To the Time Traveler

They say music, as a malady, is incurable. I wonder if you ever watch yourself, seeing the moment happen as boom goes the drum, clack clack goes the hat, the bass comes in between. I wonder if you dream. Of penniless thoughts that have wandered the streets for so long that they have peaked interest. I wonder if you see them seeing you.

Does it hurt?

When you sit down to excavate yourself, reaching into places that many people don’t know exist to find traces of long forgotten questions, does it hurt? I’m asking because I need to know before I lose myself too far in this space of questioning. Or maybe I already have. Maybe, once started, it is impossible to stop. Like a journey that started on a huge highway that has slowly morphed into a footpath. Do you now find yourself hacking at vines trying to clear a way to trudge forward?

Is that what makes you stronger?

Or is this a tale that we have told ourselves, hoping that somehow stories will create a space for their tellers? So now that you’re searching, have your palms found the answer? Do they drum in memory of past that has been pounded through time on the hides of last night’s dinner? Do you see images of yourself, 7000 years ago, pounding on a drum talking about the town under the sun?

They say that by 3005 there will be nothing left on the planet but time and nature. Do you think Mother Nature will miss the sound of our drums, beating stories across the earth? Or will they be memories of a species that overstayed their welcome and only left when there was nothing left for them?

Maria Salaam, je utakumbukwa?

Love and memory continue to walk down a similar path, have you found the key to memories of love? Is that where the energy that you give them comes from? When they come to hear you be, are you there? Or do you leave and let the gods of love and memory take over, controlling the palms that somehow communicate a past that is so far that it is indistguishable but so close that it is crystal.

I was once told that the difference between knowing and not knowing is a question.

Years later I was asked “what does knowing look like?”

Have you found the question? Or do you keep asking, hoping one day to stumble upon the right one? Still, the palms of the drummer have been known to hide secrets that were held imprisoned in particles of organic matter that have been used and reused by the universe for decades. As if little capsules of time were wrapped and placed there just in case all havoc breaks lose. Which, if you think about it, is a good plan given that it did.

Does the process of releasing time tire you? Do you ever want to give up? I’ve been told that music holds you when nothing else will – does it? Is that why it is incurable?

Still, there is only art, and there is only trust. Somewhere in the background as I write this a bee is buzzing, a friend is humming, a parrot is whistling, a building is being constructed, a car a reversing, another is revving and my fingers are typing. Do you capture time as you travel, trapping it for later just in case?

Or does time naturally attach itself to your body, like oxygen that comes across excited molecules of carbon, looking to get laid?

Signed

A Dependent Observer

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