Resurrection
June 20 2007


There was a story today
about the comatose man who stunned everyone,
coming back to life after 18 years.
As if you went to sleep tonight
and woke-up next morning
2 decades in the future:
your tiny children fully grown
and moved away;
your wife an old lady
living with another man;
and the world incomprehensible
run by adolescents in business suits.
And you
too weak to sit-up in bed
looking down at your wasted body,
the heart of your life cut out of it.

To have so much time
lost in a black hole of memory
must be like buried alive
— feeling helpless,
and cheated,
and irreparably detached from the world.
This is not the kind of time travel you’d hoped for;
not the bright young man in his titanium cocoon,
crammed with lights and gauges
whizzing about the ages
at will,
master of mankind’s fate.

Like you, I am curious about the future
and to be transported there would dazzle and amaze me.
But it seems time travel is a zero sum game,
in which to gain the future
you must pay with your past.
Like this miraculous man,
who can now move on
but can never look back.