Timeline

The best dreams seem to occur during 1967 but the calendar
brays 2006! 2006! and jerks me unceremoniously awake:
then I remember 1970 sinking its fangs in my neck,
slaking its thirst at the burst artery of karmic predisposition.

Time moves like cement in this laboratory of fools.
I take an age over breakfast, lingering among the unborn.
What’s the rush? I stopped functioning in 1993
and nobody noticed; by 1998 my body was dating

other subpersonalities while I maintained an identity within
the limitless crystal caverns of 1976- and winters in 1992
whenever the Abba-glory grew too radiant. Since 1999 atma
has been totally brahma: I glitteringly overflow 1973

spilling selfhood in plumes and plasms transdimensional.
It’s all so 1995; the way time-tigers shimmer sideways,
how each moment resonates like a million-stringed sitar
in the hands of some Hendrix-Shankar-Shiva hybrid

with 2012 the underpinning drone behind diverse ragas
of suffering and ecstatic flight. Oh, those Mayans:
such terrible smartarses, I hate them for being right
but we must allow the ancient dead their parsimony

so move over Teilhard de Chardin, there’s room for me
on the love-bus! No? Then back to bed unencumbered by
accomplishment, as if no time had passed, or could pass
this sequence of moments mashed up in spastic synchrony.


Jon Hellier

Image: Natures Adores a Vacuum by Winston Smith (2001) available from Henry Boxer.