Fugitive Time

Oct 14 2019

When it took weeks

for a letter to arrive.

And they were kept

in a locked box

of dark exotic wood,

tucked in the envelopes

that had carried then over the sea.

In elegant hand, on yellowing pages

in slowly fading ink

held for posterity.

While our modern lives, it seems

are disposable,

coded in ones and zeros

and zipping around the world

at the speed of light.

Electrons

in furious motion

and circuits opening like floodgates;

so fugitive time

seems relentless,

and desperate lives accelerate

like superconducting wires.

We swim

in an invisible ocean

of electromagnetic waves,

a cacophony of voices

passing through our bodies

totally unaware.

We are water in water,

our density the same

boundaries transparent

molecules undisplaced.

Voices

that if only we could listen in

would drive us mad with sound.

And when the electrons stop

will be lost for good.

The most intimate thoughts we've shared.

Our lust, and lies, and loneliness,

poems and letters of love.

All utterly gone

before even we are.

Yet, like TV signals from the 1950s

that are now approaching the nearest star,

our most frivolous conversation

is swiftly winging its way

out to the galaxy's edge,

despite having weakened

to the merest whisper

drowned out by the cosmic noise.

We document our lives

obsessively;

as if to tempt immortality,

or like a talisman

warding off death.

But like the tree that falls

and no one ever hears;

like the silent waves

that flood out into space

but diminish by the inverse square,

when we are gone, we're gone

and might well have never existed.