nineteen in little more than a week:
already time slips through my fingers,

days trickling through the cracks
in the sidewalk, leaving

me rubbing my fingers raw against
seams in the parched pavement, wondering

when the rain will seep back up. I heard time
runs faster as you grow older,

an ever-tightening spiral of minutes days
decades blinks of eyes

and I wonder how I will bear it
when even now I am grasping

desperately for anything in reach,
anything to slow the locomotive

down, and all I get is red-scraped palms
from slapping past tree trunks,

arms too skinny-weak to pull, to hold any
branches as the train whisks me by

by-by-bye