At the sound of the tone
The time will be
Six twenty four
the temperature at the airport
is seventy three degrees

At the sound of the tone
the time will be
sunrise
the temperature at the top
of the world's tallest building
is sixty two degrees

At the sound of the tone
the time will be
midnight
the temperature at
the center of the earth's molten core
has nothing to do with midnight

At the sound of the tone
the time will be wasted
sitting at the airport at midnight
the temperature
seventy three degrees
measured in units of boredom
a metric derived by computing
how long it takes to get bored
staring at a liter of water
at room temperature
so one liter over unit time equals
one unit boredom


At the sound of the tone
the time will be the time
that you picked up the phone
to call time and temperature
with the temperature of the air
in your ear canal, trapped against
the speaker grille of the earpiece
an exact measure of the operating
temperature of the human metabolism
the humidity a tropical 98%

At the sound of the tone
the time will be expressed as
a function of temperature
If a one meter diameter sphere of
chemically pure beryllium
is heated to four hundred degrees
Celsius
and lowered into a cubic meter of
expeller pressed canola oil
which is at a temperature
of forty eight degrees Fahrenheit
what then is the tone
that sounds
at the airport checkpoint?

for an answer
the man at the checkpoint
rotates his wristwatch
to expose the secret face
so that he can set the bezel
from Mean Time
to Specific Heat
with the big hand on beryllium
and the small hand on canola oil
the third hand moves retrograde in relation to
the fourth hand, which points to an answer
expressed in illegal units