Okay, but now imagine someone,
one of fifty, say, in the queue, fiftieth first
and advancing little, somewhere within
the seventy-two-hour window of efficacy
for post-exposure prophylaxis, and, later,
in the screening room watching The Clock
with the few dozen others in rows behind and ahead
who had waited too. He knows he has to
but he hasn't yet. We pick it up there.
It is two thousand eleven a few more days.
The movie tells what time it is.
In poetry too we all face forward.