We’re swirling leaves carried on the flow,
pebbles skimmed across the waves,
seabirds too ungainly to reach the sky.
We only touch time’s surface,
and never understand its depths.
~/~
On Friday, she knocked softly at the door.
She was elderly and frail, and she
held a schoolbook out to me.
When the morning’s rays are slanting through the kitchen windows, it’s time for mathematics.
Once upon a cereal box, I read of the analytical
and inestimable Doctor Petal, who was confounded
by the nature of free will, and chose to coalesce
the time stream to make the future
as irrevocable as the past.
When the rain fell sizzling down, damp with lightning,
she observed the protozoa in each drop,
waiting to reach the underworld
to complete the polygon of life.
Diurnal hours on planet earth
It’s as if I’m alive, I’m almost sure.
Strangers know me at the supermarket,
people knock and peer through windows,
ask me why I wasn’t where I should have been
by rote and custom.
Yet I know when I awaken every day,
I’m here for the very first time.
I’ve breathed the air chirped by sparrows,
critically appraised everything
I didn’t understand,
searched for magica potenta
in urban mysteries, shaded quantum clouds,
on bedroom ceilings, and found echidna quills,
kookaburra beaks, sobriety, all the words
I didn’t want to write.
Three knocks at the door-to-door,
I said I don’t want any, thank you,
not knowing what I didn’t desire.
Time is not a river in the mind,
it runs in agitated swirls and eddies,
with a little fabric softener.
We’re pebbles skimmed across its waves,
seabirds too ungainly to find its sky,
who skate along time’s surface, and
never understand its heights
and depths.