---
title: Something
subtitle: about the nature of poetry and time
genre: verse

id: poetry-time
toc: "Something about the nature of poetry and time"

project:
    title: Stark Raving
    class: stark
    order: 5
    next:
    - title: The Moon is drowning
      link: moon-drowning
    - title: AMBER alert
      link: amber-alert
    prev:
    - title: The Big Dipper
      link: big-dipper
    - title: Worse looking over
      link: worse-looking-over
...

| I'm writing this now because I have to.
| Not in some "my soul yearns for this and
| I can't help it" way, but in the way that this
| moment is structured as such, that it is
| crystallized this way, me writing this, and later
| you reading it, now for you, later for me,

| and this tenuous connection mates me
| and you forever, combined with each other, two
| [electrons momentarily entwined][].  Later,
| when I'm dead or far too famous for you, and
| you're in school, reading my words because it is
| required reading, I want you to remember this

| connection we've always had, this
| [spider's thread][] hanging between you and me.
| Which of us is the spider and which is
| the fly still remains to be seen.  To
| eat, perchance to fly: all of that and
| more.  We can settle all of this later.

| Yes, it is you I'm thinking of in your later
| time: you specifically, not another.  This
| is true for all $x$ such that $x > 0$ and
| $x$ is a real person, though it doesn't bother me
| to write to a fictional figure or to
| [a figment][], maybe, of my imagination.  This is

| what you are right now, anyway, [dear Reader][], is
| it not?  I'm talking about my now, of course, not later,
| which is your now.  Later will be my now too,
| and maybe I'm ultimately writing to a future part of this
| self: you could very well be me.
| In fact, you probably are me, [some other version][], and

| I am you in the past, or what you could've been, and
| at the same time, this isn't true.  Everything is,
| and nothing isn't.  The difference between "you" and "me"
| is in name only.  Maybe you'll get this later,
| [when you're older][], when I'm older, when all of this
| is something we'll look fondly back to,

| because I do hope to meet you, although much later,
| and I hope your feeling is the same.  All this
| talk on me and you and you and me we'll keep between us two.

[electrons momentarily entwined]: treatise.html
[spider's thread]: last-passenger.html
[a figment]: epigraph.html
[some other version]: elegyforanalternateself.html
[when you're older]: found-typewriter-poem.html
[dear Reader]: real-writer.html