Life Is Flying By

If a robber drops a wristwatch on a speeding locomotive
and it shatters on the floor by his bags of stolen maps,

and ten years later an impatient woman wedges her luggage
beneath that robber's very same seat, oblivious to the unsealed

orange peel pomatum leaking all over her day planner, a mess
she will discover during the disarray of late night unpacking

in a town that one day will be famous for its mile-high prison,
is it true that the aforementioned robber is incarcerated there?

No. By the time they build the jail there'll have been revolutions,
slavery, several Christian raptures, massive animalia extinctions,

a new alphabet invented to continue these calculations
and to somehow account for the absence of time capsules.

Did no one, no one at all, think to leave behind sealed
lead boxes of Polaroids, skeletons, family trees, instructions?

Anthropologists perpetually flounder toward false conclusions:
the Elasmosaurus with its head attached to the wrong end,

the supposed Noah's Ark just old wood from a garage,
the fiddlehead fern fossil mistaken for bones of an alien fetus.

We'll be dead for the overwhelming majority of earth time
but everyone's so caught up in this life thing, too busy

speeding hither to label anything properly. Praise the Lord
for those tiny oval stickers on all grocery store produce!

Let's use that model to give future historians a helping hand.
Start by stickering each person and pet that you pass today.

Each sight you see, spot you sit, what you thought as you sat.
Next: diagram how they all, quite miraculously, connect.