Balachandran V's "Chronographics" watches a watch repairer at work and ends up reflecting on how little control we have over time. The speaker looks into a shop and sees the repairman bent over his bench, a lens in his eye, pulling the "innards" out of a dead watch with a forceps. The language of surgery and death runs through the poem: watches are "disembowelled," the ticking sounds like a toll of "impending doom," and the big old wall clocks hang like Capuchin monks in the catacombs, silent and watchful.
The speaker starts as an observer, but the mood shifts once the repairman starts work on the speaker's own watch. There is admiration at first ("How precise!"), then unease. Standing still, the speaker realizes that his time literally depends on someone else's steady fingers. The tone is quiet, a little eerie, and slightly humbling, as a simple repair becomes a reminder of mortality.