All The Clocks Are Broken

I am sundial. My body blocks out the sun and projects an imago of me in shadow against the wall. As a child my clump absorbed the light and grew. But now it is only the relationship of light’s angle to my mass that can alter my amplitude. I have become fixed in dimension even as time creeps on.

I am horology. Marker of time. As much as I inhabit space and move through it in dragging hope of making it somehow bloom, I am just counting off the hours, minutes, seconds. My cells age. My muscles turn to fat. My sinews seize up. My tendons lose their elasticity. My skin wrinkles. All this change on the landscape of me. Spatial changes in the lone visual dimension of the three normally accorded to life. While time proceeds apace. The wrist watch of me is losing time. There is no mechanism for winding me back up or changing the battery to restore me to factory settings. So in fact I don’t inhabit space at all. My corpus is the space across which time marches. My body the clock face.

I can sire progeny, cheat time that way. Except that they too serve as dials. Integral and separate, despite the inherited mitochondrial quartz from which we share frequency but not periodicy. For when my pendulum finally stops swaying, apart from perhaps a slight wobble on their faces, my clock is stopped and theirs runs on. For a few more decades at least. But generational chronometry cannot buy us any more time. No persistence. No immortality. Time of death. Death of time. 

We are sundials. Horological markers of time. Across the space of our bodies. Exactly what we are counting out time for remains hazy.