The Clockmaker's Lament: An Elegy for Time's Unwoven Threads:

In the attic where dust motes dance like ghosts,

He bends over gears, their teeth gnawing hours,

Each tick a suture, each tock a wound—

The clockmaker weeps for the unwoven threads.

A lifetime spent winding the hands of others,

Now his own springs coil loose, unspooling,

Pendulums sway to a dirge only he hears,

As shadows stretch long in the amber of dusk.

He collects moments—cracked porcelain faces,

Fragments of laughter trapped in brass chambers,

The breath of a child, the scent of her hair,

All cogs in the machine that grinds them to dust.

With trembling hands, he forges a key,

To still the relentless, to freeze the last chime,

But the gears spin backwards, unraveling years,

And the past spills like sand through his skeletal fingers.

The clockwork heart shudders, then falls into silence,

A mosaic of memories scattered in glass,

He kneels in the wreckage, a king dethroned,

Cradling whispers of what cannot last.

Yet in the stillness, a melody lingers,

A tune woven deep in the warp of his bones,

For though clocks may falter and pendulums fade,

The elegy lives in the spaces between.