When The Clock Sojourns Poem by Norman F. Santos

The grandfather’s clock
Defunct, senile, and silenced
Loomed like a vertical demise
Rising in the muted corner
Or rather the clandestine core
Of the disembogued hearth
And I can tell in its scathed varnish
Of weary and eroding mauve
That it had once vied to emancipate
From the providence’s dictates
And that was probably when
Its hands stopped from moving
The pendulum was now a lissome
Unwavering string to the grave
Of the clockwork’s very soul
And although it never swings
Its phantom was undulating
Into the sloped paths of impasse
Swelling and bloating inexorably
Without beckoning the rousing
Of the prismatic night lights
Perhaps it was consumed
By the darkness of the hour
And in this unholy instances
Of the suppressing nights
I can still here the diurnal ticking
Of its moribund arms
And the infinitesimal gears
And their asunder whirring
Billowing in a haunted echo
Sojourned, like how it was once
Smoldering in zeal and alacrity
And the memories sank
Into the capricious sea
But not of the forgotten
Rather, of the evocative forgotten
A bandwagon of phantoms.
Halted but never liberated
The clocks never stops
It never even started
And you will realize this, flat and hollow,
When you understand that the clock
Only stirred when you had handed
Time, in your unbolted callused palms
And no one ever took it
As the nights will never permit
Nothing ever ends
Even when the clock sojourns.