The Future (audio only)

To achieve reality (where objects thrive on people's passions), enormous effort
and continuous social interactions are required, and I can't get started
without you. Not here—over there's a better place to begin a funny story.
History with its dead all shot through with regularities in the woods
and following what looks like a cow-path
is part of a creature's sexual magic. Its recorded words
now are just a small memento meant to trigger memories
which will give us energy when the right time comes.
Every afternoon high in a tree
the forest vagabond naps while time hangs
like a swarm of midges, trembling on. It might be female
but it has a phallus's tendency to jump up. How lonely it is
to think that I can only think what I think even while he is thinking—our
          thinking
just our respective working body's hum. And while the warlords of Mycenae
          were storming
Troy the foundations of their own societies were crumbling, too.

A dream, still clinging like light to the dark, rounding
The gap left by things which have already happened
Leaving nothing in their place, may have nothing to do
But that. Dreams are like ghosts achieving ghosts' perennial goal
Of revoking the sensation of repose. It's terrible
To think we write these things for them, to tell them
Of our life—that is, our whole life. Along comes a dream
Of a machine. Why? What is being sold there? How is the product
emitted?
It must have been sparked by a noise, the way the very word "spark"
emits a brief picture. Is it original? Inevitable?
We seem to sleep so as to draw the picture
Of events that have already happened so we can picture
Them. A dream for example of a procession to an execution site.
How many strangers could circle the space while speaking of nostalgia
And of wolves in the hills? We find them
Thinking of nothing instead—there's no one to impersonate, nothing
To foresee. It's logical that prophesies would be emitted
Through the gaps left by previous things, or by the dead
Refusing conversation and contemplating beauty instead.
But isn’t that the problem with beauty—that it's apt in retrospect
To seem preordained? The dawn birds are trilling
A new day—it has the psychical quality of "pastness"  and they are trailing
It. The day breaks in an imperfectly continuous course
Of life. Sleep is immediate and memory nothing.

The Lost Pines Inn would be a good name for a motel, or No Sheep in the Meadow, The Lost Egos, The Downtown Country Inn, Mike and Ann's, Doug and Diane's, Bob and Joe's or Just Joe's Hotel, Warm Toes Hotel, Anything Goes Inn, The Come Inn, The Company Retreat, The Hermit's Den, La Cave, The Little House Hotel, The Reliquary, The Happy Family Inn, The Rooster's Coop, The Corky Floor, The Henhouse Hotel, The Egg-in-a-Nest, The Rooks Retreat, The Cooks Inn, The Beat A Retreat, and a music group could call itself Crested Loader, or 10-Second Crossing, or 9 Car Train, or Thumb on the Space Bar, or the Unlike Minimums, The Shepherds Without Sheep, Sheep Without Sleep, Two Feminines, Autism, The Twice Maniacs, The Genetics, The Nasty Uncles, Interfering Women, but streets get named typically after numbers or trees of they're given the names of prominent as well as lesser-known citizens or the names of great cities of the world or the great letters of the alphabet from A to Z but in celebration of the things we consume the names of products and objects should be given to some streets (Tagliatelle Lane, Glue Stick Street, iPod Alley) and to encourage pursuit of intellectual professions a city's central thoroughfare might be called Mathematics Avenue, Neurochemistry Street, Jurisprudence Boulevard, or Lit Crit Street while at the edge of town the thoroughways and by ways could commemorate abstractions and generalized conditions (as in Global Capital Street, Logic Throughway, Affluence Alley, Interruption Boulevard, Domination Interstate, Accumulation Highway) and another great name for a motel would be The Soporif's Inn, or The Archive, and Duke, High Spot, Drummer, Archimedes, Shadow, Ranger, and Gamelon might name some of the 220 horses at work under the hood of the blue 2003 220-horse power P.T. Cruiser that got me home by bedtime.