Human Life

Always behind my back I hear
The spastic clicking of jerked knees
And other automatic reactions
Tracking me through the years to where
Time’s winged chariot is double
Parked near the eternity frontier
And in such moments I want to participate
In human life less and less
But when I do the obligatory double take
And glance behind me into the dark green future
All I see stretching out are vast
Arizona republics of more

Copyright Credit: Tom Clark, “Human Life” from Light and Shade: New and Selected Poems.
Copyright © 2006 by Tom Clark. Used with the permission of Coffee House
Press, www.coffeehousepress.org.
Source: Sleepwalker's Fate: New and Selected Poems (1992)