Linda Studley

Future Past

I wrote down the year today
as nineteen instead of twenty.
as though some errant, swirling time warp
tapped me on the shoulder.
New memories came like visions
from temporal cognoscenti,
and transcended the divisions
between now and then and older.

Which made me wonder what would happen
if one day the time warp hit
straight on, full force, and pulled me
deep into the eerie vortex.
Would it be a hurricane’s eye
where once and future engrams flit
like flying cows and spinning barns
whizzing past my quaking cortex?

Would patterns form and fray and fade,
emerge, then merge again to form
the multiverse of maybes
that spawned my personal, perfect storm?
The brainstorm of the century.
The wormhole to what’s never been.
The one way ticket, first class seat,
to the nearest loony bin. 

“Two thousand twelve, two thousand twelve,
not nineteen anything” I say.
I grip the pen as if an anchor
to my actuality.
“I have too much to do to ride
time’s crazy centrifuge today.
the future past is soon enough
to face my own reality.”

#295