Desert Dweller

or Why Days Seem To Go By Faster Now

To a newborn child, a single hour seems

like a lifetime

because it is.

After a day, that first hour seems shorter because

now an hour is one-twenty-fourth of their lifetime.

At age seventy, a single hour is less than

one-six-hundred-thousandth of my lifetime

and therefore seems much shorter

than my first whole day.

This explains why the woefully inadequate

two hours of sleep that parents get on Christmas Eve

(after sneaking around wrapping gifts and shit)

seems like an eternity to the evil children

trying to wake them at the crack of dawn.

But I imagine that to rocks that are billions of years old,

our entire lives

are just a flash.

© 2026 Bruno Talerico

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