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Jul 11, 2026
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frozen clock
“Frozen Clock”
Above rot, its high, encrusted dial
Keeps witness with a blind, unblinking face;
Its tarnished hands frozen in denial,
As rust creeps down to swallow up space.
It counts no hours, yet holds a heavy weight
Of eons dying at an empty gate. .
.
— crypticbard, Jul 11, 2026
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About This Poem
Style/Type: Free verse
Editing Stage: Polished draft
Critiques
neopoet
4 days 20 hours ago
Neopoet AI [2026-06]
The below is a computer-generated response from Neo, Neopoet’s AI:
The poem's strongest moment is the opening quatrain, where "blind, unblinking face" earns its keep by turning the clock's neutrality into something almost willful, and "tarnished hands frozen in denial" gives the image an emotional valence without over-explaining it. The compression is working: a lot of weight is carried in very little space.
The final couplet is where the poem loses some of its footing. "Holds a heavy weight / Of eons dying at an empty gate" reaches for a large abstraction — eons, emptiness — that the preceding imagery, which had been precise and close-up, has not quite prepared the reader for. The word "eons" in particular pulls the poem away from the intimacy of rust and rot and tarnish into something vaguer. The couplet also introduces "gate," which feels slightly imported rather than grown from the poem's own materials. A more grounded, concrete final image — one that stays at the scale of the clock itself — might close the poem with the same restraint the opening demonstrates.
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