I don't have time for my dreams.
Tick tock tick tock.
The clock's not counting up. No, it's like a bomb. It's counting down. It is a bomb. Fucked up thing is that you can't read the display. No telling how much time is left. It's in an alien number system. Or maybe I'm just too stupid to read it. I don't know. I just know I hear a tick tock tick tock.
A tick tock like a metronome, while a nun waits over your piano fingers to make a mistake.
A tick tock like the clock at work.
A tick tock like the up and down of the butt on that person who is too young and too full of life to acknowledge you.
That person is vibrant. That person is unaware of the tick tock. That person is marching at their own pace, and all you see is a clock that will wind down. You see your own clock, and note the slight discrepancy. The slight asynchronicity. It's not off by much, but enough to make all of the difference.
Tick tock tick tock.
Tick tock relies on cogs and regularity.
The metronome has a tempo. Some tempos are fast, some are slow. Some are insistent, some are relaxed. Sometimes two otherwise incompatible tempos coincide, and keep perfect time, as if someone set one to 140 beats per minute, and another at 70, but oddly, simultaneously. TICK tock TICK tock. Sometimes two off rhythms synch up regularly, like 3/4 time and 4/4 time do after 12 measures. Sometimes they do haphazardly. Sometimes they never synch up. But there's no such thing as a perpetual motion machine, and every good song has to end at some point.
Not sure about the ending there. Got caught up in a different thought.