Whose Time Is It, Anyway? and Other Poems

By Ken Gosse

Whose Time Is It, Anyway?

I stared at its face and I dared it to grace
me an hour of time, either way;
one before or one after, for sadness or laughter
(as if time is under our sway).

A move into the future means now would be past
and an hour is lost (may it not be our last),
else return to an earlier time, though that clime
has moved on and is gone, as if nature’s a pawn
we can change at our pleasure without giving measure
to moon, sun, and stars as if power is ours
to advance or delay any night and its day
at the whim of our laws as if we have just cause.

Reality beckons and timeliness reckons
that Now must be Now after all,
yet we take up the cause to renew our faux pas
as if nature must bend to our call.

By adjusting our clocks, putting time in a box
till we need it next time that the sun doesn’t rhyme
with our rhythms and needs and our business proceeds,
or the daylight we crave for the hours we slave
just to make our ends meet, often facing defeat,
for in winter, short days often mean that we phase
into work before dawn, staying till the sun’s gone
as the night takes domain of our toil and pain.

But the clock stared right back, telling me that I lack
any power to send any hour
to the future or past and that time will outlast
the brief moments which I may devour.

Bluebirds and Greenbacks

Somewhere, over the rainbow,
in the Cloud,
you’ll find money in strangers’ pockets
if you Source Crowd.

Entrepreneurs have mined there;
each must vie.
Kings and scammers have dined there
grabbing their piece of pie.

Someday I’ll wish upon a star
and won’t find money very far beyond me.
I’ll dance beneath a faerie moon,
but when I hear the piper’s tune—
will they have conned me?

Somewhere, over the rainbow,
money flows.
Pots of gold at the end
all beckon
as my debt grows.

Going Out On a Limerick

One marvel of limericks is that
they can change like a Cheshiry cat,
but this might leave unease
like a viral disease
or intestinal quease
when you’re on the high seas,
so if you think that you smell a rat,
let tradition be what swings your bat,
although Bartleby’s cat,
found in Schrödinger’s hat
wasn’t where it was at
when he told it to scat!
That’s why Bart preferred not to do that.

Onomatopoetry

Oh-
nomatopoetry,
doubledacwannabe,
soon failed noisily—
one vowel too long.

A-
hem, bang, growl, thump, honk, whee!
Winslow, Michael Leslie
(Police Academy)
made noise a song.

Er-
go may we always be
everaft’happily
all a capellaly
singing along.

Well, Who Wrote That?

Although my words are authorized,
sometimes I find I’m quite surprised!

Ken Gosse usually writes short, rhymed verse using whimsy and humor in traditional meters. First published in First Literary Review–East in November 2016, since then in The Offbeat, Pure Slush, Parody, Home Planet News Online, Sparks of Calliope and others. Raised in the Chicago, Illinois, suburbs, now retired, he and his wife have lived in Mesa, AZ, over twenty years.