Letters to the Possible World: Garbanzo Plays the Hidden Garden Gallery

The future hasn't happened yet,
Or it has happened and is past.
The future never really happens,

Which is part of why I wonder
How we ever manage to get
To sleep knowing we never die.

Awareness is of fresh contrasts
Receding among the bric-à-brac
Of the richly textured past, never

More so than in the cases of sleep
Or wakeful forgetting, experiences
Observed only in the even

More distal aftermath than most,
As varieties of inference called gaps,
The darker shades of contrast.

There is the animal, addicted to life,
And perhaps some smaller distractions.
There is the compound awareness,

Part product of flesh, part product
Of the long, thin generations of culture
That whip and coil through it.

The latter is more used to vanishing
As part of being aware at all, but
Would rebel against flesh for immortality.

The future, which was out there
In a hidden garden, a possible world
Without us, impossible to visit,

Is one among the fading pasts, images
Of what we all were wearing, the swallows
Flicking white in the evening, the music,

The friends, the gossip, the art, the little
Girls in lurid frocks having fun, one
Daring the other to eat grass. Last night's

Drama. Why do the dying take pictures?
Who are we saving them for? Truth,
Beauty, and thumb pianos. We laughed.