I can see the future but it's not seeing and it's not the future
of spiritual worlds where music is the absence of evening news
chewing like a rat through a prison wall
a mole blind to the paintings of Van Gogh
we met by the river at Auvers-sur-Oise
but it's the future and portrait painting is obsolete
like filmmaking, video, or stoning the village witch to death
the collective spirit bound and gagged
locked in a basement of a house in flames
the sunflowers out in the fields ablaze
*Native of San Francisco, Jay Passer's work has been featured in print and online since 1988. His latest offering, My Part in the Works, is #19 in an e-chap series from Ten Pages Press.