Time & Perspective Quote by Bradley Chicho

“Declare this smite time” opens like a manifesto and immediately slips its own knife in. “Smite” is the wrong verb for what follows, and that wrongness is the point: the line stages time as something both sacred and violently claimed. It’s not “spend time,” the polite bookkeeping phrase. It’s time seized, time struck, time announced as if it needs a ceremonial bell before you’re allowed to treat it as yours.

Then the poem starts hoarding. “Extracting precious gems” turns hours into ore, affection into a kind of artisanal labor. The phrasing is conspicuously transactional - extraction, preciousness, wholes - but it’s also tender in its insistence that what we share can be refined into something durable. The weirdest move is “wholly hours,” which reads like a typo until you hear the moral claim inside it: not partial attention, not background companionship, but time given with integrity.

The invented verb “fruitcake” is the hinge. Fruitcake is the classic joke-gift: dense, overwrapped, passed around, mocked, and still weirdly comforting. To “fruitcake a friend so dear” suggests the messy truth of intimacy: love often arrives as something homemade, excessive, slightly embarrassing, and meant to last. The subtext is that friendship isn’t validated by grand gestures; it’s validated by the stubborn, crafted oddities we make out of our limited hours.

Chicho’s context feels contemporary despite the faux-historical dates: a poet writing in a culture of optimized minutes, using deliberately clunky diction to make sincerity sound risky again.