In Time

A restart poem that immediately doubts whether starting over is possible anywhere untouched by war and repetition.

'In Time' opens on something 'Grabbing it's chance / To begin again, and again / And again' and then strands that fresh start in a void where there is 'as far away, as nothing / to say, about where / we will go'. The poem pivots through quick imperatives - 'Make it look fast as a shot', 'A gun a ball a person' - to a quoted maxim, 'As well as one as another', which it attributes to literature said 'in Paris, / before the war was over'. It closes by relocating that line: 'Now we say it here, / where war never ended...', collapsing the gap between historical war and a present that has no armistice.

The title pulls in two directions at once: 'in time' as rhythm and 'in time' as endurance, both of which the poem distrusts. Beginning 'again, and again / And again' is not renewal here but a stuck mechanism, and the interchangeability flattened into 'A gun a ball a person' makes the borrowed Parisian wisdom 'As well as one as another' read as nihilism rather than tolerance - one target, one toy, one human being, all equally disposable. The move that lifts the poem is the final transplant: a phrase coined in a Europe that at least expected the war to end is dropped into a 'here' where 'war never ended', so the trailing ellipsis leaves the begin-again loop running with nowhere to arrive. Within a collection titled 'From Sinatra to Christ', this reads as the secular pole - a worldly, war-soaked shrug - against which the collection's later reaching toward Christ defines itself.