TIME as enemy.
TIME as illusion.
Asking your buddy, every
half hour, for the time.
Counting the hours, the minutes,
until lunch, the 2 o’clock break,
quitting time.
Be here now, the voice within
urges, but the eternal moment is a
measure of suffering as well as joy, a
measure of the meanest absurdity: digging
ditches for still more apartment houses,
looking busy when there is nothing to do,
picking up ever smaller bits of trash, wiping
the ass of the beast.
Around midday, Charlie knocks
a hole in the pile of sand with his shovel.
“This would be a good place for a nightclub,”
he says drily, and the fantasy occupies
us for the next half hour.
Over coffee, we decide to
write a history of America.
“Things started OK,
and then got bad, and then
got worse,” we begin.
We never get beyond
the first
sentence.
