Time Has Butterfly Wings

Part II.

I've been obsessed with the idea of time lately. 

It flutters away so quickly...

...And you can't get it back.

Lost Time

   "Wait." Her one word shattering the silence. "Where did it go? I... I must have lost it!"

  He inhaled sharply, having been jerked out of his mindless space staring by her sudden exclamation.

   "What? What happened?"

   "My watch! I don't know where it went! It must've fallen off my wrist!" she said, panic seeping into her voice, as she frantically searched for it on her obviously bare arm. She stood up and looked around her seat, then bending down to look at the ground.

   "Are you sure you wore it out today?" he asked calmly, so as not to provoke her already blazing fire.

   "Yes! I did! I remember checking the time before we got here! Oh, can we please, please go back to that store to ask if they have seen it?"

   He sighed.

   "Alright, let's retrace our steps and see if we can recover it."

   She jumped up and embraced him with gratitude.

   "I know that it's much easier to just buy a new one, but this watch, it means something to me. Otherwise I wouldn't let it bother me so much."

   He kissed her on the cheek, "I know, m'dear." Then patting her arm, "Well, let's get going then, shall we?"

  

  The two of them started on their task, walking slowly, their bodies bent slightly forward, looking carefully at the ground. The passersby all glanced curiously at this awkward pair, wanting to know what they were looking for. He didn't notice them, and neither did she, for they were too engaged at the quest before them that their peripheral vision seemed to have shut down.

   They gradually reached the store where she thought she had lost her watch. She looked at him with hope in her eyes.

   "Fingers crossed!"

   She strode excitedly across floor to the spot where her instincts told her the watch would be. He saw her start to kneel down, hesitate, then get back up with something shiny in her closed hands and a smile on her pretty little face. He smiled back at her as she walked towards him, a little bounce in her steps. He helped her put her watch back on.

   "I honestly don't know how it fell off in the first place. It fits so snugly on my wrist." she said softly as she watched him gently close the clasp of the watch.

   "The clasp is a little loose -- there is barely any resistance when I tried to close it." he said as-a-matter-of-factly, "I can help you fix it when we get home... Well there we go. Good as new." adjusting the watch band so its face faces upwards to the wearer.

   "Thank you..." she said as she looped her arms around his neck and kissed him. He kissed her back. "You probably think me frivolous, getting so worried over such a small, minor thing, but now that I have it back, I just feel so much better about everything!"

   He held her waist, looking deeply into those shiny eyes that he has looked into for so many years, and said, "I'm glad that you're happy."

   He then broke the gaze and looked at his own watch.

   "I presume if we head back to the restaurant now, food will be ready for us."

   She smiled and linked up with his arm.

   They walked out to the parking lot. He took out the car keys from his pant pocket, she, a step behind, fixing her lipstick. They both got in, seat belts clicking. The engine started up and they were in motion. The sound of the radio drifted nonchalantly in the moving backdrop, lazy and ready for rest as the daylight departs.

   He was humming quietly under his breath, steering the car to the winding shape of the road. Headlights from cars in the opposite lane passed in and out of sight.

   She gasped and sat up straighter in her seat.

   He gave her a quick glance, and asked, "What's wrong?"

   After a moment, she slumped back down and gave a sigh.

   "I lost it again." Disappointment evident in her eyes and in her scrunched up brows.

   "Oh." A moment of silence. "Would you like me to turn the car arou-"

   "No. It's alright." she said abruptly. "That watch has caused enough hassle for today. Perhaps it's a sign... maybe it's best to let it go."

   He didn't say anything, for he didn't know what to say that wouldn't tempt her mood. He released his right hand from the steering wheel and took a hold of hers.

   They held hands as the backdrop moved on. He sneaked her several more quick looks of concern as they sat in silence, the radio still floating around somewhere in the background. He cleared his throat, gripped her hands a little tighter, as he returned his full attention to the road.

   Many minutes and turns later, he slowed the car down to a stop and turned off the engine. They released hands to unstrap themselves from their seats. Car doors opened and they stepped out into a newly born night. A tiny clank sounded off in the cooling air.

   He walked around the front of the car to her side. She stood up straight just as he got to her. She held up something and in the leftover light, he saw her dangling her watch between her fingers, sparkling a little.

   He chuckled lightly, feeling her happiness emanating in the darkness.

   "I can't believe I spent the entire ride, the whole time, worrying and lamenting over its loss!"

*

Writer's note: I'm not normally one to write prose for I have always had more affinity for the poetic than the prosaic... but I do, at times, think of stories that I would like to write and which are better expressed/presented in prose. I have dabbled in prose before (which I may post in the near future), but I'm not always inspired to write one. But I was today. This story was inspired by a true event, haha. I've also been reading a lot of short stories lately (scary ones in particular) and enjoying them very much, and so I endeavoured to write some myself (yes, I'm hoping to write some scary ones too). I don't want to go all high-school-English-teacher on ya, but see if you can unearth the theme/motif in this story. It shouldn't be too hard, haha. :) Hope you enjoyed!

