The pulling string,
which is Time’s tether,
brings
and binds
all things
together
in the contoured galleries of our minds.

Piaf has been dead
these thirty years or more
and yet her voice is bought
and sold in any CD store.

Yesterday and tomorrow,
mingled joy and sorrow,
are raw material for the present mind
to spin its webs and bind.

Only the present acts,
begins and ceases,
holds, releases.
The other tenses
only seem.
They make a mockery of our present senses
and merely dream
the time away.

Release this present moment from its treadmill,
this trudging on from ‘was’ to ‘will’.
Locate the very pinpoint
of the here
and the now.
See the very pinpoint disappear
in a gust of autumn laughter
-leaves falling through bare and empty rafters.

“Oh God,” said Hamlet,
“I could be bounded in a nutshell
and count myself a king of infinite space,
were it not that I have bad dreams.”

If Lord Hamlet would let go his dreaming,
he would be king indeed!

.