[“it’s hard to remember when apathy starts.”
        - kreddible trout, thundering word heard, august 18, 2002]

when the light came on
i realized i lost an entire era of my life.

i had to check my watch
  though i couldn’t find it
  because i had stopped wearing it
  because the effort required to put it on
  exceeded the value in knowing the time.

i had to check the calendar
  but that was mostly futile
  because i didn’t know what day to compare to.

i realized someone had switched my eyesight to black and white
  and my hearing to mono
  and stuffed cotton up my nose
  and sandpapered my tongued
  and put a wet suit on me.

so i went to wreck beach
  and dumped the wet suit
  jumped in the surf and tasted mouthfuls of the ocean
  extracted the cotton to smell the salt in my hair 
    that i pulled around to my face to rest on my top lip
  floated on my back to let the surf pound stereo back into my ears
  and i stood on a sandbar
    facing west
    staring hard at the sea
    until i could see all the shades of blue water
    from here to the gulf islands.

today is the seedling and the open eyes and uncriticized heart
  in the vulnerably open chest cavity
  and the serendipity magnet of my soul
  and the being on the lookout for phoenixes out from the common.

then i came back home and left my watch in its drawer
  not because time didn’t matter
  but because it did
  so much so that as moments go
    i needed to re-tune myself to being aware of the precious nowness of time
    that the ticking watch would just add needless anxiety
    of loss of potential and possibility and kinesis and temporal bliss.

and in the rise and fall of empires
  the eruption and erosion of mountain ranges
  and the lust spark 
    and ember stirring 
    and shoveling sand over the cooling ashes of relationships
  the entropy does rule
  but not without the ecology growing a new tree
  from the stump of a lightning-felled spruce.

Copyright 2002, Stephen Buckley
08.23.02, 1200pm