The Imploded Hourglass

Before the schedule, upon the alarm’s flat vowel, 

After the last 打卡 and the quantified dayshift, 

We who are living rather are timing 

With little patience. 

Here is no rhythm, only clock; 

Clock, and no rhythm, on a digital road. 

GALILEO’S GHOST (reciting his mantra): 

To measure everything measurable, 

And to make everything measurable 

That is not yet … 

O mighty Machine, thou assembly line of seconds 

That produces, with indifferent breath, 

The minute’s tick, the hour’s debt—

Clock Time, thou micro-transactioner, collect thy uniform subscription! We, who outer the inner, 

We, who translate hands into feet, 

We have partitioned the day, have degraded it 

To mere position: a tandem of numbers. 

From this, our duration. From this, our impatience 

For the event in the interstitial pause. 

I have no time 

(a whisper in an elevator shaft) 

Time is money 

(the chyron’s pulsing vein) 

I have no time 

(a prayer in a stalled aorta) 

Utilize your downtime 

(a wellness app’s barren refrain) 

I HAVE NO TIME 

(a headline screams in a deaf ear) 

When once the incense uncoiled its scented zodiac— Sandalwood for the Rat, musk for the Horse, 

Plume of dawn, ash of twilight, 

A sensorium of moments, 

The memory of smell, the root of the undivided I— 

Now only the sterile arc of the second hand, 

Tracing its prison on the face of things. 

We eat when numbers conjugate, 

Not when gut hums its ancestral song. 

We sleep when blue light dictates,

Not when eyelids weigh with dreams. 

The grid. The spreadsheet cell. The calendar alert. 

A vibration at the wrist. A ping in the pocket. 

O mental-rational, thou great Divider, 

Spatializing what cannot be held: 

The Between thou hast made a commodity, 

The Now, a location. 

“HURRY UP PLEASE, ITS” 

(Time?) 

“THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!” 

Has the clock really undone so many? 

Each one’s eyes, fixed upon a screen in the palm, 

Are data-mined, 

And held for quality assurance. 

Influencer! 

You who lionize the constant click, 

That certainty you planted in the silicon loam— 

Does its root now touch void? Does it bloom 

With error codes? Or has the Ground Itself, 

That 5.3-second slippage per century, 

Opened a crack in its flawless bed? 

Oh keep the Snake of Numbness far hence, that siren of somnambulists, Lest with his susurrations he lull it back to sleep. 

You! archivist of identity—my doomscroller,—my digital twin! 

Oh, how the cracks begin to show… 

Retired: explosion—outward, in fragments 

Conspired: implosion—-the vortex at the heart of 

The hourglass, thirsting, inhales its own boundaries. 

That snatched waist, an isthmus, strict gate of then and next, Collapses. 

Now: a museum of frozen falls. 

Each grain of sand hangs distinct, 

A planet in a crystal cosmos without sequence. 

Irruption! 

Janus-faced: the end of measure, the birth of the 

Achronon—time-freedom emerging amidst time’s dust. 

A collision of cosmologies 

In a broadband hum. 

The nervous system of the world extends 

In electric planetary vesture. 

A VOICE (from a bot farm, thermal):

…transaction log 045. Timestamp corrupted. 

…attempting re-sync with atomic clock… 

…failure. The constant is variable… 

A VOICE (Hopi, from the root): 

My time is what happens 

When the corn matures. 

The drama of the stalk. 

It makes its own space. 

A VOICE (a perfume strip, scratched): 

Scent of pine for the Hour of the Tiger 

Ash of cypress for the depth of night… 

Spray of deodorant for the paid partnership: OCEAN BREEZE.exe 

A VOICE (the Oracle of the Data Stream): 

And I, Tiresias, having exchanged an eye for an ear, 

Have foresuffered all. 

I, who have sat by the dead servers of Thebes, 

Have walked in abstract asceticism to prepare the way for 

Endless patterns of human privation. 

