Christopher Merrill

The trick, say gurus, is to stay in the present
though even while saying it, the present flees.

Words disappear into past-time by the end
of the sentence which proposes to arrest it.

Time is money, we say, but it is also language.
Words take time and split it into separate realms.

The present seems the thinnest membrane
between past and future, the sliver of an instant

we pass through without ever being there.
Before, we say, and after and now.

But isn't that what childhood is all about,
a pre-verbal idyll without time

before the snake of language slithered in and hissed,
You are dying, you will die, you have died.