The mind is a time machine,
A look back upon our lives machine,
Think forward with our mind machine.
But there’s a difference between what you saw
And what you see, through a growing and different
Set of the same eyes.
Be careful to only watch through a window –
Silhouettes against curtains or shadows on a wall.
Tread lightly
With cotton candy footsteps
That wouldn’t even imprint sand.
The fabric of a memory could tear even if
You just drape it the wrong way from a thought,
And a recollection is as fragile as a river reflection
Fractured by a breeze –
Malleable like the mind is made of plasticine
And if you squeeze it with a hand too warm
It might just reshape.
We can’t ever return to the body
That lived a story now only remembered or told,
And the eyes we watch it with are distanced –
Far further along a now beaten track.
You took the long way here and a short cut back,
But in returning,
It’s still…
Frozen in time
As as museum of relics of your version of a past,
A gallery of defining moments
Inked into chapter titles and notated postcards.
You already wrote the book,
You don’t need to read it again –
The beauty of remembrance is you can skip
The bad parts this time.
Or the good parts if you’re melancholy…
But when we look through half closed eyes
We don’t see a whole anymore.
The mind may be a time machine
But no one is a time traveller.
Our journey is barely a collection of parts
And you can never see a complete reflection in
A shattered mirror or mosaic of glass –
Missing the immersion found in the venture of today
That we so mistakenly displace
With loss into thought or a dream just as abstract
(I remember my dreams just as clearly as my life sometimes).
Memories trap lives as ever morphing clouds
Into photographs or snapshots, sentencing them
To a lifeless life of static,
When we could be morphing freely ourselves.
A cloud’s elegance is really in the way
They transform a little more every time we blink.
A time lapse before our eyes, in a world so
Completely alive that we can watch the sky as it thinks.
Lauren Kathleen 