Wasted Hours
September 2024
I wonder what we could do
with all the wasted hours.
The hours wilted away
to wanting. To the wildebeest
of envy that charges through us,
unrepentant and unforgiving.
The hours waxing
and waning over wanting to be like her.
More like him. How she is.
With their body. The things they have
or she has or he has or whatever I don’t have
and won’t have
unless things were to drastically change.
Maybe we’d finally
get to the flying car pipedream,
or sign new treaties for the climate crisis,
or get a handle on the housing market.
I think that’s too conservative, honestly.
We’d have thousands of hours left.
To send spring breakers to space,
or build subterranean shopping centers,
or thinktank the cure to brain cancer.
We could hash out the
wars in a couple months,
and we’d still have time
to get to world hunger.
We’d have time to seed
an orchard across every continent, and
time to wait for the fruit to bear.
Imagine the legislation we could push through.
The punchlines we could think up.
How many artists, surgeons, firefighters, lawyers
could be trained and dispersed.
The baking competitions that could
surpass feasible cake physics.
Think of all the time we’d have to catch up
on TV! To binge watch until
our eyes pop like shriveled up prunes
from their sockets
and fall to the floor.
We can at long last claim
that our Audiobooks
have been listened to and checked off
their looming lists.
The archaeologists will have a field day:
every bone and fossil
ever buried with the earth’s age will be exhumed.
The museum goers and clothing browsers could have
no limit to their loitering.
The teachers could take a second
to breathe behind their desks.
The swimmers: another lap, the ensemble: a gratuitous bow.
The gardeners would be given
fields to fallow.
The young mothers: a moment to rest their tired
bodies against the doorframe,
to blow air through the self-cut bangs
clinging to their foreheads.
All the undone would finally get done.
The crate of t-shirts from high school
the backseat has begged to get rid of would
eventually be donated.
Every dirty text, typed out and
deleted,
retyped and sent.
Each flower grown, cut at the stem, and vased.
The laundry will finally be caught up.
The pictures framed and hung.
The old moving boxes folded up and stored
in the closet at long last, just in time for the next move.
The coffee will go unforgivably cold
by the time we are finished.
But in our last minutes of our wasted hours,
in our finishing,
I bet we’d find that we
are not so unforgivable as before.
*Image: “Dreams” by Roger Mattos.


I really think you’re a genius