Empty Hands

 

I left home four thousand days ago,
on a trip planned for just seven.
"See you soon!" we said,
and parked the car at the airport.


A few hundred phone calls reduced my life
measurements to eight by six foot long
in white brickwork.
Lights on, off, bells and clangs chop and slice our time.


The night persists in its viciousness,
bringing me faces of my mother, my father, my wife, my children.
Too easily the strain marks their mouths,
the distance shreds their nerves.


Their despair sits bitterly on my tongue
and I cannot undo it.
The weeks and months crush them and I work hard
to tip the scales a fraction the other way.


We [never] run out of time.


Until the days crumble to seventy-two hours.
Will the clock not twist back to years?
Mercy haunts us, transparent and faint,
stripping me bare of past and future.


Minutes left, choking the last breaths of hope,
nameless figures suck the air from dry lips.
My torment ends with a crack.
My family's sentence of mourning begins.




entered in comp 72 Hours
http://deepundergroundpoetry.com/forum/competitions/read/8142/