Dandelion

Only time witnessed the change
To this flower in the middle of the field
Almost drowning in the vast green
Almost undiscovered by eyes.
As I walk amidst the tall swaying grass,
My hands are barely touching the blades
And the air smells softly of the summer sun
The same yellow this flower used to be.
I caress the aged dandelion delicately
But it falls apart so easily in my hand,
So fragile and so promising 
And though I wanted to hold onto it, 
I opened my palm and gave into possibilities.

Into the Night

9:00 pm

You forged those words with the heat of your rage

I opened my mouth to retaliate

But found my troops frozen in my throat’s cage

Held captive by my silence, stalemate

The space between us was a no man’s land

Where words became empty shell casings

Fell, as their force flied on at your command

Sending me into a night that thus sings

10:03 pm

I stood in front of the doorway

The wooden frame, a line,

Separating this painting to the one in my eyes

And as I took a step forward, it all became one

One where the lapis sky still had hints of the day

Making me chase down the remaining sunset

Which I can never capture except in these words

Words drawn from the same darkness of night

I draped myself with this night, wrapping my wounds,

And I found myself wandering into a world

Where light had gone to sleep

11:33 pm

My pupils grew as they drink in the dark

Learning of hidden angles never before seen

There I saw, a man beneath a tree in the park

Disheveled, I silently questioned his hygiene

He wobbled like a wooden chair with a worn leg

Leaned against the bark before falling to the green

I would’ve passed him by if not for his pitiful peg

He looked at me and beckoned me closer for words

“Just give me a couple stars of your night,” he beg-

“Gedanken experiment we will play in thirds.”

Despite the wandering hands of his reek reaching up my nostril

I stayed for the slight wisdom in the words of drunkards

He began the story in a grand way like a minstrel

Plucking away at the lines of his hands

Soon I was enveloped in his words’ tendril

He did well to cater to my curious demands

As he spoke on about the lines of his life

Of how he was given no lifelines by this waste land

He attacked the lesser chances with bitter strife

But it’s so easy to fall prey, so easy to fall prey

To emptiness, when at your throat is society’s knife

His eyes grew reflective and I watched as a shard break away

Cutting a streak down his dirty cheek; he said they’re not tears,

But alcohol overflowing to sanitize his wounds that have turned gray

Why do we leer and sneer when his plight is too, our fears?