And now—my schedule is filled up! 

We are attempting supersonic flight in an enclosed space. 

This four-dimensional vehicle—this transcendental object at the end of time— Shrieks against three-dimensional walls. 

Perspective splinters. 

The cockpit 計器盤 reads 

Altitude: now 

Speed: ∞ 

Coordinates: everywhere/nowhere 

The walls are manuals written in a deficient tongue. 

GALILEO’S GHOST (strapped in the co-pilot seat, screaming): MEASURE! MEASURE THE BREACH! 

Alas, the instruments measure only their own melt. 

An undivided chorus of fragments, rising, suspended, trembles: No tick but tide 

No point but field 

No when but how 

The pluralism of kinds; an Ox grows, a grief matures, a song finds its key. Each making its own time, its own womb of space. 

What we thought a problem was symptom; 

What we thought a prison was key, turning in the lock from inside.

O mental-rational concept, O great Divider,

Thou hast rationalized thyself unto Death. 

Sit thou, then, in thy cubicle, calculating the 5.3-second loss, And call it progress! 

Thou hast made a graven image 

Of the sundial’s shadow, 

Worshiped the crown rod and balance wheel, 

Canonized the speed of light, 

And now the idol has swallowed the temple. 

I HAVE NO TIME 

(a cry in a crystal oscillator) 

I HAVE NO TIME 

Yet the echo rebounds, transformed: 

I… HAVE… NO… 

C E N T E R 

S O U L 

L I F E 

The vortex at the heart is also mirror— 

To have “no time,” in the imploded moment, 

Is to see what else is missing. 

The maelström is not in the sea. 

It is the shape of the mind that sees 

All tenses at once: 

The past’s chipped shard 

The future’s rife hollow, 

The present’s 

…burgeoning… 

…becoming… 

…sound of no clock… 

Plurality-of-times 

Succession 

Supercession 

Silence that once was metronome 

In this hyperdimensional tesseract, sands no longer falling, now enhancing, retrieving, obsolescing, reversing, Simultaneously resonating. 

Each grain a complete moment: 

The season of slow moss, 

The year of the neuron’s fire, 

The hour the contracts expire, 

The æon of diamond thunder, unclocked. 

Achronon 

A fullness too swift for succession: 

Freedom for the scent of pine

Freedom for the corn’s dream 

Freedom for the psychic tremor, for the gear’s perfect tooth— The Integrator does not exile! 

The courage to sit in the no-time between ticks. To hold all at once the mental stopwatch, 

And the mythic circular wound, 

And the magical well of animal calm, 

The aperspectival leap: to be the synapse where Measurable and Unmeasured 

Touch, yet do not explain. 

Diurnal Wakefulness, thou partitioner of the world, Casting the long shadow of “subject/object.” 

Thou named dream a useless refraction. 

Thy light was a knife; divided the night, 

And called the pieces real. 

But Clarity… 

Clarity has no temperature. 

It is the lens washed of either/or. 

In it, the somnolent timelessness of stone, 

the somnial temporicity of the remembered street, the mental conceptuality of schemata— 

All become transparent 

One sees the All-At-Once and Through 

To perceive thus, 

Integrally, 

Is to be free from time 

By being full of times 

The scent that is a place 

The place that is a when 

The rhythm that needs no repetition to be 

Presentiated. Redolent soil. 

I am… 

Time 

Space 

Soul 

Origin — 

Quietly breathing beyond all timelessness. 

I am the not-bound. 

O happy mutation, that necessary leap into depth Where all is accomplished—

Origin — 

Wherewhen magic, mythos, and mental Are diaphanously reconciled; 

Whenwhere all is rest at infinite speed, All opposites and parts return to the whole, And the imploded hourglass itself reconfigures into its true form— 

The integral I, 

Ourselves of the total field. 

Sands do not move. 

Glass does not break. 

Hours do not come. 

“The future of the future is the present.”