Time is relative.
It can yell. It can scream.
But it can't run backwards.*

It takes 8 minutes for the light from the sun to reach the earth,
And hundreds of thousands of this exact timeframe
for the sun's inexistent sound to permeate in permanence.
A solar explosion would annihilate the human force.
Everything we know would sublimate into a vacuumed space.
All knowledge of everything,
Vanished in a fiery apocalypse.
Death would arrive before it even happens.
So what is the purpose of life if death could already be here,
Eight minutes from this moment?
The time it takes to boil noodles,
Take a shower,
Eat a bowl of cereal,
Could be the last spoken,
Thought,
Performed part of everything.

How should I believe time is real,
Death is cheated,
God is listening,
When this minute could be my eighth?

I swing my chainless pocket watch and count each of my five hundred seconds.
And wonder if it would be simpler to exist where time doesn't.
But each child climbs higher on the playground's jungle gym,
Reaching for doctorates and dissertations,
Their watches not as precisely examined as my own.
No worry of things that are all too possible
In just a matter of time-
School shootings,
Asteroid strikes,
Uncontrollable plagues-
While my watch counts nanoseconds as it falls onto Earth's surface,
Their watches spin rampantly,
Drilling into their sandboxes.
I see this,
The same age I was years before,
And these children melt into wheel chairs and death beds alike,
Their children mourning their passing,
While their children's children,
Crippled with tears,
Hold the hands of their parents in desperation
for an agony so ripping.
And all the while I see the sun exhale its time.
The trees ignite,
the sidewalks smelt with the burning grass and buildings.
And just as I peer into the beyond,
My rusting pocket watch clinks with the sanded surface of this childhood play box.