When the stockholders of my time
Have all retired,
Slaked in their thirst
And sent for sleep,
When none but the temporal moon
May command my hands
And none but the stars may judge me,
When I rouse myself
From slumbering
With eyes wide open,
Attending to the world
Instead of sitting back
And watching it rush by,
When I move to a dream
I create
Instead of another’s facsimile
Of ‘ought to’ and ‘should have,’
When I scoot the little boats of future and past off into the eddies to rest awhile,
When the sun ducks her head
And the moon shakes out her silver
Opalescent tresses,
And the trees fall still,
And I find myself with a few stolen hours
(Stolen from the green-eyed gorgons Duty and Obedience,
The bright flare of Medusa’s cousin Expectation),
When I open my eyes and let the music of myself
Free to revel in alone and carelessness
Composing itself a sextet on the stars
And the comet-tails,
And I pick wisdom over intellect,
When the sun hovers between breaking and falling
And the moon between waxing and waning,
When my mind
In its quiet insecurity
Breaths in a great breath above all the other voices
That rest in sleep,
And is heard,
Just once,
In the wastes
Between nightfall
And sunrise,
I lay out my treasures:
A thought with nowhere to go,
A love that begs to no one,
A mind that licks the last reticent drops of clarity
From the final wink of the sun,
A smile for me alone,
A dream with no one to tell it no,
When time,
Wearied by her labors
Forgets to count the minutes
She hoards as dragons gather gold,
When my hands
Restless,
Ever restless,
Still themselves in queries,
And queries
Still my mind
In the golden-patterned
Stolen hours,
Smuggled in beneath the darkened curtain
And squirreled away to be brought out
As the Hope Diamond in her splendor,
In the stolen hours
I live.