Sloppy Seconds

Everyone can claim ownership of a second.

Once you own that second, you can’t return it.

There is no refund or shipment fee, nor tax discount nor warranty.  

Even if its grasp on you is loose, and its lifespan curtailed by the unnecessary passage of time.

You own the neurons that fire holes through my consciousness,

eradicating and simultaneously ratifying the very experience of that very second.

You see, a second is too heavy a load to carry.

You suppress your second, and bury it with all the other seconds you hoard.

The passage of time is holy and absolves you from

your actions. The actions that you weighted to that time you spent

Like dollah bills, and how you flip through your seconds and smell them like money.

So many of my seconds still you keep in your pocket.

You hold on to my seconds with a mighty fist, a mighty grip, a might so strong that it turns me on.

Trickles of my day fall into your lap. And you heave them

Out like a cold you catch. But those seconds

Made up my days, my hours, my weeks and months I spent watching

In Bruges, Twin Peaks, True Romance, Ginger Snaps, QI, Peep Show,

And listening to the Divine Comedy, which at the time,

Was not very funny at all.

I learned that these were seconds I never wanted to end,

The same seconds that felt like calamities in eternities in 90 minute English lessons,

Which is also where I learned the dramatics I’m using today.

A second stretches and elongates just like an elastic pre-coitus body that spreads itself for the taking.

My seconds, like your seconds, never seemed to fall into the right hands.

I think I’ll spend a lifetime writing poetry about you, even if it’s not so good,

even if I re-use the same sick seconds to the same tune of the same sick emotions

But recycling is good for me, if not the earth,

so I guess I’ll take out these seconds I own,

dirtied and clouded by the mental erosion,

stolen back from you,

and place them in front of me one by one

Re-arrange them and hope that somehow

They’ll remake a whole new year, and a whole new day, whole new seconds,

That spreads out in front of me like a fresh new blanket straight from the wash.

Until one day when they’ve dried up–

from overuse, wringed too many time from the same hands.

I’ll let these seconds casually slip

Away from me

Back to you

because truly, with your foot on my neck, and fist in my hair, and blade on my tongue,

you are still singularly the most beautiful feeling I have yet to feel again.