HOW TO DREAM BACKWARDS

My little cousin asks me about my dreams

I tell her honestly

We might have shrunk the future down

Into a sliver of a horizon

Too small for all of humanities dreams to pass through

It doesn’t matter she tells me

'Then

I will learn how to dream backwards

Against time

I will learn how to cut strange loops where rivers end

So they will run upward back into the clouds

I will learn how to grow things in both directions

If all that is left of the branches is dead wood

I will nurture roots so deeply

That they too will give up fruit'

'And if your generation forgets how to make music?'

'Then I will crack open the earth

And dance to the songs it sang 1000 years before'

When I ask the child about her dreams

She tells me

Some nights she walks backward across the hours

And uses her grandmothers hands to unbuild cities

So she can fall back awake among the flowers

but how do you preserve into language what this earth never spoke of with words

at first we took a knife to time itself

tried to segment the days

like you do an orange

hours then minutes

seconds then milliseconds

we worked our way to the land

this half for the birthing of seeds

this half for the consumption of fruit

when we learnt to speak

I called you a name

you called me an / other

we spoke each name into eternity

but it did not bother to learn them

instead

when eternity spoke of us

it said

"that was the time when people had not yet learnt

you cannot slice up water"

THE PARTS OF OURSELVES THAT SACRIFICED SUNLIGHT AS THINGS MUST GROW IN BOTH DIRECTIONS AND ALL AT ONCE OR THE CENTRE WILL NOT HOLD

The Hours

Are getting tired of us 

Running closed loops around them

But 

It is a hard thing to speak of new futures

When all the language you have in your mouth

Was written before your birth

WHERE DO I END

WHERE DO YOU BEGIN

WHERE DO I END

WHERE DO YOU BEGIN

WHERE DO I END

WHERE DO YOU BEGIN

© LamicLamic