Tic, tick. Tic, tick.
The superhero who could read minds
found something worse than secrets to keep:
no two souls share a room.
One replays yesterday's wound,
one rehearses tomorrow's ruse,
one has slipped the timeline entire—
humming a song only she can hear.
Same table. Same clock.
All alone.
Tic, tick. Tic, tick.
---
Ba-gung. Ba-gung ba-gung.
The time traveller tears through years,
racing to catch the breath before the blow,
the beat before the word that broke it all.
She rips through decades like tissue,
arrives gasping, grasping—
but cannot change what the other felt.
History bends. Memory mends nothing.
Ba-gung. Ba-gung ba-gung.
---
Tic, tick. Tic, tick.
Time is the polite fiction—
the sun's slow arc we all agree to track
so we can play at sharing now.
But clocks count life passing,
not life pressed into the chest,
not the hour that stretched to a year,
not the year that vanished in a breath.
The clock lies to the bored and the blessed
and apologizes to neither.
Tic, tick. Tic, tick.
---
Ba-gung. Ba-gung ba-gung.
The traveller moves through when.
The reader sees through then.
One bends the frame,
one reads what's penned within.
Different gifts, she thinks.
Different sins.
Ba-gung. Ba-gung ba-gung.
---
Tic, tick. Ba-gung.
Then one night she stops mid-flight,
still as stone in someone else's dream,
hears the clock and the blood
click into a single beat—
and sees.
To slip through time
is to slip through mind.
To read a thought
is to ride its time.
The traveller.
The reader.
The same woman—
meeting herself
in the mirror between moments.
Tic, tick. Ba-gung. Tic, tick. Ba-gung.
Just here.