Keeping Time

by Mike Orlock

I’ve lost time.
Lost track of where I left it,
(on a table at home, in a desk at work):
I placed it somewhere for safekeeping,
thinking, That five minutes will come in handy
later today or early tomorrow—
Just give me a minute, maybe two,
I’ll get back to you in a second…

First I have to find the time,
but with every turn I take
I keep myself from really keeping
the empty promises I keep making
to waste not/want not what little time I have…

I am the prodigal son who tasted
the time of his life and wasted his time
thinking, he had all the time
in the world to spend, not
knowing he was broke
to begin with in the end.

© by Mike Orlock.

Mike Orlock is a retired high school English and American History teacher who divides his time between the Chicago suburbs and a vacation home in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin. He has been married for 46 years to his high school sweetheart and inspiration, Liz, and greatly enjoys being grandfather to five beautiful granddaughters who keep him, he says, “jumping like a frog on a hot skillet.” Mike’s short stories, poems, and reviews have appeared in a variety of publications and he is currently serving as Poet Laureate of Door County, Wisconsin, a position he will hold for the next two years. Mike’s latest book is Con/Verse/Sations, released last fall.

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This is a superlative poem.  Homo Sapiens is a mammal that exists on a high wire.  “Life” is a matter of tasting and wasting is it not?  There are no guarantees, security is elusive, relative, no-thing which can be seized and possessed.  “Being” is a matter of existing-in-relationship with the external world,  The components of which are infinite: the creek and Braeburn park and the marsh behind my house; this Starbucks where reading and writing and conviviality with others happens; the sun rising this morning in a ball of light over the Fox River at Geneva, etc., etc..

I am reminded of how fundamental is the dimension of time to my experience of the self.  Also, I am reminded that prior to the “I,” the ego, there was the “we.”  I owe my sense of self entirely to the opportunity as well as gracious assistance offered by many teachers in the matter of acquiring language.  Teachers are guides.  Words are “key” to unlocking the vast storehouse of culture.  Learning never ends.  Or it shouldn’t end, the exploration of the parameters of this experience which I “know” as my life.

Tasting and wasting…learning.