Time
The present carries you along, the past
Unwinds behind, time’s arrow
Keeps the future up ahead.  
That’s how it’s always been, but now
The present slips away, leaves the future in the past,
  and disappears.
You’d follow but the present’s gone, moved on,
Left you behind,
In a future that’s already out of date,
But still enough to knock you down.

Change
Things change without you—
What seemed stable disappears,
Your horizon shrinks to nothing,
The future surrounds you,
And everything is stranger than you imagined.

Keeping up
You hesitate along the way,
Say that’s enough to this and that
But keep up with the rest,
Until you say to what remains
This far but no farther
This much but no more.
            
Memory        
When asked—
You find your reasons are in the past,
With gaps and pages missing,      
And certainties uncertain,
Planets in motion, pulled loose from their stars,
Leave you in silence.

I’m told that I’m a dream produced
by time and space and DNA, that’s organized in such a way
that chemistry and physics are enough to make it dream,
so let’s accept that really there’s no ghost in the machine.

But still it seems that I exist, and isn’t it amazing dreams
can interact with other dreams,
do calculus and higher math,
gaze at the stars, make art, make love,
investigate it all and find
we’re just another accident of chemistry and space and time.