This is our stench wafting gently into the sweet air of the night

I closed my eyes and saw the same darkness all these years

12:00 am

It’s the prelude of a new night

I closed my eyes and saw the same darkness all these years

I opened my eyes and found the world the same sight

Except for the street lights that illuminated the silhouette trees

My eyes followed the black branches up to the sky

Where the artist drew them fading into each other seamlessly

1:00 am

The moon was quietly floating among stars

Sighing gently in the dead of night,

Bringing about the quavering tides 

Tonight I took the time to observe it intently

There I saw a rabbit hopping along the craters of a man’s face

Bringing medicine to quell the moon’s sighs

A cassia tree stood stoically on its surface

I watched as a woodcutter with a scythe

With a Sisyphus task of cutting it down

Then there was Chang’e, whose expression I could not read,

Whose story we will never truly know

And I wondered if she misses the solid ground of Earth

I hopped along the dark pavement

Next to a tree whose roots held onto life

Longer than I have lived

I walked up and touched its rough skin

Carved by years and lovers’ markings

And it will be the only one in time that remembers

2:00 am

I was walking towards the city lights

The wind brought with it a strange coldness

My skin raised goose bumps to try to slow it down 

The artificial lights teasingly touched the back of my neck

Sending a horrible shiver down my spine, afraid,

I saw sharp shadows trying to crawl out of dark alleyways

Lurking and luring the naïve into its possessive embrace 

3:04 am

There was something in the air

As the wolf howled at the sighing moon

Calling the night creatures out to play

They crawled out gleefully from under the rocks,

Some late night bars, and from behind those words

It was too late for me to take cover

As my shadow crisped in the light

They approached me, their shadows engulfing mine,

Their ghoulish smiles evoking pessimism,

Such darkness, as they sank into my pupils

Searching and prying for hidden sights

Suddenly my fears were awakened

As ghosts made themselves consciously present

My subconscious flooded with sweat and tears,

And suppressed memories of ache and failures

Despair stepped forth and took my wet face in its hands

Lifting so I could stare at him eye to eye

I shuddered involuntarily and was overwhelmed

By his drumming of my heart beat

That my tears became black ink

I was so close to drowning in those words

So close to giving up the lines of my hand

And surrendering to his command of the night

Until an infant’s cry pierced through his haunting stare,

Shaking me from this living nightmare

4:29 am

I sat on the ground a good while

Trying to recollect my senses

As the wisps of the past started to dissipate

Though the uncanny darkness still remained

My hands were balled up so tightly,

My finger nails were imprinted in my palm

Crescent smiles, those smiles still dwelled,

The shadows lingered, into the night

5:24 am

I was blanketed beneath a dark gray sky

A shade the artist painstakingly mixed

My footsteps echoed softly

On the pavement of a different gray

Bloodshot eyes and tightened lips

I looked down at my hands tinted by the night

Half wounded by the night’s excursions

Half fatigued by the weight of these words

So I was dangling off of these lines

To keep myself from crumbling

6:31 am

The night retracted its fingers

Releasing its grasp of the world

I watched the shadows shrink

Slowly

The painting blooming into colours

Things that had been lying as stones

Now stirring awake and amnesic

7:05 am

Day breaks

7:14 am

Tick-tock

7:22 am

These words

7:32 am

Tick-tock

7:40 am

Ink from the night

7:55 am

Still

8:00 am

The sun swept over the land

Where night once dominated

Sending shadows into frenzy

The sky had licked an orange lollipop,

Watching the people beneath

Hurrying like ants, going nowhere

The moon faded away with its sighs

Replaced by song birds with their wordless songs

But I could still see with my constricted pupils

For sleep has not made me blind

Nor could I forget

The traces of the night

9:10 am

It was time for me to go back to us

Retracing every step and every word

Still afraid and unsure of our status

Our hearts red dark, too proud to step forward

We both reached for the door knob at the same time

Life’s cyclical way, written in this rhyme,

Written into the night.

Entry for this year's competition... Proud of this one too. Can you catch all the devices I've used? 
October 4th, 2012: So I was reading through my previous competitive entry and realized that perhaps I should try and explain this one a little more than I had. 

The main inspiration for this poem is the idea of circularity, which I tried to express with time and with the journey that the protagonist goes on in the story. The most difficult part of writing this was my wanting to be witty with when each section should start. The first section started at 9pm. The next section started at 10:03pm because it took me 63 words to write the first section. To put it differently, each word stands for a minute. But it's hard to keep that consistent since sometimes I need more words to express what I want to say. So sometimes, it is the number of characters, the number of lines that are equivalent to each passing minute (it is consistent IN each section, but differs by sections). I had originally wanted to do a 24-hour cycle instead of the 12-hour one that I wrote, but I felt that half a day was sufficient for me to dictate the 180-degree change that the character went through, while at the same time, maintaining that circularity. (...Or it might've been that I didn't have enough time to do 24 sections. :P)

In order to tie the beginning to the end, the first section is one half of a sonnet (the first two quatrains) and the last section is the remaining (the third quatrain and the couplet). It started out with a fight between lovers and ends with the reconciliation. Because as I have said previously, love is always the reason, the life of poetry. It's a foundation that I cannot shake in my writing. 

It might've been Donne's influence on me (since I took a seminar on his work), that I felt compelled for my work to self-reflect. The artist, the ink, all these self-referrals are my desire of wanting the reader to realize that I am sitting here writing this poem, literally, into the night. And that I am borrowing from the night's elements to write this, hence the emphasis (repetition) of "into the night," and the darkness from where I borrow my ink. And yes, it's true that I wrote this poem into the night, haha. I wrote the fears of the night, I wrote of my own experiences of the night, albeit minorly changed to make it more, relevant. I also wanted there to be parallels between the character, the reader, and the poet, so that as I write, as the story starts, as the reader reads, we're all in it together. So yes. This is why I wrote what I wrote.

Crickets

The sun is packing up after a busy day,
Collecting its light and its warmth.
The sky is left with its departing steps
And we can trace it to the horizon line.
That's where we wave goodbye to it
And whisper hello to the moon. 
There is a stillness in darkness always,
But if we listened carefully
There is an orchestra of crickets
Singing the day's song to us.

Out

In medias res
In love
In trouble
In death
In purgatory
In hell
In pain
In time
Indifferent.

Clock

We are dangling off of the hands
Of the indifferent clock
That runs through all the lands,
An unpick-able lock.
And we move through the day,
Often apart,
But there is always a time to pay
A visit to you in my heart.
Numbered times,
Even in these rhymes,
Always those times,
Spinning dimes.
Our lives are circular
Beginning where we end,
Heading nowhere particular,
Still holding onto those hands.
But we always somehow,
End up together again,
End up in the now,
A love time looks on with disdain.
We are still dangling off of the hands
Of the indifferent clock,
That moves through waters and sands.
Finally, we took our stands,
Loosened grip and landed at the dock,
Together, holding hands.

