I’m far from being old, in fact I’m only twenty-eight,
Yet there is one phenomenon I’ve noticed much of late:
My days and weeks are passing at an ever faster rate.
When I was five, ten, seventeen, clock and calendar kept
A slow, monotonous tempo, both bad and good times crept;
These past few months, indeed, these past few years, seem to have leapt.
What happened to my innocence, my wonder and my youth?
What happened to the black and white, the bald lies and the truth?
A slow man in a fast grey world is one who’s long in tooth.
A boy I went to school with once, is now a married man,
He’s fat and slow, matured and long devoid of swift elan,
We spoke at length, but neither of us knew when time began
To leap and bound instead of crawl, we couldn’t even guess,
The more we thought about it, so we understood it less,
He ended confused by it; I ended up in a mess.
Now’days it seems I never have the time to read a book,
The things I left unfinished, those I never undertook,
Stare back at me, indicting me with dour, accusing look.
So how much faster then must time for older people pass?
Each hour must see the sands fall ever swifter through the glass,
One day the trees stand naked, and the next they’re green as grass.
Time, precious time! in all creation there is no worse sin
Than that of wasting, squandering you; you have no peer, no twin,
For you are the foe every man must fight, yet none may win.
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