Monday, September 14, 2009 at 9:04pm
By Alma Anonas-Carpio

The timelines of life
Run colorful ribbons, threads of thought,
Throughout dreams of what if,
That game of chance that
Never ends the same way,
But stabs at the toughened heart
More surely than a murderer's icepick would.

We wove our lives with threads we chose,
Colored them with our decisions and perceptions.

"I had such a crush on you then,"
One would say to another over a decade later
And both would pause oh so slightly
To think of what would have happened
On the road not taken.

We fed the woof to the warp
Without too much thinking,
With way too much impulse.
We forgot to look at
The fabric of it until now.

"Ah, but I was too drunk/high/busy with
Someone else's body in the pool."
Yes, the actual road imposes itself
Black and solid and certain.
But those imagined moments remain:
Such tiny, sharp shards of fiction
That could well have become truth.

A warp here, shot with a woof there.
The shuttle darts back and forth too fast to see
To predict or stop. All we do is stay with it.

"We could have loved each other,
You and I, and what would the world have become?"
Ah, the questions raised
About the left-hand path
When the right is chosen and walked.
They come too many years after the fact
To be answered with any certainty or clarity.

Photographs shot by the imagination
Can document these streams of existence.
Songs sung by voices unheard
Will describe emotions unexperienced.
Dance can express the sensuality
That was never let loose.
Perhaps even black poet ink
Might scry that alternate universe.

How amusing now to think about, after a decade,
These moments of what-if and wherefore
And what-the-hell-happened?
Let's forget the regrets. They get us nowhere.
Somewhere there, curiosity stirs,
The brain whirs in an effort to process
Data that never was input.
The syntax error is inevitable
And our weaving loses some rhythm.
The shuttle pauses oh-so-slightly
As our minds wander and our hands falter.

We talk now of our lives as they grew
Organically from our choice
Of words not to say, options not to take
And things (or people) not to do.
Are we content? Perhaps. Perhaps not.
We will not know until we decide
Upon contentment or discontent.

But we are friends and we can wonder
Every now and then, when boredom sets in,
When old hurts ache and when new wounds
Are felt to the core and all we want
Is something to take our minds off
These things before us that really bug us
To the bone, to the soul, to the very core
That even God does not violate.

We are friends, woven of the same threads
But we are separate scarves, our fabric does not mesh.
But that is what makes us friends,
This distance of respect, the space of air
That enables our similitudes, our shared hues
To fly free like banners of self
On the winds where we soar.

There are no regrets.
We take up the threads again
And busy our hands once more.
We bring our eyes back forward.
There is a tomorrow yet on the loom.