At first glance, it is difficult to make a case that her most recent poem has anything to do with me.
It seems innocuous, just a bunch of cliches about time strung together, an almost pleasant romp as she flexes her poetic muscles – until the next to the last stanza which seems like a shot to the heart.
Paraphrasing, the open opens with “time will tell,” followed by “Time healing all wounds, and that time marches on (the one cliché she manages to avoid) and cannot be stopped, she using a puzzling term of time being unstoppable second only to death.
In an allusion to Einstein, she describes time as relative, going fast or slow depending (and her she personifies it) on how it feels.
There is never enough time, yet trouble if there is too much time on our hands.
It moves quickly when things are good and drags when they are not.
Time, she said, is a cruel mistress, but it is also father time.
Sometimes the time is not right and at other times it is just right, and people find a lot of ways how to kill time.
People are always in a hurry to save time, and yet seek ways to preserve it.
Then in another odd phrase, she says in order to seize time (perhaps alluding to seizing the day), we have to deny it.
She makes reference to the old wives’ tale about a stitch in time saves nine (basically meaning it you take care of something right away; it won’t get worse later).
But then, we get to the troublesome next to last stanza in which she calls time crazy, a fleeting wanderer with a personality disorder, as annoying as a gnat, yet “clever, ill-timed and elusive.”
She closes the poem by saying this last makes sense since “we invented it,” despite not knowing exactly what it is.
After having read the poem over and over, I come to believe that it is an allegory, saying something far more sinister that it would otherwise imply.
The speaker in the poem is utterly reasonable, someone who appears to be making an observation about the nature of time, but the poem seems to be about something more.
The point of view shifts between a number of pronouns, “I,” “we,” “they” and “it” and yet maintains an extremely remote point of view, factual, unlike some of the more personal poems she’s posted over the last half year.
It is easy to substitute time for love or even one or more of her alleged stalkers.
By opening the poem with the phrase “Only time will tell,” she appears to allude to the frustrated hopes of people who have professed to love her and who she has cast aside, people who hold out hope that her feelings for them might change if enough time passes – this idea supported by the next line about time healing all wounds, even though she has said in other places this is not at all possible.
The next line talks about time being “unstoppable,” which may well be taken as persistent (a pest even, which later is echoed in the next to last stanza). This is followed by an extreme negative comparing time to death – perhaps referring to her own fears as expressed in previous poems about “locking and unlocking” because she feels unsafe.
The poem makes frequent references to the speed of time, calling it relative in the second stanza, and later about how to save it, hold onto it, even seize it – references that would work as well if talking about love or some other ethereal aspect of life.
There seems to be this idea of good feelings that generally come at the start of a relationship passed all too soon, while the bitter after taste of the breakup lingers on, and that people with too much time on their hands might spend too much time speculating on it and find many ways to kill it off.
For those still clinging, love, time or even the poet might seem like a cruel mistress.
The next to last stanza, however, stands out in a number of ways, and is the reason why I suspect I am – at least in part – the target of the poem.
To fully get the impact on this stanza, I’ll quote it in full
“I say time is a schizophrenic jerk, an ephemeral vagrant with borderline personality, a nagging bother with a clever, ill-timed (snicker) elusiveness.”
This comes in the aftermath of our friendship earlier this year in which she failed to pin me down and shape me into her new stalker, and suggests that somehow, I have interfered with her plans, and I have somehow eluded her, as if she refuses to believe my silence over the last month, and insists without evidence that I am somewhere in the background bent on foiling her schemes – whatever they might be.
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