Hourglass

Sealed within an hourglass a shower of sand descending scraping away my supple skin as when one refinishes a hardwood floor scouring off the old varnish and stain Its grit scratching like the claws of a cat at my corneas already malformed before my birth so that I was never able even as a child to perceive the world completely clearly everything fuzzy like a fogged mirror and blurry about the edges causing me difficulty differentiating between 0, 6 and 8 a’s and e’s and o’s I choke as it rises over my mouth and nose Those observing my struggle to survive from the other side of the glass smile wide as they speak in pointless platitudes preaching worthless, irrelevant notions such as I should look upon each grain of sand as a potential pearl but I am not an oyster in the ocean