14 Jan Black dots

You’re but black dots, unthreatening and bland. Yet I step closer, and then I start to shiver. I’m making out the contours of a black gas mask, and then another. And another.

Under the suffocating, eerie tick-tock of the clocks, you’re trying to catch your breath. You’re now in thousands, time ticking you right by. You’re running out of air, you’re running out of time.
Yet to our naked, urban eye, you’re nothing but a black dot in a row.

We check on you from time to time, during our annual remembrance season; but then you blend again into the disconnected worlds inside our phones. 

That’s it. You’re back to being but black dots in an uncanny row. (A.M., January 2019)

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Hirakawa Kota, Black Colour Timer, 2016-2017 (acrylic, glass primer and oil on radio-controlled clocks). 

‘Catastrophe and the power of art’, Mori Art Museum, 2019