Once I Could Make Sense

As I lay before you here - gray, thin, bedraggled, sick and weak - Hang on for just a moment!

Just as now I am pausing in my vigorous, full-color life, equally as vibrant as yours is to you

Just as the long-dead doctor who spanked me into life so far in my past was, way back then

Do you try to imagine as he did then, and I did later, that you are me and I am you?

I was a boy who was glad not to have been created as an adult and especially not an old man

This useless and wornout husk you see now, did once actually quiver and overflow with life

Slowly, so slowly, despite all my best efforts and intentions, it must have all come to this

I lay gurgling, learned to crawl, walked, ran, walked again, sat down and now lay here, still

I apologize in advance and thank you so much from the real part of a life to your busy future

I likely don’t have a lot to say right now, but know that once even I could make a little sense

This shrunken and dried chrysalis, from which I am about to emerge, actually served me well

These bent and twisted fingers that can now barely even feed me, could make a daily music

I know not if memories of any of this will remain across the years, to my shrunken perspective

But once a light burned so furious and bright it often brought joyful tears to my eyes

I sat with my elders and later, my loved ones closer than you sit to me now and pondered

Are my eyes empty and blank, drugged or filled with pain, with no trace of this life now?

Once my faculties were sharp and my reflexes quick and I took the measure of this world

Its hard now to believe that I will strive merely not to soil my sheets and can barely sit up to eat

Yes, I knew the impossibility of imagining the weak and withered as the young and strong

But, I swear to you that my own life was no faded photograph, incomparable to your present

The meaning of my time may well be invisible to you and forgotten by me…but here it is real

I may have forgotten running miles, skiing steep slopes and swimming those huge blue swells

So, go ahead and make your pronouncements but simply remember that I made them, too

For all that remains to me is all that will remain to you, far sooner than you can prepare for

Relative To One Another

I am slowing down as you are speeding up and we pass at an angle to time

They go up and we move down with the vast oceanic swells between us

Rotating slowly I see the beauty of the stars and galaxies all around us

Spinning too fast in my time I became disoriented and confused

I am folding up my ragged tent as you stake your newest claim

Her mother can no longer stand but your child has just learned to crawl

I am passing you as he is passing me and we cannot yet get out of their way

There is a new well in your village and we celebrate by our swimming pool

I read my book as you send one-fingered messages off somewhere into the ether

The snow that sent you off the road was welcomed by the farmers

We carved different ellipses around an invisible center of gravity

They waste more than they can ever use as we eke by on castoff remnants

I traveled quite slowly but was struck head-on by a speeding semi

When at last I returned it seemed nothing had changed but no one recognized me, either

The loss of the microscopic diatoms spelled disaster for the whales

Parts of seconds were to seconds as seconds were to the age of the universe

Her long lifetime could not be seen on the smallest of geologic time scales

All their simpering adulation could not push his boat across to heaven

We pass closely heading in different directions in all four known dimensions

Their silly propaganda changes timbre, Doppler shifting with the passing election

We observe a planet perturbing its sun as we are swarmed by microscopic mites

We attack our enemies while trillions of our cells hungrily struggle for their blood supply

Gentle winter sunlight shows the soft side of nuclear fusion on a truly massive scale

We destroy expensive, sophisticated satellites with simple high-speed brute force collisions

I am spinning slowly around in circles but you - You are really making a mark

A sun-glassed business woman phoning in a leased car distractedly strikes a fawn

I am sliding down the hill smiling, never to ascend again

He still climbs upward, his fatigue masked by the anticipation of the run

We both stand quite still as my train leaves you behind at the station

I briefly continue moving in small arcs after stepping off the merry-go-round

This seemingly small increase in temperature rippled through the biosphere

The insects hatched early, the chicks starved and the trees were decimated

My bobber went down just as you roared by shouting hoarsely from your speedboat

I sat down to be served as she struggled with the wood for their cooking fire

Our music and fireworks filled the air but not a sound went into space

I paused behind my muddy ox as your silvery jet gleamed far, far overhead

The difference in our ages would make a full lifetime for someone else

Our fossil bones would mix and date to plus or minus a thousand generations

The look in the eyes of the mutely destitute mother spoke too much to me

He thought disdainfully of all the little words he could ever hope to write

The poverty, filth, sickness, slave labor and lack of hope were as nothing -

Given the wondrous future paradise he learned of in the magnificence of the mosque

The clockwork universe was underpinned by the chaos of quantum uncertainty

Our most basic assumptions proved devastating to our ecological niche

I lay on my back with arms outspread in a field bright with spring flowers

20000 miles above, a geo-synchronous satellite moved right along with me

I breathed deeply as my beautiful vehicle turned oxygen into gases, poisonous to me

