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.