Published June 30th, 2011

15 Minutes

15 minutes was all we had left
Until you said goodbye to me

We treasured it with simple
Words and caring silence
And I can only imagine
The look on your face,
Your thoughts and
Slight curve of smile
An illusion made up
Of time and real pieces
And I played and replayed
The moments we had
In my incessant mind,
A jammed projector,
The images erupting,
Fountain-like,
Pouring happiness
Into the basin of my heart

You said goodbye to me,
Always, so we could say hello again.

Why is it that I feel my poems are getting crappier and crappier? Lol.
Must be the faulty, ambiguous inspiration...

A Storm's Symphony

Crescendo
Forte, rage
Incessant pounding, strumming
All in unison
The rain marches on
Falling on tympani
The sound vibrations in the air
Like hands and fingertips
Enveloping and touching me
The way air does,
The way air courses through my body
I can feel my soul grow
Like soft, dangerous gray clouds
Like shadows on a sharp note
Like the lines running on and on
My heart beats to the crash of the cymbal
I'm washed by the wave of notes
My body in its command
Aye, I am music's puppet

Change in Season

My eyelids descend like night
When I opened them,
I came to realize that
The once barren trees
On which I hoped for green
Are now once again bare,
For the birds are leaving the trees
The skeleton frame against the gray
Sways to the crunch made by feet
As each foot steps on the once green
Skeletal leaves dried up by the fading sun
The wind, like an automatic broom,
Sweeps up those remains untidily
And the streets are littered
With colours of orange, red, and, yellow.

Downtown Toronto After Class

The sky was licking a cherry lollipop
Turning its once blue tongue
Into shades of red, pink, and purple.
The air, the breath of a boa constrictor,
Breathing down my back,
And I wonder if the man who passed me
Was also wrapped in its power.
The ambiance is stiller than usual,
The flies like scabs on once open flesh,
And the only noise I hear
Is the incessant buzzing of air conditioners.
While walking through deserted streets,
A black cat crossed my path,
And I wonder if I'm cursed with bad luck.
I walk upon lifeless sidewalks,
Some blocks drenched in sprinkler water.
There are firefly lights permanently perched
On those familiar, disconnected buildings.
The tower still pokes through,
Like the tall kid that stand at the back
During class photo shoots.
Step after step, I relinquish my eyes
Of their observing duties,
As I open the door to my dwelling.

Fireworks

We never see in the present
Everything is momentary
So our pupils are enlarged,
Wanting to swallow the light
To capture the sparks of the night,
And it sets our heart aflame
And we emit sighs of awe.

Fear

My heart is racing against the speed of light
It erupts of anxiety like a volcano
And I don't want to face it,
I don't want to face it

I want to remain disconnected
For the fear of change
I don't want to draw a new image
When I can re-visit the one already perfected

I fear that my feelings will not remain the same
The one that I had felt before
Because we are composed of time
And we never remain the same,

Except in our minds.

End of the World

There is pounding,
The pavement rumbles
There is screeching overhead
The stoic buildings crumble
As the once-blue sky erodes
To frightening colours
Darkness streaks the air
The tattered man who prophesied
All this, scrambled for his life,
Not believing his own words
Yet bragging about the impending doom
The once-stern businessmen
Begins to find humour in this
Insanity, hysteria arises
They are all running
To unknown places
Struggling for an answer,
For a way out
But there isn't.

I lay in your arms
Under the apple tree
I'm dreaming of galaxies
Far away from here
We're jumping from planet to planet
Putting stars in our pockets
As we eke away from existence

I pull back into the present
And I smile at your bravery
There is a twinkle in your eyes
That affirms everything
There is a calm tenderness in our hearts
We acknowledge the truth
Without fear or panic
There is nothing to regret
For we didn't need a catastrophe
To confirm our love,
No realization to be reached
And in this chaotic change
Our love remains still,
In this moment.

The Truth

I will never insist on
Things that have
A coin's chance of outcome.
I will never force you
To love me.
I will never lie
To get my way.
I will never love
Superficially.

I can believe in you
Hurting me.
I can believe in you
Changing my life.
I can believe in you.

But please
Don't toy with my emotions,
Don't drag my heart by your feet,
Don't trample on my dreams,
Don't purposely murder my spirit.

Don't think that I'm fragile
Without you.

I'm perfectly fine on my own.
I have survived without you,
Before you.
And I can do so in the end.

Remember this truth.

Hourglass

You're a grain of sand in the hourglass.
Sparkling as you fall
Into my memories
Each one as significant
As the next
Each one bringing
A smile
To my face.