Learning to Lose

You lose yourself between the empty ticking of the clock,

The low-brow knock of tick-tack-tock;

The wayward, strident second hand

Beats to the sound of unmanned wreckage

Inside the holy-water of your heart.

 

You lose yourself between the leaves of sheaves of books,

The smell of well-felled plant-cells planted in antiquity

Permeates the dusty shelves,

And only time will tell whether

They will find a home again.  

 

You lose yourself in stacks of stones and tomes and poetry,

A clustered, flustered, flotsam-jetsam meld

Of stories bound together by the past;

Held in ship-shape place for

Longer than history itself.

 

You lose yourself under night’s weighty deep-dark cape,

Walking the fleeting distance from one bright-bite

Pinprick of light in the sky to another;

Wondering under what thundering sky

You yourself will join them.

 

You lose sight of yourself, you begin to notice, in the meaningless

Of hypocrisy, and the view of infinity from your bedroom window.

So while pre-processed thoughts and lacklustre words

Pour from the jaws of immobile, ignoble people,

 

You lose yourself again in the empty ticking of the clock,

And learn to love its simple sound.