by Stephen Mead.
It’s simply complicated.
The future is behind you.
You are on an escalator standing backwards.
Beneath you is the present & the past has your eyes.
Seeing only these two, you feel the other
exactly where your hands aren’t.
I’ve forgotten the Greek phrase for this.
My tongue is of the Sphinx, that inscrutable mouth.
Perhaps it’s hieroglyphic from too much reading,
reading into & deeply.
Perhaps it’s a narrowing, that long view,
that historic, with some Egyptian fall
always shadowing one’s vision.
Do you know it too, the analyzed realism,
the so-reasonable cynicism, the parochial intellect
of hyper-tense sense?
World enough; the time/patience,
the faith/trust catching up for a minute clear
here where your world is still
a refugee’s postcards, the home
set about, the looking & the don’t look
back into a future simply colored by this knowledge.
Look, suddenly we take off our shirts
here on this escalator which could be
in Algeria or Iran, could be a film
on some flesh-resembling screen,
but I feel only the lines on your belly
while you feel the lines on my mouth.
This is asylum then, the future behind
& touch everywhere else.