13 Minutes to Midnight
Tick, tick–the seconds stretch like wire under tension,
A clock nailed to the wall like a threat, face cracked, hands inching with intent.
The house is a wound, shadows pooling at the baseboards,
Every quiet room swollen with the aftermath of laughter,
Thirteen minutes left on the dying clock–
Time leaks through fissures, a slow, ugly weeping,
Not mercy but exposure: the ghost of youth circling back
With voices thin as old film, brittle in the dark,
Every promise echoing, every betrayal sharper than glass.
Phantoms stalk the corridors, slip beneath the doors,
Their touch cold, reminding what’s been lost:
Nights when nothing could wound us, mornings when nothing was wrong,
Now just a haunted retelling, the story running backward
While the hands crawl forward, ticking spite into our bones.
Eyes flick to the clock again–numbers bleeding toward nothing,
Every minute sliced by a blade that can’t be stopped,
No justice, no cure, just dim flickers and the cold aftertaste of regret.
Those lost nights: headlights shining through fog,
Broken curfews, cigarette halos, plans made to dissolve by sunrise.
Fragments cling like wet leaves: a laugh in an alley, a first touch,
A scream swallowed by the city, the cut of a secret kept too long.
Every memory a splinter, each hope a shatter in the rearview,
No comfort in old photographs–smiles now brittle, frozen,
Torn edges, faces half-remembered, eyes that dare the night to end.
Thirteen minutes to midnight, and the silence contracts–
Each tick, a wound, each tock, a dare.
Will anything in this room survive the next hour?
Do we seize what’s left or let it pass through our hands,
One last attempt to wring meaning from faded blood and worn skin?
The chill creeps in where youth used to burn,
Lost years slither down the spine,
Old songs now noise, old dreams now warning signs,
The ache of what’s vanished settling deep,
Haunted echoes pooling in twilight,
The shade a blanket for everything unsaid.
Every footstep in the dark leaves another question,
Every second shaves the future into less,
No restart, no forgiveness–
Only the relentless march and the breath held too long.
Soul’s lament, an unfinished note dissolving in silence,
The countdown not to some grand explosion–just a closing in,
Past ghosts steering by dead reckoning,
Nothing ahead but the final clarity of endings.
Thirteen minutes to midnight, and the truth left unsaid–
Will we make this count, or let it slip away instead?
Still the clock grinds on–
Thirteen minutes, then none,
And the echo remains, in the hush, in the gone.