Only time is adamantine.
Only one hardest substance serves
As an armor impervious
To all ventures.
Not a thousand years of tearing and
Scratching with desperate hands serve to carve
Even a single, transparent curl
From the surface of one moment.
Bright and fixed for eternity;
Unchangeable, unreachable
Before your eyes. Untouchable.
My eyes search out the image in every detail
My hands grasp it but find no purchase.
Tendons tighten to grasp, to clutch
To move or shift just one tiny millimeter
One hair’s breadth of difference
Of claw back one touch, one moment,
Immersed again in that moment
That vision, one tiny chance to go back.
But the wall is unchangeable. No wearing
Away through the years, no softening
Never coming unfixed from its
Fixed place ever. Stuck fast like it was
Tethered and chained Promethean
To the immovable heart of the Earth itself.
Unreceding, it is I who recede. I who change,
Who fade, who wear away and erode
Like a burning log self consuming
Until only pale ashes crumble away
And are blown before the roaring gales that leave it clean and untouched. A handprint
Only on its surface, soon gone.
Undetectable in time.
Still the wall remains. Still it stands.
The moment we made.
Though we must go ahead, though we
Must be left behind.
Always forced to go before, always leaving behind these monuments of joy and loss
And foolishness and carelessness.
And golden days that hurried over us
While we waited out the moments.
Set as soon as conceived, fixed as soon
As we glimpsed it from the corner of our eyes.
Hardened in an instant.
Ever before our eyes to stand until the
Eyes go dark and hollow and disappear.
Still they remain. Untouched.
I have found the hardest substance on Earth.
And it is time.
Making Nobody Happy 