IN THE BLINK OF AN EYE

The degenerate clouds have metamorphosed in my brain

and as the rain shoots down I remember the many lives

that I wasted while running through the forest of severed branches.

The suicide clock without hands moans like an animal

stripped of its meat, lying by the side of the road.

Help me, I think to myself, as I sit by the window, the window

that looks out onto the frozen lake in which a man with my face

is half submerged, unable to move a muscle.

And as I try to remember how my mind and body

arrived at this moment, a thousand years have passed me by

in the blink of an eye.

Jeffrey Zable is a teacher, conga/bongo drummer who plays Afro-Cuban folkloric music, Latin Jazz, and Salsa with groups around the San Francisco Bay Area, and a writer of poetry, flash fiction, and non-fiction. His writing has appeared in hundreds of literary magazines and anthologies; more recently in Once Upon a Crocodile, Raw, Fiery Scribe, Third Wednesday, Uppagus, and many others.