Something

about the nature of poetry and time

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.