time travel (in this time after the End)

time travel (in this time after the End)

“It would liberate me forever from this hopeless prison, this pain of being me.”

Letter from Lieutenant Mamiya, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami

it is 2010 i fall back to

tumble fully and deeply

unlike any SF film or book

i am sitting at a bar

in Savannah, Georgia

it is loud and i am tired

i am with cycling friends

but alone on a single stool

at the corner of the bar

exhaustion and beer cloud

my mind steeled by noise

until one song opens it

i shout to a friend beside me

“who sings this song?”

he answers wrong but close

my search for “Frances”

finds Florence + the Machine

to lie buried almost two years

•

that was before the fall

but very close to the End

i did not and could not see

when i listen to that music now

i trip and slip back two years

and look at my empty hands

Florence + the Machine pulses

into my chest a soundtrack

for all my time indistinguishable

my past my present and my future

have blurred like a Tralfamadorian

nightmare—“this pain of being me”

•

in this time after the End

no different really than

before or during or after

i am reading my second

Murakami novel all alone

sitting at the bottom of a well

i wake each morning now

to negotiate with frailty

insolence and calcification

i depend on strangers’ words

sung and written and spun

keeping a dead heart beating

and i am a time traveller true

fixed at no point in time because

there is no point to time alone

i touch the cover of the novel

and test its weight in my hand

before beginning to read again

i plug the iPod into my car stereo

and choose Florence + the Machine

to wrap myself for returning to you