BOWIE: '--, '', . -- -- . . ..'
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I ran out of things to do

Because the day was over.

It was too late to do anything else

When I turned off the TV

So I did nothing but think.

I thought of what I wanted to do

And what I would do if . . .

And then I thought of what I have done.

And what I wish I had done

And what I didn't do.

I thought about my long day of doing

And I wished I could do it over.

My thoughts were running low.

There were only a few left.

It was late and I was slouching.

I thought of all the things I had to do

To get ready for bed.

I thought of lying in bed

After I had done everything,

How nice that would be.

I think that was my last thought

Before I brushed my teeth.

But while I was brushing my teeth

I had a whole different thought.

I was trying to remember

If I bookmarked where I left off reading

Before I turned off the light last night.

I thought I had.

And then I tried to remember what I read,

But I couldn't until after I flossed.

Then it came to me.

Dana had just returned

From her third time-journey

All beaten up and covered with mud.

She had just fought off a white man

Who was trying to rape her.

My thought was my hope

That she will get better at time traveling

As the book progresses.

But the problem with time travel is

You can't change anything

Because, as bad as things are,

You might make them worse

If you mess with the time-line.

And then I thought: Is that the problem?

Is that why things are so off,

So it's like we are living in a Bizarro comic?

Maybe we are all time-travelers

Who have forgotten that we have been here before

Probably countless times

And we have long forgotten the golden rule,

Don't change the time-line.

Too late.

What have we done?!

And then I remembered how I started this poem:

"I ran out of things to do

Because the day was over."

And then I remembered what I was for Halloween:

A burned out rockstar time-traveler.

And then I started wondering if some rockstars

Are time-travelers who

Have learned how to change the timeline

In their favor.

Might it be possible for David Bowie to come back again

And be even greater with less suffering?

I enjoyed that thought above all the thoughts I had that day

And decided then and there

During and after gargling,

That I would be a rockstar time-travaler again this Halloween.

Only with a better wig.

Gary Lindorff is a poet, writer, blogger and author of five nonfiction books, three collections of poetry, "Children to the Mountain", "The Last recurrent Dream" (Two Plum Press), "Conversations with Poetry (coauthored with Tom Cowan), and a memoir, "Finding Myself in Time: Facing the Music". Lindorff calls himself an activist poet, channeling his activism through poetic voice. He also writes with other voices in other poetic styles: ecstatic, experimental and performance and a new genre, sand-blasted poems where he randomly picks sentence fragments from books drawn from his library, lists them, divides them into stanzas and looks for patterns. Sand-blasted poems are meant to be performed aloud with musical accompaniment.


He is a practicing dream worker(with a strong, Jungian background) and a shamanic practitioner. His shamanic work is continually deepening his partnership with the land. This work can assume many forms, solo and communal, among them: prayer, vision questing, ritual sweating, and sharing stories by the fire. He is a born-pacifist and attempts to walk the path of non-violence believing that no war is necessary or inevitable.