Absent-Minded
Oct 30 2010


I lost track of time.

As if the hands of the clock
tick-tocking off in the corner,
went racing on
to the small hours of morning.
And the relentless drip-drip-drip
of the leaky faucet
stopped cold.

Days blinking past
the earth spinning madly
and rocketing ‘round the sun.
And the cosmos
majestically circling above,
glimpsed briefly at night,
obscured
by the light of day.

I found I could go either way,
reversing back through life
to the singularity
at the first moment of consciousness.
Or slip into my dotage
and perhaps beyond;
although here, it all gets blurry
and nothing seems sure.

Which is when I looked up from the page
in this cone of yellow light
enclosed by darkness
and picked up the trail again,
tracking time —
marks in the sand
washed clear by incoming tides,
what happened by
while I was distracted.

Blissfully
transcendently
absent;
my cold cramped body
left behind.



This is when writing – or any creative endeavour, for that matter – gets so enjoyable. It’s that highly desirable state of free association, when the compartments in your mind break down, there is this easy focus and flow, and you feel as though you’re channelling: taking dictation, transcribing what’s already out there, waiting to be realized.

In fact, I was tempted to call the poem “Ayahuasca”: not just a beautiful sounding word that would make an irresistible title, but also a word that connotes a similar transcendent state. I chose not to, though, because I didn’t want any reader to think I was referring to an actual drug-induced experience. Of course, the act of writing is not specified, so this would be a reasonable interpretation, which the reader is free to chose. It’s just that, since it’s not what I intended, I’d rather not point him/her in that direction.

The poem started with the first line. (Believe it or not, this isn’t as obvious as it sounds, since it’s often not the case!) I wanted to play around with this familiar expression, deconstructing it in a very literal sense: so I become a tracker, literally on the trail of time. I suppose I’ve done essentially the same with “absent-minded”: where the creative act is an out-of-body experience, and the metaphorical absence becomes actual.