Futures

Hope made us believe the things we believed about past futures.
Should we believe dreams born on a whisper’s strength?
Or on sorry portents?
Like the dead rat in the road, smack-bang in the middle,
Hope makes us credulous.
Makes us believe the fairy tales that are dreams of possible futures.
What we have is an atom-wide thread
Which ties us to our far-from-probable futures.
Our hopes are fired by things no more rational, and no less stupid,
Than the vain hopes of the stars in the papers.
Hopes fed to us by psychics who see futures as clear as stars.

I wait every day for the future, patiently, in both life and dream.
That hoped-for future that never comes.
It keeps its cool, sure place, in my endless distance.

Bring the future forward.
Bring what forward?
A time substituted by its own future.
Will future futures be the same as past futures?

Futures always arrive.
And nothing always happens.
Hope itself gives the content and spurs the dream
Of impossible futures.
Of every possible future our lives could take -
Like the branching of a tree.
Such better futures for ourselves.
We simply wait.
Like a widow waiting for her dead husband.
So we twiddle our thumbs instead of igniting the fire
Which could spread to a future we actually cause.
The futures we want will only be actual if today, right now, right here,
We set in motion things which last the time need, and lead the right way,
To reach these future states.
Better futures will not fall into our laps, like gifts from heaven.
We must make the future now.
If we fail, then futures will still arrive, as they always have,
But not the ones we wanted.