Traveling the Backward Path

April 2008 000/444/888 Last night, I closed my eyes before bed  And imagined life in eras now long past.  I saw the Shakespearean actor shuffle down an alleyway  While, on the other side of the globe,  Scrappy, thin men carved out a fortified village  In what would one day be the United States.  I drifted in the thunder and rolling clouds  On a warm jet stream high above.  While civilizations below conformed to  The advancements of the ages in which they lived.  I imagined the inevitable pull of westward expansion,  And I saw great ships establish trade routes to usher in  A new prosperity.  I spent time in houses.  Sometimes, I sat in the rooms at night  And watched the people who slept.  They could never guess that I was with them,  But sometimes, they would look nervously  Around and stare with alert eyes  Into the darkness where I sat watching.  They could not see me,  But they c...

Perhaps I will know when the final moment reveals itself and then tumbles as a last breath from my mouth. All of history Is in that moment. Everything gathered, and everything stolen... it will all be there in the ever-spoken Word. This is the last syllable of recorded time. Is it a stone from a stone fruit thrown into the gasping mouth of a well. Falling evermore toward the bottom, it speaks as a  single collective thought. Oh, you are there and I am too, collected in the zeros and ones, calcified like bone and squeezed into a bubble. …bubbled up and calcified  You  from me. WWWWWWWWWWWWW The relics of all  formed from the  we. Hide now in a different tense— spoken secretly. (Not past, not present, not future.) Our binary brains can never explain the syllable strain of that final moment. Within the orb, the particles collapsed. Every particle— under the weight of underwater pressure. A force compelled a kinetic collision that formed the core of everything. In t...