ON THE WATCH

Rebecca Wilcock

The guard leans back, mind adrift.
His specs slide, a sigh escapes slow.
Untouched lasagne, left cold,
while centuries around him rise,
no longer quietly stored.

His mind plagued with doctor masks,
hissing through the sunken eyes, Time
and its relics of demons,
now infiltrating his timeline.
How omnipresent, The Past.

From ages of bronze to bytes,
a world once shaped by grit and flame.
Gladius’s sharpness gleams.
What would the Stoics say of soft
lives glued to algorithms?

History runs through the halls,
through the veins and through the cables.
The Past, unyielding, and true.
While The Future stalks and mirrors. 
The guard shifts, eyes on the door,

‘Another night to kill, I guess.’