Time Is Playing a Game with Us, But Fate Is Cheating

The grandfather clock struck its final hour so
long ago, and so did our youth.
And those whispers from the restless nights are nothing
but an unfamiliar mumbling in my ear now.  Sometimes
a faint blurry cry for help comes from somewhere
within my conception. I wait for it
to die down, like those moments once passed,
but it seems to never really end anymore.
One choice that I let slip out of my hands made
myself a Myrmidon to the simplistic indulgence
of the moment, forever left broken for
all the years sent and a lifetime to surrender.
But what truly was it for? I cannot help but wonder
the way I let myself be convinced I do not
know anything.  Yet it was like arrows
shot straight to the target, though really it was
poison I drank like ambrosia in the dark of day. Sometimes
I wonder, was I the arrow itself
thrown for the amusement of those around me?
I have seen them somewhere, I am sure, but
where, I feel I will never retrace. Sometimes
I think it could have all turned out okay.
But was that even truly a possibility?  After all,
weren’t the red octagons there from the very start?
Sometimes I know not how we let everything else cover
the most conspicuous of truths,
staring straight into our eyes.
But tomorrow I awake from this
nothingness of this life that beholds
nothing for me, knowing that leaving
this pain behind in the deeps will never
allow it to return to the light of a life. Sometimes
I forget what brought me
to choose something I could never
have done. But I did it.
I rise from my own ashes, but
I think I left my soul somewhere in that heap.
Now all I feel is an ambivalence,
a melancholy which I cannot touch,
yet a joy that does not truly
belong to myself. Sometimes
a flash of it all comes back to me,
but it disappears spontaneously.
Maybe this is what was written
for me in the stars I used to look at.
But this is enough for me to
guess they were right.
If I never had wished for anything,
I would never have had to suffer.
And so I sit across from the old
grandfather clock, leaning against the support
of the wall; both of us there with nothing,
no function left in ourselves.  Yet sometimes
I look up and smile
and think I see the second hand move just a little.