Contributor: John Kropf

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Time won’t come out to play
It won’t bargain
for a return trip
or make an exchange of
…a year, a week, a day
For any reason
No matter how devout

Wrongly condemned prisoners
Released after decades
Must hate time
For not opening up
And giving back
what everyone agrees
should not have been taken

Or a persistent old scientist rediscovering
a long lost critical element
He once encountered as a young lab assistant
The one that could have made all the difference to his life experiment

Killjoy time
Has firm rules against a do-over.
And I suppose it likes having sayings written about itself…
If I knew now what I knew then…
Making up for lost time…

Since time won’t play along
I compensate (in my own case)
Transmitting and receiving
in concentrated but dangerous doses
Pressed into as short a span
As the moments allow.

Take that time.


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I'm attorney and writer living in Arlington, Virginia. I have two books to my name: Unknown Sands: Journeys Around the World's Most Isolated Country, a first hand account of traveling the central Asian country of Turkmenistan and a legal reference book that has nothing to do with poetry. I keep a blog on books and poems on an unscheduled basis, http://compulsivelyaimless.blogspot.com/