Three nights from the beginning
Unintentionally marking time
A clock that ticks me awake
Loses its battery, each nights design

Glancing as I passed the stool
Holding pieces toward control
A context began to play
About history on a roll

Personal more than social
A historic walk through time
Pulled from a womb of darkness
To an existing paradigm

The early years forever gone
No memory to serve
The unconscious years of infancy
Not subjectively preserved

Family, siblings, community
All live inside the past
Courtship, marriage, offspring
A shadow does all cast

The delineating lines
Between the this and that
Energy and time, it seems
Surrounding each personal fact

Does the unconscious life of infancy
Have a lesson from which to learn
Is programming being impregnated
Imprinting adulthood confirms?

Is technology a metaphoric mirror
We’re programs of zeros and ones
Locked, loaded by virtue of coming
An educational beneficial sum

The inception was marking time
The road narrowed then it curved
The time we mark unconsciously
We’ve learned from the world we’ve served.

4/15/18

[Note: 8/31/20: This is a confusing poem. It sounds like I had a clock
that kept me awake and for 3 nights I kept taking the battery out in order
to get some sleep. That’s what sent my mind on a journey about marking
time. The second stanza sounds like on the way to the bathroom, in the
middle of the night I observed the pieces of the clock on a stool. By the
time I get to the eighth stanza I’m comparing the human mind and our
experiences to the accumulation of data on a computer. By the last stanza
I’m acknowledging the fact that the poem meandered everywhere.]