Once upon a thyme,
There was a kid named Pace,
They felt their existence was a crime,
For without reason or rhyme,
Pace was living outside time.

They Benjamin Buttoned in the early dayze,
And accelerated linearly towards the end,
But what about the beautiful messy quantum middle?
While Rome burns Nero plays the fiddle..

Pace was an eternally fugitive figure..
Disfigured, preconfigured, seeking for a reconfigure
Quicker, slower, twitchy, glitchy, witchy, ravey gravy.
They’re always searching for those slippery happily-ever-afters at the
Afters.

But like eels, they somehow slither out of reach.
They meet Cinderella in the back alley to smoke spliffs
Constantly ADHDed away from the yellow brick road,
En route to emerald sin city. gritty gritty

Tin man is smoking Tina, for his heart aches,
Scarecrow was murdered with crowbars,
A hate crime - while friends of Dorothy are still on the run,
Eternally the faggots and their friends between revolutions.

Is it Our time?
Asks a big yeti named Yet,
Lurking in the snow piles of our lament.
So? Is it our time yet?

And what makes Our time Ours?
When does my time AND your time become: your + my time = our Time
when does it stack? And why is it often out of whack?
when does our togetherness amplify? and when does it magnify our alibi
when we want to stay hidden, in spaces between time..
when is the Timing just right and when has it left
and when have we left it?

Pace paced and wondered..
Can we leave time? While we're alive of course..

Can we escape the ticks and the tocks?
those heavy building blocks of the clocks..
Can we set sail to new docks, past the jagged rocks and hard knocks?
To fields of green where sheep of humans dream,
And time is as runny as melting ice-cream.
Where it doesn’t run out on you, but covers you in stickiness instead
whether you’re summiting mountain tops or cosy in bed.

The poet wrote:
‘To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour’

Now Pace felt their heart beat slowed down
To a soft thump, while their thoughts were out on the prowl.
But how can I find eternity in an hour?! I am no wildflower, I don't have this power!
They looked to the almond trees and asked ‘what is this time beyond time? it sounds like god’
And the almond trees answered..
They blossomed.

Pace smiled a secret smile.
A smile that beguiled.
Can a smile be a unit of time, a way to capture a while?
Between-the-whiles is where the WOW lives out its days
Always swinging between sobriety and craze,
and it weakens time like kryptonite
Flipping tears into galaxies and day into night.

So perhaps there is no realm of time beyond time, rather a state that allows us to drip through
The hour-glass in a different speed or with a different viscosity,
We slide and ooze and spill and squirt in and out of worlds,
But it depends on how malleable we let ourselves be,
survival of the liquidest.

Now Pace quickened in pulse and sat straight up,
The liquidest and wettest states of matter, always beaten by wiley waves are the rocky shores
Perhaps there I can learn the lore at the core of
Time’s backdoor
Where i’ll sneak in, as in a Trojan war,
and discover new ways to be and move and sea
And find the paces
that
are
right for me.