See here: I am an asthmatic seven year old
holding Time's hand while he gently pats my head
like a mother, but then stops smiling.

Because this is the moment before
you innocently showed me your privates.
Touch it, you said - you were ten, it was hard - and I did.
 
So here I am, seven, the moment before all of this,
looking like a child lost in a supermarket.
Time says, "I will mark this spot, this moment,
this you, by driving a stake through your right hand,"
and he did, just after you told me
God would crucify us if it ever happened again.
 
See here I am: a fourteen year old child hitching a ride
with the sun in my hair, going nowhere to be on my own.
Time pulls up first, gets out, pulls some
shit about pretending to like the scenery
(semi-desert, scrubland, and waves scratching cliffs).
He mutters something about its looking better
in widescreen before giving me that almost sympathetic,
almost wide-screen smile,
fingering the stake in his hands.
 
Because this is the moment before you gave me a ride -
or rather, your father did. The car was full and you
were in the back under a blanket. I had to squeeze
in next to you, and you were beautiful and horny,
and your parents couldn't see,
or weren't interested, like mine.
 
See here: I am sixteen and in my hand
I hold a letter in which I bare all to an older student
with a devastating smile and a devastating girlfriend.
The day before the nights of anguish,
the stubborn pretence that something will happen,
that you would return the love I could no longer keep secret,
Time arrives without ceremony to drive a stake
through my brain and to tell me I know
you would never be able to give me what I want.
"This," he says, "will hurt you more than me."
 
See here: I am nineteen and outside a club notorious
for available sex. Time appears to drive a stake
through my genitals. "Because", he says,
"this is the moment before you abandon yourself to lust."
The moment before you and you and you
showed me how to enjoy my youth, recklessly.
 
See here: I'm thirty six and standing outside
our bedroom door. It's that moment before
I catch you with him, the moment before
you look at me as if to say it's all your fault.
Time nails my left hand to the door.
He marks the moment before I smilingly expect
to find you asleep, looking perfect, expecting
to wake you with a kiss, expecting
forever to be something belonging to us.
 
See here: I am forty six and single and satisfied,
standing beneath a tree, surveying my garden,
my smug little existence away from
love, sex and it's related murkiness.
I age well in night light and even
have a fire to cast comforting shadows.
I no longer have asthma and eat healthily.
My job is my love and is more faithful.
I look content when Time arrives,
impassioned and punctual, with a stake for my left leg.
"This is the moment," he says, "before ..."

I'll tell the story.
I have my own restraining equipment.

The moment before you called -
I did not run to the phone.
A voice from the past - you said something
about a girlfriend and my devastating letter,
and your need to conform. You said
you meant to call/write but something
always came up, which is my excuse.
I said yes, let's meet, be discreet,
for coffee at a nearby café.

Look: here's a photograph of you.
You had treated me to a balloon flight on my sixty-fifth.
I took the picture of you looking excited and unafraid.
That was the day you told me how,
when we had met at that café years ago,
your recurring nightmares stopped.
"It's like this," you said, looking down and then up,
"I look down at myself, stretched out, distorted,
mapped with stakes to hold me as the years
pull me apart, and then Time arrives with a razor blade ..."

You told me, later, that I had set you free.

Time's here to take our picture:
You're at my bedside, stroking my head
like a mother, holding my hand with tears in your eyes.
It's a peaceful scene - the torment trapped
beneath unsaid things. You turn the pages
of our photo album and will, no doubt,
put this one in when the light has gone.

"See here," I say before Time arrives for the last time,
"I'll be waiting for you."

I hold your hand.
"Don't let go," you say.

I say, "I let go the night you called me,"
and close my eyes.