smash the clocks

She hit me in the right temple with my alarm clock while on top of me the first time we fucked and I thought I fell in love,  but I'm still not totally sure that's what love is.  A smattering of plastic and glass filled the bed, and i didn't need to look out the window to see stars.  That clock is forever left with a big hand on the 12 and a little hand on the 3, for that moment stood outside of time.  This epiphany sparked an ability to be present.  We spent the rest of the night and morning in hazy forgettable fog, with dried blood down my cheek reminding me that time can be destroyed.  I remember naked bodies chain smoking on balcony's, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches brought back to bed.  I can recall a smile that was without qualification, without a past or future, the kind I put on as a show for myself.  But, that night I learned I can be myself, if only for a moment.  That night I learned we are only a moment, a collection of moments, chaotic and spiraling in and out, loosely connected by civilized ideas of time and morality, and that our only goal in this life is to destroy all that controls us.

We are not born in a privileged time.  We are creatures who have brought ourselves to the brink of our destruction.  We have taken our freedom and stymied it with rules, laws, borders, cages, classes.
The beauty of youth quickly stripped away by 8 hour days (if we are the lucky ones).  Our bodies lay broken for the sake of production.  I have heard them declare that we need only to take back the means of this production, to free ourselves from these evil bosses.  Yet what of freeing ourselves from ourselves?  What of destroying time?

 In the beginning of the Industrial revolution clocks were smashed and not just as symbols.  Clocks were smashed, the towers torn down, a revolution against control, the control of the body and mind that was coming.  As hierarchy and the grasp of domination grew deeper they took infinity from us and replaced it with time.  And not enough stood up to smash the clocks, and here they are, on our wrists, on each of our screens, on the phones in our pockets, we have chained ourselves to time.

We have taken what was once infinite and incalculable and reduce it to mere numbers and tasks and appointments.  We have become a culture of busy, where being busy is a source of pride.  Where stopping to smell the roses is seen as cliche and silly.  Where sitting alone in a meadow has become just a refuge for hippies detached from the world.  We have robbed ourselves of infinity and replaced it with a minute or a second or a day or a year. 

That night my skin was broken open by the clocks that have haunted me all my life and I felt infinity.  I felt a universe in that moment and that clock fucking broke because no machine can measure joy or sadness, they exist outside of time.  We exist outside of time, yet we are taught to fear it.

We are told that you only have 15 minutes left on this test.  That we will be late.  We leave lovers in bed alone following indefinable moments of passion because the clock dictates that we make our appointment just in time.  Our passion has been robbed from us.  We see too much free time as horrific, as boredom, we look at it and wonder what will we do with all that time?  We fight boredom with screens, as clocks stare back at us and numbers torment us, counting down precious seconds until obligations that we hate, jobs we don't want, appointments we fear.  Time has named the past an anchor dragging behind us and the future a horizon that is forever out of reach.

Yet as much as they want to tell us we are ephemeral and that the sands of time will eat us all, they are fucking liars.  We are beyond on time, we will always be infinite, unquantifiable, incalculable.