Joshua Michael Stewart’s For an Additional Three Minutes Please Insert Twenty-Five Cents moves on from that payphone instruction for buying time which is becoming less and less familiar as cell phones rise to contrast different senses of passing time, of permanence, transience, and things in between. The question that begins the poem replaces, at least tentatively, a state considered, at least by those who believe in it, eternal with the by-definition temporary state of rental. Then the gathering of snow clouds is compared to the gathering of dust; the first is naturally transient. The very term used to designate it refers to its dissolution into snow. The latter is an emblem of lack of movement.

Slow and rapid change, transience and eternity are slipping into each other. It seems as if the “yellowing newspapers” on store windows could be changing at any pace and maybe, just maybe, the “[b]oys in dirty jackets collect[ing] / shards of glass to pack into snowballs” will turn into the old man of the second stanza before the snow falls.

At the very least, the blurred line between fast and slow underscores the possibility that the boys could become that man, that the teenage girl tugging on her sweater may have become the “woman with pine needle hair”. The general uncertainty of time adds to the disturbing air that leads the reader to wonder what sort of person would rule, even with their shadow, even if only in the appearance of a gesture, over this world.

That we do not know the addressee does not detract overall from the poem since this is about atmosphere more than specifics.