Imagine our future selves as the much-harder-to-follow laws of us.
Because writing a new poem requires a future self, which is not the same thing as a new self or redemptive self or redeemed-squeaky-clean self in which all things are singing toward togetherness.
Because starting a new poem requires a future self, and the future requires fewer laws that rest on eternal, static certainty, so when someone comes at you with rules on what poetry should and should not do, they are in essence telling you discovery is platonic and predictable and only somewhat triumphant.
Because discovery is a slippery fish that will defy the laws that seek to confine it, so to slip with it just might be the way to go.
Because you haven’t even started that poem yet, and the present self is already an older self, complicit in reflection, and fortune doesn’t owe you a single wild stallion.
Fortune doesn’t owe you a single wild stallion
*
—and perhaps someone will argue it was a ridiculous premise, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. In the real world, you can’t bring back emperors, philosophers, and outlaws to get to the next levels of history class and human evolution. Ridiculous, using time travel as a shortcut to saving the universe, or solving a riddle lest it cost you your life. That poem. That poem pulling the emergency break, before you reach that some place you think you know as always too far away.
Yet our future selves are the much-harder-to-follow laws of us, and you’re writing this down as a space for other poets. And you’re not outside a telephone booth but a hard, tall stack of outdoor Amazon lockers. And you’re not at a Circle K but a 7-Eleven off of Queens Boulevard at a weird, twisted intersection not far from the exposed and elevated tracks of where the 7 Train meets the N and Q Trains and cab drivers gather in the large parking lot to catch up, drink coffee and smoke, trade stories, and somewhere among them surely is your dearly departed Uncle Balani who worked in a Rio Grande Valley garage just like the ones not far from your apartment here in Queens, who slid his cancer-ridden spine underneath countless flatbed trucks until the second stroke immobilized him from the waist down.
You came here on an innocuous errand, to pick up a package that your husband’s mother sent you from Hong Kong a few month ago. The package had not yet arrived before she arrived in Toronto in June, and actually just this weekend you were, in fact, in Canada, having dim sum with her family at Golden Palace Banquet Hall, and it was mentioned many times, by various aunts and uncles and cousins, that perhaps she should have brought the package to Toronto, that it had not yet arrived, that perhaps it was lost in the mail, at sea, ended up in the wrong country—when it, in fact, would arrive in New York while you were in Toronto, a slippery fish with contents that his mother herself no longer remembers.
And as the sky dims and it begins to rain again, no matter what information you punch into the system, the locker will not open for you. You dial the number Amazon has listed in its error message, but there’s no reception in the area, this dead zone, and having just come back a night ago, wildly disorganized as usual after a trip, you have no umbrella. You stand there in the rain, and your physical body feels it twice over. Because you’re coming back to the States a little less these days. Because you grow more and more connected to your husband’s family, and missing those alive haunts you differently from missing those dearly departed. Because your uncle is not there among the cab drivers, not sharing stories and cigarettes your mother asked him not to smoke, he’s not coming back the way you thought he would, the way your future self (back then) predicted in a poem, that when you tried to make an eternal and static law of life-after-death, the two birds you always saw passing in the sky after mentioning his name never came again.
They never came again, you just erroneously wrote.
Because now they might, which is to say they will, though you might not see this with your own eyes.
Because to engage with a future self in writing poetry is to never apologize for the no-door to lock, for the no-meal to come home to, that you no longer try to make each poem a house of worship to raise the dead so that they might reenter as exactly as what you knew.
Because sometimes the package you might never receive is so close it’s beyond reach.
Because sometimes it remains locked away on a street you could find with your eyes closed.
With our eyes closed.
With our eyes, all of our eyes seeing and unseen.
Because death and poetry are as closely linked as living and poetry.
Because death just might be a future self, the selfless-seeker who compels you toward poetry, the exposed and elevated twisted train tracks of living, filled with the melancholy din of trains that don’t always open for you.
Because now you are walking under them.
Because you are walking back home, your uncle and the package elsewhere.
Because for all their present unknownness, they are not unknown to you.
Because you are a crossing crossing an evening, long as it is unfinished.
Because death just might be a future self that doesn’t answer but asks the questions themselves.
Because death just might be the curious caretaker of your very living.