93: Time

Welcome to what’s happening— if not to what should be. I was here before you and am here still— wrestling with an impossible future. Here we convert empty space into an empty past with desparate gestures and gaze for absent movements while imagining hieroglyphics from the museum of specious expectations. Our eyes water; our eyes dry irritably. If this moment were beautiful, it wouldn’t need to mean anything. Tears would come naturally, or we would force them, like frogs reluctant to hop. As it is, we don’t feel like crying. We’re not ready for mental isometrics; we aren’t ballet dancers defiling the purity of mathematical truth. By and large, we are ourselves, passing time like an odorless gas, compensating with grotesque smiles, like tortured saints, like idiots of the prior century, temporarily deaf and dumb, or anything that’s loose— leaves, gates, dust, bugs, screws, cats, cat hairs— and me, waiting for an arrival that, in retrospect, hasn’t happened. So we learn that time is characterized by everything but time— by inanities, frivolities, and profundities. Give me yours; I am feeling a little weak. Give me yours; let’s celebrate. Give me yours; I don’t want to take it without asking. I don’t want to die and I don’t want to wait. Time is limitless but not mine.