Axis

Time enters the body, said Simone Weil.

Trussed up in the DeSalvo-Gregor Samsa collar, and relatively housebound, I am in a new relationship with both time and body.

The work clock has stopped. No more ten to six, no more Monday through Friday. I have a vague sense of DKs teaching schedule, a sort of work-clock-by-proxy, a dim ticking through the walls, barely applicable to me.

This little cracked circle high in my neck is making its own sweet time. C2. See, too. Sea two. I suppose it deserves a poem. The Axis. I have written poems about the other named spinal bones, the Atlas and the Coccyx. It's the least I can do, eh, for my li'l buddy C2 ?

Night Time is different, too. I've been waking after every REM cycle, so regularly I can predict the time: ninety minutes later than when last I looked. If I'm lucky, 3 hours.

I don't wear a watch anymore. I'm not bored. Time does not weigh or drag. But I feel ever so slightly restless, untethered, anxious. Like a shaking hourglass.

10:30 AM is the "dishonorably-late-to-be-in-a-bathrobe" hour.

"Lunchtime" happens later; during worktime I'd wolf the jelly-sandwich-and-apple down long before high noon. Now I'm nuking oatmeal and raisins at 1:30. I could not be more sedentary lately, with this injury and the rainy weather. Metabolism gutters to a slow, slow burn.

Other timestones ? Recertify in Internal Medicine again in 2014. Pay mortgage off in 2018. I don't like to think of those things.

The floor is farther away now. I have to turn en bloc to see around. I haven't seen my bellybutton for six weeks, other than in the most metaphorical navel-gazing sense, which I suppose I'm doing lots of. Viz, this.

But yes, I must do an axis poem. There will be a hangman in it. I'll work in "clot the bedded axle-tree" and yggdrasil, the poles, the axis mundi.