I have always had a problem with time.  I am pretty sure I have written extensively on this topic, the fact that I think time is exclusively a mental heuristic, and an extension of the fact that perception is an inherently linguistic exercise.

I have been finding lately I have a problem with verb tenses, especially in my poetic writing.  The English language doesn’t have as many expressive verb tenses as say, French, where there are so many verb tenses I thought I wanted to die trying to learn them all.  On the other hand French has a subtlety of orientation in time that mixes me up in English.  In “Jesus: A Cure for What Ails You,” I am stuck in this problem.  The tenses available to me are clumsy – it is hard to express the future-events-dependent conditional that I am trying to wrestle with, especially in the second and third stanzas.  French, by the way, has these things.

I am so tired of fighting with time.  This is just another one of those things.