The Reinvention of Time Travel

Observers

We like to think our perspectives alter

while the people that we are don’t falter.

Doubts infect the

Traveller’s dreams

… Why me? 3

I dreamt last night I had a pet,

a cat that left me for a bet

it would get a better life on the internet.

“Is this normal?” I asked the vet.

A blind dog he’d known once took a jet

to be enlightened in Tibet;

yet this was a cat, he said, I’d best forget.

But to offset my loss, he thought I should get

an egret or an avocet –

advice which put me deep in debt.

Finally on every gruesome sad excuse

that social media produce

for animals and News

I cringed to announce my cat is loose.

Facebook returns unprovoked abuse

for my failure to induce

my cat to defer its cruise.

Instagram merely tries to amuse

with endless slews of cats in shoes,

and tabbies in tutus, Siamese in canoes,

and a tortoiseshell with its head in a noose.

YouTube has fewer felines to peruse.

Its messages are more diffuse:

green parakeets who’ve had the blues

Bruce the camel who’s fond of booze,

a mongoose and a Christmas goose

with onions stuffed up its caboose,

and countless other renegades from zoos.

A man called Noah says he’ll let me choose

spares after he’d extracted twos.

There’s a horse that moos, and moose that coos,

and a toad which on command exudes

an inky ooze which perfectly deludes

its prey and zoologists that it eludes.

The BBC brings balance to my news

with interviews with kangaroos

and cats whose owners they want to lose;

while The Daily Mail makes no excuse

for cancers caused by orange juice

and glues, and maybe anything that mews.

The Sun does its utmost to confuse

issues with views on who sues whose,

and The Times occludes with cryptic clues

whose meaning I could not adduce.

It’s a cause for terrible regret,

in spite of all the clueless shows of abject

love for every far from perfect online pet,

that not one answer shows respect

for my fret and upset when mine left.

So why did it pick on me to reject

and punish me with this neglect?

Why me? Why make me sweat?

Why has my cat not come back yet?

and memories of youth

and childhood only

raise more questions

Odds and ends

What are the odds that anyone lives

and credits this to Young Conservatives?

When your parents met not much was achieved,

till years later, Son, when you were conceived.

Observers 1: Coming of age

The city’s a slightly soiled museum

crusted with soot from dead men’s grates,

where learning goes on show in burnished cases

double-locked with keys, one old, one newer,

of unpriced intellect, calculated class.

Tom, you said it’s right to question theories,

fall in love with flowers, talk with fairies

and dream in emblems and cards.

We lighten Monday evenings with your tones,

accepting your terms of obsolescence,

wearing your status like some immense stone

that’s borne to a place of pre-eminence

by ageing acolytes of Cú Chulainn.

So did you, before you crumpled to a husk

of reputation, opt for imbalance in Ireland

since there was no safe choice? or is this

what happens when you drink with Yeats and Synge?

Everything once done is ordinary at last;

and we are locked in ordinary things

waiting or searching for that something strange

that would add texture, distance, depth and range.

Could it be those you taught or failed to teach

are lost still, never having been within reach?

Ideas and argument may run like beer,

with sex like a pastime, time like a spear;

but who grows the grain in the ivory tower

where poetry and privilege wield power?

Observers 2: Songs of Insolent Experience

After the undated cacophony

of childhood with its mindtricks and inventions,

the first draft of life was scripted and scrawled

by night on skimp disordered paper scraps

loosened on Maidenhythe’s scraggy Moor.

It could have ended then in chemistry,

mutilating friends with weedkiller bombs,

with penny pranks on the mainline to Wales,

or crazed discoveries of drink and speed.

How lucky everyone who ever lived,

and can remember, has also survived.

The same girls who passed us, we passed around

for drinks at The Thames, The Castle, The Bear,

the pubs to impress with poetry, wit,

and infinite futures drunk with promise,

sometimes two or three in a week, before

a snog and gasping fumble for their pants,

as sly humiliation groped us all.

These were tiresome exuberant years lost

in “experience”, with projects undone,

unrequited lusts, feigned wisdom in grossed-

out freedoms, indulgence and obsession.

There was a first real love, there always is:

but how mangled, how mystified were her teens

with me to witness simulated pain,

a Hamlet played on stage by Tamburlaine?

What kind of tolerance does someone need

to be manipulated by kindness

for serial danger and rejection?

What allows love and faith to be benign?

Shouldn’t she have seen that cruelty is crime?

Observers 3: Eating the placenta

When I could fly the town was no cocoon,

though only half the song is in the tune.

One night, two days, three lives to consume:

no one is sure of return from the Moon.

In Sixty-nine, if I’m right, everything

turned towards return; eighty after dark

and mirror lights might as well be galaxies

retreating; I’ve lost perspective to wind

and tyres, unshifted gears, the radio’s

inconsequence, everything real ahead.

I take straight lines even on country roads;

signs are other people’s destinations.

Half the night to get back from some outpost

of experience, to rediscover home,

light source, life preserver; half the night lost

in tunnels of air between two contraries.

A key turns a lock, a heavy door shuts

the darkness out; the quiet house warms and glows;

a clock is ticking regardless of time,

and nothing comes suddenly to an end.

Tonight is vanishing in the mirror

at speed, and someone else lies waiting, like me,

for another return; three days from now

pulses will race when some other distance

is evacuated at deadly speed;

my body feels weightless, still in motion.  

There’s no stopping this craft in its vacuum –

in hours I could be standing on the Moon.

Observers 4: Caesarian intersection

A cyclist coming back to Maidenhythe

has ridden all day, nowhere to nowhere

across the formless farm-flat Waltham Plain

heading for Chiltern edges and beechwood

remnants where birdsnest orchids used to grow .

Here in land squared by geometric fields,

at dusk beside a wooden crossroads sign

he meets a man who doesn’t dress like god,

but stands like a milestone solemn and still

with gravel features washed by faded light.

He speaks as if prepared by certainty:

“Maidenhythe lies before you,” he advised,

“Though god knows why you’d want to go that way”

The cyclist brakes to mark the time of day;

the crossroads man breaks too, in sudden

seismic rage. “Turn back, you fool. If you stay

you’ll forget how to regret. Everything

not left here willingly the town will take.”

Some long-brewed pain spites him to rave:

“You sparrow-minds test right by what looks right,

find good in what you’ve seen, not what you’ve made”

More than their meeting has brought him to this,

more than the sunset and buttercup cross,

more than the swoop of swallows or shadows

of telephone wires across bare earth fields.

Motionless, the two stand bound together

by evening birdsong and their encounter.

The cyclist eyes the other blighted man

who doesn’t dress like god or mouth god’s words.

His is the worthless wisdom of someone

with bones grown numb in a dumb waiter town

denouncing futures no one could foretell

of residents weaving chauvinist spells

inside their double-garaged gated cells,

downwind of turbaned neighbours’ curry smells. 

Two checkpoint soldiers smile and block my track,

deep in discussions to conclude a pact

which promises that neither will attack

if I don’t move on and I don’t turn back.

5. Explorers »