Gary Priest’s most recent poem to appear here was “Bled Out” (October 2016)

Daylight Saving Time
By Gary Priest

Spring

Outside the storm clouds are committing suicide;
muzzle flashes disconnecting the candy floss,
and bringing the rain, dark and thick as blackcurrant jam,
or splattered cerebral matter.
I follow each morose H₂0 poem down the dirty window pane
and curse daylight saving time.
I tell myself I need to get better at waiting.
I tell myself that aching is de rigueur for lovers this season.

Outside the wind is rattling through plastic gutters;
misbegotten skeletons cursing the chill in their bones,
and I envy them their tombstone denouement, hearts putrefied
or fattening an earthworm’s diet.
I think of feeling nothing except rigor mortis and regret
and curse daylight saving time.
I tell myself I need to get better at just being.
I tell myself you really do miss me while you’re sleeping.

Outside the night swallows any hope of spring,
deflowering all the virgin berths with smooth black satin,
and I think of you in your once lopsided bed, dreaming
your schemes in cherry bomb red.
I think of your skin, white as an unnamed ocean of the moon
and I still curse daylight saving time.
But I know that these hours will melt every morning,
and there’s no distance between us that isn’t receding.

Autumn

October has arrived with a gap-toothed grin
and another daylight saving time,
but now there is nothing left to gain.
The melancholy roots are sunk deep
beneath the slowly freezing earth
and that extra hour at 2 a.m. finds me awake,
counting all the ways the night has
of making you feel alone.

October days are a bitter, withered recluse,
peering through dusty grey curtains
and cursing at clocks, those thin fingered
merchants, pilfering your pockets
of every opportunity to be a lover
or to be loved and marking out
this daylight saving time
that gives me sixty more minutes
to recognize all that I have lost.

October will soon give way to colder kin.
Those cruel descendants of daylight saving time
come with sharp white teeth and a radiator rattle
and want to eat everything that is not them.
Yet, I welcome their chill at 2 a.m.
and I allow them to kill any warmth
that still resides in me when I think of your skin.