Time Stinks

I had recently returned from the brink of oblivion. 

Flabbergasted, I began to study and stare at everything. 

The square clock mocked me in its symmetry

and consistent movement. I don’t think time

really behaves that way, I told it. Time never listens. 

I opened the trash to throw out the remnants

of my despair. I said, I smell thin mints. How can this be? 

When is the last time I ate them? 

When I stopped laughing, I noticed the cat looking up

at me quizzically. I screamed, how can this be?! 

He ran off and hid under my bed. I haven’t vacuumed

down there since I moved here. I bent down

to look at the cat and I apologized. He accepted

it gracefully and with a slightly protruding tongue. 

He stared. The clock stared. The blank TV

became not blank. Not by function of gaudy electricity,

but because I had willed myself to see more of this, 

all of this. How can this be? I asked the TV. 

But then it was just black glass and a menacing figure

looked back all occluded and sinister and not me at all. 

So I began to wonder if anything on the TV was real at all. 

When I stopped screaming, I realized the cat

was on my lap and I wondered whether

I had been screaming at all. He wouldn’t tell me, 

no matter how hard I begged. That protruding tongue. 

I stood. Walked down the long hallway leading

to my front door. I unlatched the lock. 

Opened the door. Looked out. There was no one there. 

Therefore, the world has been stripped of its denizens. 

I turned around. The cat stood behind me. 

I am the last man! I hollered. He licked himself

somewhere somewhat vulgar and walked off

to go back under the bed. So I followed it. 

But then I smelled toothpaste. I realized my sense

of smell had been made so acute that even the dust

under the bed had an aroma. Like one would expect 

a pile of decaying bugs to smell. But you don’t smell 

an ant simmering on the summer sidewalk. 

It’s just there, among the people, similarly ants. 

I went outside to remind me that others are still all around. 

I looked up at them and smiled. I kept tally

of how many smiled back and how many didn’t,

and then I stood on the curb and considered

whether to hurl myself in front of a bus. 

Do you know you saved my life by smiling back? 

By making that arithmetic slightly less ghastly,

the parade of zeros and ones making me all whole again? 

I turned and walked into a park. It was one giant circular path

with a little playground off with squeaking swings and frivolity. 

I wondered if, when I came back around the bend

towards what I tell myself is twelve o’clock,

that old couple I saw sitting on the bench 

will be there or whether long, long ago

they had been buried. They were still there. 

But I still went home and smashed the clock. 

This is absurd, I said to the cat, hitting the clock again

and again with the handle of a screwdriver

that never fixed anything in its damn life. 

Why is it there? I asked the cat. 

He didn’t know what ‘it’ was any more than I did.