I carry time inside a silver armor,
a pocket watch once wound in noiseless years,
I watch its hands ticking logically
through a dark and widening illogical storm.
The second hand does not mark the second,
it marks the hurt
The hour hand does not mark the hour,
It marks the harm
Etched in time, the seconds mark famine, ash, and flight.
Watch out! they warned, but not for what we thought.
The boots returned
Not ghosts, but Sons of fear,
marching in step through ballots, borders, broadcasts,
saluting flags with older stains, still wet.
They chant of order, purity, pride
and freedom.
Watch out! they yell
to the juvenile too close to the curb.
The night watch now keeps my eyes too wide.
The cities blaze intense, while tents dissolve in mud.
The watchdogs serve their masters, not the disappeared nor the missing.
The screens show fire in every language
the prayers chant in united tongue
I watch a sky littered with abandoned meditations
and ignored manifestations.
I watch.
A stopwatch ticks beside a spinning planet
warping time beyond its control.
How quickly a coastline vanishes in flame,
how long before the river starves to bone,
how soon a grain silo becomes a grave,
Plenty was once normal but not anymore.
And all the while, the news rolls past like fog
intense, intimidating indifferent.
We say, Not on my watch, but what we mean
is not so near that I must be forced to act or grieve.
Let horrors bloom in someone else’s garden.
Let the watched borders be the walls we snugly sleep behind.
Let hunger sound like thunder,
loud,
deafening,
so we won’t hear the truth
As I watch.
The boy once said, Watch the clouds with me.
Now I am told they are coded, tracked, and sold.
They weep on fields where children beg for salt,
they gust in hope, begging the rains to fall.
But there is also the cloud of secrecy,
a veil, protecting the mighty,
swaddling steel empires in hush and height
sheltering billionaires building bunkers in the peaks
floating high above law, vapour walls on stolen land,
above labour’s cry
as they call it vision,
and name it liberty.
The watchful eye is no longer our own.
It stares from drones, from satellites, from cash.
It watches who we feed, and who we don’t.
It knows which bodies count, and which do not.
It catalogs the cost of every lie.
And still we say, “Watch this,” with hollow pride,
a tik, a tok, a trick, a meme, look here not there
silence those screams.
Turn the dial or is it now a click.
Can’t dim the constant light.
So we hide behind the looking, drinking, spy Glass,
and call it safety.
Watching.
The pocket watch is warm and wet in my anxious palm.
The face is cracked,
the hands are tired and slowing.
Yet it ticks in sync with something,
something vast and wrong.
I watch.
I do not look away.
And time watches back
at me
taking notes
counting my breaths
calculating my sighs
measuring my silence
watching me
as I watch.
by Joëlle Rabu June 12, 2025