Free Time

Imagine there was NOTHING
where we now feel ticking time.
Imagine losing all befores and afters,
thens and whens that parse
out time into memories…
Try it, if you please,
to imagine a conversation where you speak
of grandparents, great-grandkids, or a very first puppy
(back when your health wasn’t yet on the skids)
all running amok concurrently
NOT how they occurred most certainly,
but imagining it that way
makes it so, because I say so
Time becomes unstuck
Who’s not to know?

Measures of passing events
control us, rule our days and nights
set limits to each action,
wrong or right.
We parcel time out in hours or millisecs.
We alone need clocks and watches.
You’d never see a groundhog turn his calendar page thus
to discover a shadow on his day.
Outrageous for groundhogs to know of the fuss.
They sleep on,
until one feels the crack of dawn…
no clock or chronometer creates
the shadowy misnomer.
Time is, in truth, neither cyclical,
nor sequentially fixed.
It is a floating rather mystical,
memorical,
hat trick,
invented to describe the space where
all events between or betwixt
other memories are fixed,
although loose and well mixed.

Imagine all your carefully stored memory-drawers
stuffed full,
each one stamped with dates and places,
imagine those dates now erased.
The box of these snippets are then thoughtlessly dumped
onto a tabletop,
unsorted, jumbled up,
as around they flop.
Now call this reality.

Dementia can be causal,
but, once time is optional,
it frees us up from the
logical sequences so constraining.
If your world sees sunshine,
in mine it might be raining.
If your world says WHOA! Now is just a moment
I say, all nows can be my NOW now.

I see them disarrayed before me.
I just have to pick one NOW to see
how that moment pleases me.
I was 3…hmmmm..but then at 10
I did it again…my memory of then is NOW
NOW is whenever it appeals to how I feel if
what I FEEL is real,
then REAL is how I FEEL
NOW.

I soar on a separate plane,
no gravity holds me to a sequence.
No reality forces an awful consequence
since my mind
can shift the time
to switch said time to a NOT NOW, or a
NOT-THEN.
As time becomes less a when,
my time is whenever I deem it
convenient.

My time is whenever I dream it.