John Koethe

“ … Nineteen
Was nothing special and I wouldn’t want it back,
Yet sometimes when I think about the years to come

I see almost as many as the ones since then.
I feel a vague and incoherent fear, a fear
Of waking from time’s dream into an even stranger place,
As different from today as now is from nineteen,

Without a sense of where I am or where I’d been before –
Which is always here, in my imagination.”

- John Koethe, from “The Maquiladoras”