"Don't You Know"

…that once upon a time

was time enough for us,

back in the day

when clocks were all beside

the point, yet there were only clocks

to tell and toll the time, the toil

of hours before a cell became the foil…

…that memory is the rosebud

of our history as we downslide

in helpless thrall through drifts

of time, image as miniature as heads

of pins, the re-collection of

the coinage of our realm, and we

the hapless, helpless hopeless royalty.

….that youth is frittered away on itself

by the young, the music of the spheres

a scrannel screech across the thin fabric

of living from time to time, in ever smaller increments,

love and faith and fear and trust like spools

of thread all interwoven with each other….

…that dreams are links along a chain

encircling the world as it might be,

each dream a capsule to be swallowed,

a code to be deciphered, a cryptic key

that might unlock the only door

you ever dreamed of entering,

love the will-of-the-wisp we follow

like footsteps in the sand….

Dan Pettee, a native New Englander, currently operates his own freelance writing business. He’s had poems published in a wide range of journals including Chicago Review, Texas Review, Amherst Review, Descant, Negative Capability, and Cape Rock Journal.