Irrational Hours & Calendar Dozens

I need better words than my own to go here, and then to follow on down.
For example,

There is enough failure in the system to fuel everybody's ego and guarantee the creamy lubricant of propaganda.

Sven Golvenstein, an ancient Judeo-Swede watchmaker, said that
but no one listened because he was the only Yiddish-speaker in the Alps.
All he did was make & collect.

He put time on your hand or your kitchen wall. Then Sven collected
fine sums for his labor. Golvenstein charged extra when a timepiece
included the irrational hour between six and seven.

When the sun neither sets nor sits but inches its way
down and up microscopically.

But if I wrote that in Yiddish it would sound Chinese to you, maybe.

***

Her words are better than mine but her last one was goodbye.
I would quote my mother or father, if I knew who they were.
I would quote you if you were here but you are there.
Wherever that is.

***

But I can pull back the calendar to 1939 when I had a year to live
and my name was Fitzgerald. But call me Scott.

I wrote the Great Gatsby and we got FDR. Kafka wrote the Metamorphosis and Germany got Hitler.

***
Then I can tack on a dozen full calendars and it is 1951 and I bussed
all the way–with bat & glove–from Minneapolis to New York.
Some say I am the second coming of Jackie Robinson
but I don't go to Brooklyn nor the Bronx because I am no Dimaggio.
I go to the Polo Grounds in Manhattan, land of the Giants.
Somebody says Play ball and that is what I will do.
They put the #24 on my back and expect me to carry the team.

Amazing athlete. He can hit, run, field, and rattle the opposition. Amazing, downright A-Mays-ing.

But call me Willie.
I do not know what to say so I say Hey, as in Say, Hey...
and they call me the Say Hey kid.

***
Let us tack on a dozen more and call it the winter of 1963.
All I can do is believe what they tell me and give my trust
to the Warren Commission, as if it were the Book of Genesis.
One bullet became a ballet, pirouetting through a President,
pretzeling down through a Governor and then
prancing across a hospital gurney.

***
Give me one shy of a dozen calendars and let it be the summer of 1974.
Let us play a game of before and after.
Before this eleven-spot, a President was assassinated.
Now another one resigns. He drowned with guilt when someone flooded the water gate.

I could write more but it is better to not have expletives deleted.