A tale

a tale written by special, about special, to special...

a draft


This tale does not hail of far away lands or talk of valiant princes.
This tale is that of a poet, a rather ordinary man with a rather
extraordinary pastime. You see, the poet collected clocks. Every nook
and cranny of his old, dilapidated house was full of all sorts of
different clocks from all sorts of different eras, thousands of them.
There were grandfather clocks, and alarm clocks, kitchen clocks and
bathroom clocks even a waterfall clock made of bamboo.

The poet loved all his clocks and made sure to take extra special care
of all of them. To him, they were the rythmic observers of our
ephemeral lives. They taught him about love and hate, about sorrow and
joy, about rage and indifference. They never rushed him, and he never
rushed them, without his care they would all stop, and without their
stories he would not dare write another verse.

The old poet was afraid, terrified in fact, that if he stopped caring
for some of his clocks they would all turn on him and he would wither.
Yet he had so many timepieces that caring for them took all of his
time, he had to sacrifice sleep even to write a single stanza. Some of
his clocks were elaborate and fascinating and had the best souls,
others only beeped annoyingly when running low on batteries, but every
single clock wanted his attention regardless. Obviously he never had
time to either think about what he was writing, nor to read what he
has written before.

One day, things began to change, seemingly for no reason, but the poet
was no longer afraid. He picked through his loosely bound songs and
read, and absorbed, and he finally realized why he wrote down the
clocks' wisdom in the first place. With that realization came freedom.
A well cared-for soul will tick out its wisdom for him forever, and
when you've got forever, you don't need a thousand clocks.

Here sits the poet with a pen in his right hand and a set of
batteries in his left. The last set he will ever buy. In the distant
corner of the room a whine of a traveler's alarm clock in its last
throes. He will make it wait, but he cannot let it starve. Yet he is
no longer a slave, but he is not yet a king. A nearby pendulum gently
swings back and forth as the recently wound longcase clock ticks out
"No more", "No more", "No more"...