Breyten Breytenbach

there is no time
time is man's skin
it cracks and crackles and shrinks
in life's passing-by
in the fire of being
telling the hours
then letting them be
in the ever reverberating
moment of silence
 
in the smoking dance
of the evening star and the midnight sun
in the curl of the leaf
in the dove's swiftly
graceful and fluttered
gesture of dying
 
there is no time
time is the shooting
comet of recall
strewing heaven with the sparks
of stories no one will ever hear again
 
time's my love for you
the lizard movements
in your body that come and go
to fill the hollows
with the fire of telling
those many faces of departure
 
there is no time
just the pulse of the heart
as pain under eye-shells
 
just the emptied tell-skin
of this poem
splotched and measured
by cancer words of forgetting
like lizard shit