ON TIME TRAVEL.
When God invented time,
it filled the gaps between
gravity and planet,
black hole and red dwarf,
between astroid fields and Death Star,
and reached across the great nothing.
And it was relative.
It was faster some places,
slower in others.
Also nothing that moved
on a schedule
cared for one second
about being on time—
it was simply a course,
an orbit, a distance.
When humankind invented time,
we based it on luminaries in the sky,
whether the great light or lesser,
and we used it to keep sacred festivals,
keep gods from anger,
plant and sow in season.
And it was relative.
We had no idea until the past century,
but our construct for organizing life
had tapped into
a fundamental cosmic rule—
it sped up
and slowed down with distance.
Memory is the turbo button,
that allows for time travel
through awareness.
To be clear:
You are only ever in the present.
You can access the past
through remembering,
and you can access the future
through imagining—
although its wobbly,
you alter a few things.
But by sinking down
into present awareness,
with a relaxed mind
and a dash of magic,
you can summon back
past versions of yourself
and dream of
the decades to come.
Now, who is to say anything
about the time of your life?
How fast you should go;
when you should take it slow;
why your cells replace themselves
yet you have the same soul;
whether you have remembered
days gone by
or imagined life in an Age to Come
or simply hopped loops
like subway cars
onto a different time cycle
somewhere else;
or whether you knew these
secrets of time…
Most of all, who is to say time is money,
that I— have to steal a little time,
jam in a meeting, or race the clock;
that there— is never enough time,
no time to lose,
flies fast when you’re having fun,
or we’ve got to get going ASAP?
I say there’s no deadline
until you have a flat, dead line…
then let’s just see.
Because no one
in our world really knows
where they came from,
where they are going.
Time will tell.