun's invisible threads
But the threads are slowly dissolved by the poisoning fluorescents
And, like the rest, your body grows heavier in its chair
Until in the gymnasium, where outside it had made great spins, amazing leaps,
It can no longer do a single, solitary push-up, and its breath labors to stand
In the afternoon it reclines awkwardly in its chair which will not fit
It is a broken marionette, an inanimate weight smothering your dying ember
And you are filled with an overbearing consciousness of
The mocking, mocking, stately march of Time... until
A glint, a gleam, a narrow beam of sunlight piercing the gray of the window
Transfixes your eye, which opens wide and drinks it
And it is followed by a golden lasso which comes snaking through the window
And wraps itself about you, buzzing, as the buzzer sounds,
Then spins you whirling from the room, the hall, and yanks you outside
Where you are free to be possessed, to be the Mad Marionette
Suspended from the sun's fine lines that somehow reach between the ticks of Time
But, suddenly, a new thing collides with your life
And says in your ear 'I like you', and the wetness of a kiss on your cheek
Burns lazily through you like a slow bee sting
And as they run away, you see that they have lines and lassos too
And you realize that Time has been striking twelve for you
And there are others who will dance you
More powerfully than the sun