Time

Conceptually there was a time 
when time wasn’t.
It took tents to articulate tense.

The quiz is what was and what isn’t
and how we know
since time carries all things away.

It may be what’s said that I said 
I didn’t  say,
but was somehow by someone misremembered 
or perhaps made up.

The past is tricky and the future even more so,
since neither one exists
as entities in themselves. 

Time requires a conscious mind. 

Events may be predicted and recorded, 
and they do and did exist,
but time itself remains a concept undefined.

All perspective is a function of “now”
and requires thought 
which requires a conscious mind:

and that’s the problem: 
Time does not exist of itself, 
except perhaps as a puzzle for a self-reflective mind. 

Absent conscious awareness of being,

there is no time:
no past and, accordingly, no future.

And what is mind except a concept created 
apart from time
by a conscious self-reflective brain?

So the question is: What is real? And how is reality defined?
What is the nature of ideas? 
And what, in reality, is fact?