I thought I could stop

time by taking apart

the clock. Minute hand. Hour hand.

Nothing can keep. Nothing

is kept. Only kept track of. I felt

passing seconds

accumulate like dead calves

in a thunderstorm

of the mind no longer a mind

but a page torn

from the dictionary with the definition of self

effaced. I couldn’t face it: the world moving

on as if nothing happened.

Everyone I knew got up. Got dressed.

Went to work. Went home.

There were parties. Ecstasy.

Hennessy. Dancing

around each other. Bluntness. Blunts

rolled to keep

thought after thought

from roiling

like wind across water—

coercing shapelessness into shape.

I put on my best face.

I was glamour. I was grammar.

Yet my best couldn’t best my beast.

I, too, had been taken apart.

I didn’t want to be

fixed. I wanted everything dismantled and useless

like me. Case. Wheel. Hands. Dial. Face.

For the dim regions whence my fathers came

My spirit, bondaged by the body, longs.

Words felt, but never heard, my lips would frame;

My soul would sing forgotten jungle songs.

I would go back to darkness and to peace,

But the great western world holds me in fee,

And I may never hope for full release

While to its alien gods I bend my knee.

Something in me is lost, forever lost,

Some vital thing has gone out of my heart,

And I must walk the way of life a ghost

Among the sons of earth, a thing apart;

For I was born, far from my native clime,

Under the white man's menace, out of time.