I struggle to say goodbye, to infinity
And how do you part with immortality?
And why should feeling like you'll live forever
Mean dancing in the park, uninhibited
A playground?
Mean days of joyful laughter and falling in a heap at the bottom of the shining slide
Breathless
The metal bites in your skin and you cannot breathe

But you are alive

Now the seconds tick past
And I suddenly, I hold a gavel in my hand
From the court
From the finite court? No…
From the court I imagined and drew on an artist's easel before I wrote my name with a thick, wet brush
From the court that was my own
And I run through the house
My eyes will not meet yours
Never again, really
Not while the cobwebs grow on the easel. Never again, at all. Unless I choose.
And the ticking grows, a cacophony
A finite cacophony
Childlike, the words I remember from a poem
Tick tock
Tick tock
Tick tock
But I cannot make myself remember the mouse even though I want to
Because everywhere I look the hands are screaming
You must live, you must live, you must live

In this poem, nothing rhymes and nothing is beautiful and there is no mouse.
They say I am becoming the woman I will be.

I raise the gavel and I smash the clocks into silence
They fall and glass, like the wind-up music box with mirrors and the revolving elephant, tinkles across the floor
A lullaby of sleep, and then the clocks are silent and their gears will never turn again because I crush them too and the gavel is dark
The hourglass can no longer tell me I have three minutes, then I sleep
I raise the gavel and the sand flows toward me from within the broken glass, hissing, like the beach
The hourglass is dead

And the sandcastle of eternity grows strong and vernal
(I had forgotten; the sandcastle was crafted by the smallest hands that knew everything of joy)
The summer triangle gleams down at me
Through the sunroof
That is my fountain of youth:
A sunroof
And a sandcastle.

And this time the night will never end
And I will know who they mean when they speak of Sagittarius
I will say once again, I am the archer? He, who loves true freedom for mankind. A name I cherish.
I will believe them because I believe in a summer night that I see through a sunroof and I believe in infinity.

And with the gavel?
I have stopped the tide.

The sand is in my mouth and in my hair and in my heart
Is it kismet, to taste the sand? That whenever tears flow and the late night hour crawls upon me I should feel it scouring my skin?
That a thousand years of broken shell should be an itch upon my cheek?
A slight nuisance and a slight reminder
For the rest of my days?
There is, after all, no eternity.
But there is time.
Time to feel the sand
Or time to live.

And I weep
Because the gavel is me.
And
I do not want to die.