Clocks

        The clock rang twice on the hour.
7 o'clock, as they said.
         It filled the house with a sort of electric glow, the kind that burns and bleaches the ears the way spice does the mouth. It announced the arrival of singing birds, barking dogs, laughing children. They came with the buzz, the ticking, the clicks. As they danced, a zip-click! Emanated from each of them, signaling the dancing, barking, the chirping to stop, relinquishing them to a sort of death, or rather comatose; telling time to be gone of them.

7:15, as they once mentioned.
         They were silent. Unconscious, asleep, dead and would be so. Time was gone of them. What was this time to them, but naught? To say this was time was a brutal miss-calculation. Fifteen minutes, a year, they saw this time never.

7:30, as was once whispered in their world.
         As the gong boomed, they were reincarnated, reborn, revived, resurrected. Life and time returning, the gears spun as if double time. Zipping and zooming and running 'round. Yet life was leaving faster that the springs could replenish it. And zip-click rang out again. They were still.

7:45, as some once thought.
         Life, gone again. It never stayed long. They were returned to their wood and plastic and formaldehyde veneer graves and corpses. The minutes were long, were short. That they were or were not more important. To them it mattered not.

8 o'clock, as some had said in the long ago days.
         As if anticipating the moment, the gears preceded the gong and let their gongs sing. They sang now for their time was soon to be far shorter. The dancers spun faster with a joy and vigor seldom seen.

8:30, as the fallen had once believed.
         Fearing, the gears barely left their posts. He was to come soon.

9 o'clock, as the survivors had hoped.
         Not a single creature made a single sign of life for a full ten seconds. Then, he appeared. A beast of immense power, strength, and loathing, the gargantuan creation of bulk approached the windowsill. As if offended by the lack of respect he received from the fallout zone, he raised his symbols. A brief wind catching his hair, radiation glowing from the lost city, his clap shattered a dead silence. It rang out, rang out in the amphitheater of rubble a dozen miles across, in the fields and the woods somewhere in a long distance of sadness, of destruction and madness. The moon quietly lifted itself  to the sky and the wind picked up. Clap again. This time the rubble bowed to him, to this abomination of creativity and thought, as it had bowed to the abomination of corruption and hate and the evils of itself. His last bash signaled the beast to return to his chamber. There he would sit, twisted and tortured and cruel. Time never left him. As he left the window, a paper was caught by the wind and carried to the spot. It landed in his hand. As he read it, the beast of brass and wood did something odd. Slowly, softly, it wept. It wept out and over and through the rubble and the gears and the cruelty. As it was locked again in its cage, the beast read it again.

There are rainstorms in the lowest of the desert
and in the highest of creation
And on the rain comes the soft cloud
and the cloud brings the wind
And softens the hard sun.
But in the land of war,
There are no rainstorms of soft
But of malice
And in these days,
The Malice is hard
And never softened by a cloud
But Malice can only destroy
And after it has destroyed all
The thing left to destroy is malice
And the malice will
Be gone of all
And flowers in beds
Where atom bombs lay
In in the land of guns
Death no more
Only beauty
The end of war.