When We Met

Walking in the woods / 2024 / Cascadia / Pacific Northwest / Photo by RCS

We looked into each other’s eyes when we met,

and then we hugged for the first time surrounded

by masked strangers in Sea-Tac Airport.

We already knew so much about each other – but it was

knowing from a distance, during the pandemic years.

Yet somehow we knew we’d be together and

understood it’s better to be late bloomers than never bloomers.

The messages, the knowings, the feelings transmitted

every night over mobile phone video screens – made for

a world ready for the beginning times, the New Now times,

all the times connecting two who like so many others

were grappling with and gaping in wonder about where we

were located in an ever-expanding moment, full of breath and visions.

We chose each other as the other one who was theirs.

In a world where life and death are always a daily occurrence,

living in a historic moment that’ll be told and retold and

handed down, with truths and mistruths, through the centuries.

They’ll say, remember when the whole world became one, and time

stopped in the way a river is stopped by a damned dam.

Billions said yes to an utter stillness which could be felt by all,

in the ocean of time and space.

We found out we were all the people we’d been waiting for.

For a while, there was no time – no upstream or downstream.

We met on the Internet, and were willing and able to believe

in spider webs long enough to stretch to the moon, and future Ice Ages

meant to be sung about and lived through with clarity and

love and courage – knowing the cave dwellers, compound-living livers,

and long-distance travelers, of the reinvented and rebuilt

eco-utopian visionary remade Cascadia region,

700 years hence will recount the words found on scraps

of paper, and bokes discovered miraculously whole,

recounting BeforeTimes history, after being

found in derelict, underground, dusty and salvaged

stores of the boke, and windblown roadside signs with

place names of food emporiums long made meaningless by

time’s swift and slow passage. Voices and tongues in the BeyondTime,

sitting around campfires and often recounting our current times,

our whirling wilder times full of violence and human horrors,

and wrongheaded intergenerational cultural beliefs

embedded subconsciously, dug in so deep, it’s almost beyond belief.

Yet somehow seeds were planted deep within hearts, and in the Earth.

Knew it was up to us to grow the new beyond place world – for to continue, after the

ecological collapse humans had to end war, created at first by peaceful pockets

of whole humans, beginning with each connected heart, in every corner of the world.

A whole and complete world so different from the BeforeTimes – from

those warring, primitive times of the early twenty-first (as it shall become known as).

I’m putting together an eBook of my Internet Poems, Prose Poems, and Noir Prose Poems, among others types of poems. More info as this project progresses.