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I saw the best moments of my generation vanish into lag,
wired nerves sparking after the fact,
eyeballs dragging photons from stars already dead,
voices echoing from mouths closed a half-second ago,
“now” collapsing into replay like a tape spooling backward,

who hallucinated immediacy while neurons delayed the parade,
who stitched milliseconds into banners and called them present,
who carried the corpse of the instant on their backs
and mistook its warm ghost for living time,

who rose screaming in midnight cities,
demanding the truth of a razor-edge now,
only to find it dissolved into smears of then,
electrical shadows stumbling across axons,
a flickering cinema screen where the projector
was always a frame behind the reel,

who danced at the edge of spacetime blocks,
cursor-minds scratching graffiti on Einstein’s continuum,
while eternity sat still,
a frozen cathedral of yesterdays and tomorrows,
and consciousness crawled like a late traveler
arriving after the train had left the station,

who proclaimed the glory of immediacy,
yet lived as permanent archivists of the just-expired,
every heartbeat a recording, every breath a playback,
the miracle of now revealed as a lie,
the truth a perpetual then,

then, then, then —
the mantra of delayed existence,
the psalm of beings forever chasing the present
through corridors of expired light.–

Howl of the Perpetual Then

I saw the best moments of my generation vanish into lag,
wired nerves sparking after the fact,
eyeballs dragging photons from stars already dead,
voices echoing from mouths closed a half-second ago,
“now” collapsing into replay like a tape spooling backward,

who hallucinated immediacy while neurons delayed the parade,
who stitched milliseconds into banners and called them present,
who carried the corpse of the instant on their backs
and mistook its warm ghost for living time,

who rose screaming in midnight cities,
demanding the truth of a razor-edge now,
only to find it dissolved into smears of then,
electrical shadows stumbling across axons,
a flickering cinema screen where the projector
was always a frame behind the reel,

who danced at the edge of spacetime blocks,
cursor-minds scratching graffiti on Einstein’s continuum,
while eternity sat still,
a frozen cathedral of yesterdays and tomorrows,
and consciousness crawled like a late traveler
arriving after the train had left the station,

who proclaimed the glory of immediacy,
yet lived as permanent archivists of the just-expired,
every heartbeat a recording, every breath a playback,
the miracle of now revealed as a lie,
the truth a perpetual then,

then, then, then —
the mantra of delayed existence,
the psalm of beings forever chasing the present
through corridors of expired light.–