THE BLACK WATCH

Battery-powered, hour on hour,
Time tocks digitally, silently,
Slowly on my workaday wrist.
Clear of face and sober,
My Monday to Friday watch
Is a faithful old timekeeper
Who buses me to work
With morning Metro
For wake-up coffee,
As the great, grey grind
Begins again and again.

Then, on Monday to Thursday
Evenings which never become nights,
I watch tired TV on the somnolent sofa
And retire early to bed, early to rise,
Too weary to wipe sleep from bleary eyes.

Meanwhile, waiting all week long,
The strong black watch has been brooding
In the gewgaw and jewellery drawer,
Impatiently counting down the flight
To freedom and the heyday of Friday night.

Identical quartz disports
Time, ticks quickly, gallops
Apace on my latenight wrist.
Dark and mysterious,
My holiday-weekend watch
Converts must-do into want-to
And jets us to pleasure
With midnight vodka
Until Sunday’s Rose` glow
Glisters, gleams, grins
And beams golden again.

But bar, garden and conservatory
Drift blithely towards industry,
As Friday turns into Monday,
As candlelight turns to electricity
And music and talk turn to work and TV.

Willing old workwatch, up every weekday,
Heaves the leaden hours all the way
Down through the tunnel to the light of payday;
But dark in the drawer, soon to make hay,
Our thrilling, deadly nightwatch waits to play.


(2007)


The hedonism hinted at in the previous poem is also the subject here but considered in a more Yin and Yang context.

I have two watches, both of them presents from Lise, both the same model, but one of them clear of face with a brown strap for weekdays and the other black of face and strap for the weekends. They provide a neat little object lesson in the relativity of time.