You Can Go Now Poem by Dick Holmes

You Can Go Now



Time — what is it,
this vast father of all concepts
luring its children into
preoccupation with the past?

History is a fine fiction
within its limits, full of lessons
for those who have ears to hear them,
but when taken too seriously,
as if it were the whole
truth and nothing but the truth,
it prohibits experience of presence.

The narrative of sports commentators,
presented in present tense,
is more honest than that of historians.
'Will looks left, crosses over,
drives right, puts up a floater...
off the glass... GOOD! All tied up now,
three seconds to go, time out Wolfpack.
This place is going CRAZY! '

But how to put time in perspective
when time is a primary component
of perspective? Can space manage to
squeeze its age-old partner in philosophy
out of business by means of some
trick of focus, put an end to time's
executive decision making behind the scenes
of ignorance, war, and social injustice?
And will that help, or only give
space too much play, leading to
more of the same in another form of tyranny?

Time will tell, it's said.
Or will it? Maybe it's just
waiting to be told. Maybe it never
wanted the power it was entrusted with
in the first place. Maybe it too feels that it's
long overdue for retirement.
There it is now, sitting at its desk —
piled up with nothing but travel brochures —
sighing, waiting for the phone to ring,
to hear from the stockholders
those four liberating words:
'You can go now.'

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