"Birth, and copulation, and death.
That’s all the facts when you come to brass tacks:  
Birth, and copulation, and death.”*

But though he repeated them twice,
Those aren’t all the facts when you
 come to brass tacks,
Eliot left out a line:

Somewhere between copulation and death,
When you’re well along, but not near
  your last breath,
You find that the facts when you come to brass tacks are
Ice, ibuprofen and time,
My friend,
Ice, ibuprofen and time.

               


*T.S. Eliot, from Sweeney Agonistes.

A row of tabs with titles in hiding,
Each one a witness to the weight of today
The clock ticks louder, each second sharp,
Echoing the resolve she’s forced to obey
When did life slip into this solemn tone?

Her hand hovers, drawn to a magazine,
Its cover untouched, still crisp and clean
She peels it open, and there it is—
The faint smell of paper, a balm for her soul.

Not pages of profit or the season’s couture,
But the world of Bobo, the blue rabbit and friends
Bright illustrations, laughter tucked in each corner,
A refuge from journals and theories that age her too soon.

Here, she remembers a simpler time,
A decade past, when her world felt lighter
This magazine, still standing, still waiting,
The same one that sparked her love for the written word.

She smiles,
Because even amidst the seriousness,
A pause is enough to bring her home.

A single minute differs..
Old and new in numbers..

A pathway layered with melancholy crumbles
I bow, kneel, rise, humble

On pathways ease and breeze
Lovely thoughts to freeze

Eyes down a single minute.
I second my tribute

To time in time
Spirit high and low, never too slow.

The embers fade
from passing year
and turn to ash,
then disappear.

A span of time
that fades to black
now melts into
earth’s deepest cracks.

From murky fog
and blackest night
emerge first shoots
of new year bright.

Now from grey ash
of burnt-out past
the shoots are fed
’til new dawn’s flash.

The new year arrives not with thunder, but with a whisper—soft, persistent, and unyielding.
It carries the weight of time gone by, the fragments of moments we let slip like sand between careless fingers.

Regret lingers like an unspoken truth, a shadow cast by the light of what could have been. We try to grasp it, to undo it, to reweave the threads of yesterday, but the loom has turned, and the past is a river that only flows forward.

Time was never ours to hold. It was a fleeting metaphor, a borrowed grace we misused with the arrogance of eternity. Hours became currency we spent too freely, years became chapters we didn’t bother to read.

But the clock does not pause.
It does not mourn. It ticks with indifference, a steady cadence reminding us of the gift we still possess: the present.

If the past is a lesson and the future a promise, then this moment is the altar on which we lay our resolve. To forgive ourselves. To treasure the seconds. To write poetry where there was silence.

For though time does not turn back, it offers something greater
a chance to begin again.
And in this beginning, perhaps,
we can finally learn to live.





                                            @Erennwrites

At year’s knife edge
the night is long,
obsidian blade
cuts open new dawn.

The clock’s hands turn
and grasp the knife
to slice open the box
of a new year’s life.

And from the cut
the knife just made
comes ray of light
that glints on blade.

What this beam will bring?
I do not know.
But I’ll take some hope
and let light flow.

—

Photo here:
https://bsky.app/profile/jackgroundhog.bsky.social/post/3lem2baz3ks25

What am I but a soul,
Imprisoned by a shell of flesh,
With organs feasting on my fluids,
Operated solely by a wrinkled beast
At the top of the meat tower.

Have I a choice? Or am I bound
To this wrinkled beast’s desire,
Praying for the day that
The light will come calling
And the beast will die.