You survived by cutting firewood as your goats denuded the drying hillsides

He had his two sons and their daughter-in-laws, so he did not work any more

He strove hard to attain a corporate jet and to earn a 7 figure bonus every year

She remembered as a child that it snowed very heavily and it was always cold

Now, her obese youngsters went about smirkingly in baggy shorts and tees all year round

Each small change was imperceptible but the first and last photos were truly of different men

The runners showed amazing speed, but you casually drove by them so much faster

Dinosaurs dominated the earth for 160 million years but left here 65 million years ago

Our written history began about 5000 years ago with simple bookkeeping records

The sunlight that sustains me takes 8 minutes from its surface to my forehead

Four and a half years later, at 186k mps, it reaches the very nearest star

He looked at me with those soft brown eyes and I just had to stroke his ear

A long line of crowded stinking semis brought more cattle to the slaughterhouse

I am slowing down as you are speeding up, but for a while we have communications

I stand still on this rotating earth, orbiting the sun which revolves about the Milky Way as it moves towards constellation Hydra at a mere 600 kilometers per second

Their Times Have Passed Me By

Time has passed me by

And I cannot really say that I was sorry to see it go

Time has passed right on by me

But I have been OK with missing out on all the latest fads

I think that maybe now I am slowly walking down a country lane

Instead of being stuck in traffic on a smoggy super highway

I even sat quietly in the shade for a dozing interval

and thought for just a moment that I might not be losing any time

It took a while but the times have passed on by me

now their confused dust is disappearing beyond my event horizon

I’m not in tune with the early adapters

I wear and repair a lot of stuff that’s secondhand

I’m not buying new cars, fast food, colas, snacks or taking out any loans

The advertising target on my back has pretty much worn right off

The beautiful people cannot even see me behind their expensive sunglasses

Movers and shakers in a hurry easily look right on through me

I listened to the birds and not the markets just the other morning

Haven’t had that tiny and insulting 1.5% salary adjustment for several years now

I’m daydreaming on the sidelines with my helmet off as the clock runs down

Not anxiously awaiting another dream vacation I cannot afford and will not remember

Content to be cut off in the slow lane and watch the power drivers roar on by

Not quite so sure the future is still brighter than the past that I came from

Cast ashore for good by social waves as their dirty, teeming river hurries by

Not picking up the kids or meeting some prospect for an expensive power lunch

My rapid advance towards as yet unconsidered goals has slowed down to a crawl

Now as I regurgitate their sound bites, people say I sound a bit sarcastic

To the masters of the universe, I’m a useless deadbeat who pays his credit card on time

Caught up in the gears of progress I feel lucky to have been spit out while still alive

So now, somehow, I’ve eddied out for a moment just as I approach that unavoidable abyss

Thank god they spun me off and passed me by for this brief instant before our eternal nothing

The More It Blurs

The hand that grasps cannot realize the fingers that point

But the mind that is empty remains full of surprises

For those no longer busy

There is always just enough to do

The mind that wanders does not travel far

While the hand that simply reaches out, crosses any border

A people with roots within the earth

Find meaning in simple rain and sun

The man who fears that he might fail

May just be content with what others deal

To glimpse the riverbed through flowing water

Might require good light and a high bank

For those whom time has passed by at last

This could be a blessing they cannot share

A dry summer might not seem important

To sophisticated city dwellers

The more we center all our focus

The more a blur all else becomes

To strive and fail is difficult

To strive again is harder still

For the angry man nothing satisfies

As too little always comes too late

A dog may lie sleeping quietly for hours

Exploding into motion at some unheard noise

The meaning that we attach to things

Removes something from what we understand of them

To sleep is not simply to ignore

To dream is not just to run away

These are the days I often spoke of back then

These are the days, I used to say, when we would only remember back then like a dream

These days, I now recall saying, we would wonder about what happened before

Now is when back prior to then joins easily with only a confused haze in between

I always felt then that now we would retain but little from that dizzying spiral

At last, these are the days I often spoke of as our emergence from that rapid blur

Details would disappear even as we finally try to consider them during our awakening

Now is when I meant that then would seem to have been too many years, gone by too fast

These are the times I said we would look back from, only to remember so very little

I always knew we could not possibly be digesting all that we were seeing every day

I always thought now we would look back on then as if through rapidly shifting mists

I always told you that it all would pass way before we would even know that it could end

These times, I said back then, we would regard like some old movie, stuck on fast forward

These days I see I was right to say we moved too fast then to have any appreciation

Those days are the ones I always said we would now remember like their old pictures

These are the times to which we left but little to be summed up, in too a short time

Now we have no choice but to try and grope meaning from our own ambivalent contrails

Those days recede back beyond our buckled event horizon into a jumbled darkness

Now memory has compressed the tight wavetrain of bygone days into indistinguishability

Those were the days from which so few events even remain still jutting up enough to be seen

The rest lie blanketed by heavy clouds viewed from far above here in this blindingly blue sky