In the Headlights: the ROAR

[Photo: Big Frank Dickinson]

I think we are all familiar with John Lennon's quotation: "Life is what happens to you when you're making other plans." Well how about this one from another John - John Ashbery:

"No matter how you twist it,
life stays frozen in the headlights.
Funny, none of us heard the roar."

The Roar
---- Big Frank Dickinson

You never do hear the roar because it's what comes afterwards;
the realization that you participated in an event,
that, as Lennon said, it happened to you.
Despite what Tolle and his ilk go on and on about - being in
the NOW; you are still always left with the question: which now?
There are so many - the now outside your window,
in the air around you, the faint memory
tugging at the edges of your budding realization
that you will have to do something about it,
and it too becomes now, even though
you have conjured it entirely out of half-surpressed desire,
the true motivation of which is not the now that you know,
but it certainly must be counted - your eyes cannot see them,
but special machines, even if they are not in the room with you now,
could, if they were here, measure and draw graphs
right now of all those rays: x-, gama, micro, macro, and unknown waves;
they are all now, and so too are all the nonexistant suppositions,
aborted plans, pointless regrets,
and other twists in life that roar past you
now.