The Throes of History

We dreamers have had a few too many minutes on our hands.

Before this dreamer was once a blinding white plain of salt flats

Where time did not tick.

There was only a woosh behind, and then I stood upright.

I looked around and saw the light of eyes,

The darkness of All Creation affixed to them,

And darker, still, I saw the Great Wave that was to come.

That was when I was young,

And a storm was coming.

*

When I learned of things gone by

I wondered at the firing of neurons

And how inane it must be to be

Ordinary.

But, also, I thought of

A collection of spirits:

Things of those things that make everything possible.

Dust covers the mind of the pages of history, but

Not in the sense of a long undiscovered monument to humanity,

Where the unanswerable is pondered,

Where we look upon the works of pharaohs and wonder,

Where we think to ourselves about those things until

There’s nothing left to think.

That Dust is ego because it doesn’t tell us much, I think.

We are a product of these things of that which made us.

And they settle like a dusting of things in the wind.

Coursing, floating, and dissipating under a streetlight into the dark.

Yet we persist, for there’s a life at the end of every thread of ink.

*

The storm came and went,

But like an iron rod rusted and bent,

This dreamer needs to know:

Are we the dust or the wave?