The Purpose of Time

                              In response to a poem by X. J. Kennedy

Pushed from your mother’s womb plop into your
nursing home, or having sex while the re-
sulting teenager leaves home forever,
your skin youth smooth .blink. old-age leathery;
if all life’s moments collapsed impromptu,
the sensory flash would be too intense.
So, they quip, “the purpose of time is to
keep everything from happening at once,”
even though, in retrospect, all of life
implodes into a box we call the past.
Ironic, sure. But off. Time is a knife
that stabs into the dark of our half-assed
moral self, cleaving act from consequence,
daring us to buy now and pay later,
premeditate vengeance after grievance,
ignore the crap we flush downstream. Water
under the bridge – is always stepped in twice,
once by us and again by our descend-
ents. Time the tempter, a con-man’s device
that lures us to ignore and to pretend,
so we desire more and more of now
before the wheel of karma spins around
and slaps the future’s hand-palm on our brow
and time’s true purpose suddenly is found.

Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine , Issue #22 Spring/Summer 2025, p. 29; 20 February 2025.

Notes: Notice the lines are decasyllabic, and every four lines follow an ABAB rhyme scheme. The first ten lines of this poem paraphrase the 1997 poem by X. J. Kennedy, “The Purpose of Time is to Prevent Everything From Happening at Once”. This poem, by contrast, emphasizes the moral implications of time: Separating act from consequence, delaying comeuppance.

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