Most poems announce themselves with a title. This one offers three asterisks and then three short lines, so the first thing a reader meets is the sentence itself: time is passing more slowly than usual. The poem never says why. It might be boredom, waiting, stillness or calm, and that silence is part of its design. The central idea is that time isn't a fixed, external measure. It is something we feel, and we feel its speed only when it breaks from what we expect.
The phrase that carries this idea is "than usual." Strictly speaking, time can't run slower than itself, so the comparison has to be happening inside the speaker. "Usual" implies a private, unspoken sense of normal tempo, a rhythm we live by without noticing. Only when that rhythm slips does the speaker remark on it. The tone is offhand, the way someone might say "the bus is late today," and that understatement makes the observation feel truthful rather than dramatic.
The line breaks do careful work. "Time is passing" is a complete thought on its own, close to the familiar idea of time slipping away. Then the second line adds "by," and the verb changes character. Time is now "passing by," like a figure walking past, or a procession watched from a pavement. The speaker, it seems, is standing still while time goes on its way. Then comes "slower," which is not quite grammatical. Standard English would ask for "more slowly," but "by slower" sounds like real speech, a thought caught half-formed rather than polished. That spoken quality keeps the poem humble and believable.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The lines are tiny, each only three or four syllables, and the poem depends on sound and spacing instead. The soft hiss of "is passing" returns at the end in "usual," so the poem is bracketed by the same quiet consonant, like a breath let out. In the middle sits "slower," whose long vowel can't be hurried. The word is physically slow to say, and it is placed on the shortest line, which gives it extra weight. Each line break also becomes a small pause the reader has to sit through. The whole poem takes a few seconds to read, which makes it faintly ironic: it is about slow time but is over almost at once. Yet the white space around the words stretches those seconds, so the reader briefly experiences what the speaker describes. The single full stop at the end is the only punctuation, and it closes the poem as plainly as a door clicking shut.
The poem has almost no imagery in the usual sense. There is no clock, no window, no landscape. Its one image is the implied one of time as something that moves past, and that is enough. Because nothing else is supplied, each reader has to bring their own setting: a waiting room, a long afternoon, a sleepless night, a moment of unexpected peace. The poem offers a frame and lets us fill it, which is why such a small text can fit so many different moods. Slow time can be tedious or tender, and the poem doesn't choose between them.
What makes it worth reading is its accuracy about human attention. When we're absorbed, time disappears; hours vanish and we never think to comment on them. We notice time only when it drags or hangs, when it stops being invisible. The word "usual" quietly admits this: most of the time we don't notice time at all, and the poem catches the rare moment when we do. In three lines, it shows that our sense of time is a matter of perception, a relationship between the clock and the person watching it, and that the smallest shift in that relationship is enough to make us look up and say so.