"The Time Is out of Joint"

Perhaps the stars grow fainter and the sun dimmer because they recede from us.

What would time be, I wonder, after the earth has uncoupled from its parent? How would the last timekeeper, before joining his fellows in freezing, measure those last extra-solar hours, minutes, seconds?

The earth spins and hurdles, punching itself through space's dark breast, and we can't seem to keep concerned, choosing to chew instead the lotus of a billion pixellated come-ons, ones which tell us our best "us" rest on the other side of its convexity: the lies that lubricate things, the cable wefts that bind us, taut 'til made to shake our blood into a thousand frenzied droplets.

A debt to pleasure, to be sure.