Your Own Now

 Your Own Now

If you often find yourself on your own now,

let me point out - the observer once observed

is just as valid – it depends on how

fast your relative’s travelling – 

If they blaze a fulgent curve,

well, case closed, it means you’re no more real 

than them. You ask - are you able to feel

the way I feel, if every present is present

and every now is now?

Evidently. The off-side rule laments bereft,

hides under beds in plain sight of the ref

until pronounced hereby abolished

and told to take up dust-moting instead.

Pitiful pastimes, these, watching drops racing drops,

thinking about how many sailor’s socks

I might have darned, if I’d stayed in, not left her

to take her up – 

We’re walking Cornish woods,

where we’d often talked in woulds and coulds

when I felt my present take your present’s hand

in mine – and it stopped me there -

while your ghost fingers combed my hair -

but someone observing us at light speed

saw that you were much more real than me - indeed

they sighed and said - I was the one who'd died.