Crack the Spine - Issue 100

Stealing time fails, too, in any bid to reallocate, yet often not before forty towering fortresses have been built to shackle victims of the theft, doing time as thieves lose all track of their spoils and as hours stiffen into gridlock that opens cracks in concrete cellblock walls wide enough at first for only grass blades, then for ants in single file, then for a rat, and at last for a human hand and foot, a living jailbreak from death that was not waited for until time to waste or spend at last can be restored.

Investing time would seem to hold a greater promise.

Beeswax builds in tongue-smoothed spittled layers, a pixilation of hexagons to house a humming brood, abuzz with frenzied wings and waggled chatter over orientation to a universe of bright surrounding bloom, layer upon layer of dark distilled gold summer light, all stored against the snows that can freeze a single bee or shrink cities of its kin down to stragglers into spring, if not first crushed by clawed, thickened paws of bears, out to plunder honey and fat for their own deep snores in dark dens they have discovered but rarely ever built.

What of saving time, the cultivation of its thrift?

A windswept heron sways on a branch of juniper, the spindles of his avian leather legs locked stiff, his beak spear poised above choppy shaded water, his eye beaded at what stirs below its surface light, and his coils of neck looping gently out and back, the only movement spent in all his hours of wait.

Or ospreys, too, surveying seas from wings locked