This is Why the English Invented Cricket

Eventually, she stopped asking the time
and simply
stripped his wrist.

Hallelujah! Free
from the tyranny
of roughguessing.

She crocheted timetables,
and she skipped
from appointment
to appointment. Oh and she

allocated minutes like rich strips of land.
Captained the very day, she did.

Meanwhile, clockrobbed,
unyolked from hours
like bags of stone like stuffed cheeks
like great granite testicles

unable to quite make out
the second hand turning
like a rack's winch

and gullwhite where a colony
of cogernalia had been raucous
he stopped at the bench
and saw the evening stretched before him
like a long-deserted seafront.