Clockwork

[JX Valentine]

Yet another one of my "Interpret this!" poems. Good luck at figuring it out this time.

Clockwork

Tick, tick, tick.
Time is but a mere illusion
Of the grandest scale
Dripping like viscous mercury
Into a silver basin--
And mercury it is
For too much of it on the tongue
Proves toxic and fatal
Especially to the naive brain
Who knows not of how much
Mercury lies dormant
In the crimson rivulets
Over which it reigns
Nor of the mortality
Which it bears in a golden chalice:
The Holiest of Holy Grails

Tick, tick, tick.
And memories, also illusions--
False images of the hippocampus
Swimming through a vast
Psyche soup
Existent in a merely retrospective way
(Like love, only as a sweeter form of
Belladonna)
But otherwise gone already into
Puffs of silver smoke
Drifting through the apple-red fires
Of the soul
Unable to be grasped
By a monkey's hand

Tick, tick, tick.
Time, a one-ended beast
Mobius strips in invisible ebony,
Flows disrupted
Timed by constant drum beats
Within each soldier in a civilian's war,
Begins without really beginning
And ends without really ending
With the life, blossoming, and death
Of pink chrysanthemums--
From then on, flower petals ripped
One by one by a dog's hand
And by each other
And by themselves

Tick, tick, tick.
Fate? No fate is
Induced by external carcinogens
Like second-hand smoke
In a baby factory--
Humans, persuaded;
Illusions, masqueraded
Constant paranoia
The experimental control!
Controlled within and without
By words, by chess
By one's own inner fear
For departing from the assembly line
And into the unknown void
So they desperately cling to
Glass kaleidoscopes of their own
(Because that's what they know)
Ruled by their own comforting
Memories and memorizations
Of how utopia is and isn't
And where the clock dust should go

Tick, tick, tick.
Each one convinced by melodrama
That inferno is on the other side
So they live in fear like fleas and ticks
Rearranging tea cups perfectly
At great massacres
Because it's merely expected
Blind to the fading colors around them
Pink and blue -- dreams and hue

Tick, tick, tick.
So they doom themselves
In a self-presented Armageddon
To live as zombies
Feeding on blood and gore
Only to sleep at the end of the night
As clockwork complete