time

as noon approaches in your so-called "mean time" for one instantaneous moment it is the same day everywhere, it may even be sunday. saturday departs as monday arrives, a few feet apart across some imaginary line, with the sun just the same in the sky. hello, neighbor, what day is it? it's sunday over here! well that may be, but it's monday for me, back to work! or should i come on over for an extra day of weekend?

and at the imaginary poles it's evening on one side and morning on the other, you're having morning coffee while i'm having my after-dinner drink. wow, can i come across and join you? and by hopping back and forth the day can go on forever. or perhaps just sit on the pole where it must be no time at all.

and how arbitrary it all is! just do the math. ok, you have a limiting set of information to work with, your earth only rotates so fast and orbits just the way it does, but do the math. why 24 and 60, why not 32 and 45, or 15 and 96? or indeed 6 days with 35 hours, 48 minutes in each? well, no, that leaves the sun behind. even in modern techo-society it's nice to have the sun overhead at noon o'clock (or a mere one hour off it in summer). though, if it turned out to be that much better for business it might still happen. if there's more money to be extracted from people's work and people's spending, why not 5 days with 32 hours of 63 minutes, or indeed 10 days with 16 hours each? rich people don't live in world time anyway, they're always in their private jets or climate-controlled mansions, they don't care! who needs the sun when you have the deluxe super-sunroom, and who needs to worry about time at all when people must wait for you?

so on this arbitrary day of an arbitrary and awkwardly mathematical year, "leaping" around every four unless divisible by 4 and not by 100, unless it's by 400, this so-called "sunday" that so far entirely lacks sun, here in zone GMT-8 and god knows what they're doing in greenwich or why i should care. in any case, it may be 7?? in the "morning" here but my body clock seems to consider it practically midday, and while my neighbors recover from saturday-night hangovers or head off to church (possibly even both in one lifetime!) i look out at gray and wish it were bedtime already, with merely a long 15 hours or 900 minutes to go.

sometimes i wish
i'd been assigned back in time
in a place without a clock
and no one running around
making money!

but then i wouldn't have this
bathtub
or this tv i never watch
or this computer i'm
typing on