Beneath the rotted floorboards, time pulses,
an arterial thrum of root-veined clocks.
They do not tick for kings, nor bow for breath,
but coil their echoes deep into the loam,
dragging splinters of once-wooded oaths
into the mouths of worms.
What is time here, but the taste of damp?
But the drag of green shadows across unblinking stones?
A language older than lungs,
a song of split seeds whispering their secrets
to the weight of a thousand buried steps.
Above, the weightless still mvoe,
mistaking hours for thresholds,
grinding moments into calendars
as if order were a thing the earth might honor.
Their laughter carries, thin as copper wire,
breaking against the stone’s unhurried shrug.
Here is the truth:
roots keep the time,
counting each second by the shade of moss,
each century by the rise of the hawthorn's spine.
And we are nothing to it,
fleeting as the rain on uncarved stone,
as brittle as the leaves
crushed under their own arrival.
I laid my ear to the ground once,
and the earth opened a crack of sound—
not a scream, but a swallow,
a voice neither cruel nor kind.
It told me this:
"Do not fret your passing.
Even your dust will kneel
and grow itself into shadows.
The clock of roots will claim you too,
a heartbeat winding down
to something soft and green."
