The Reinvention of Time Travel

Sightseers

Isn’t travel just another confection –

one more chance for candid self-reflection,

a trek you need collecting recollections?

The Traveller can’t

feel secure at home

… Why me? 1.

There’s a nagging that the years can’t budge:

a kitchen appliance has me on edge.

It’s got it in for me, this fridge.

I needed somewhere cool for my stash

of precious beer and my pizza cache,

a place to keep my rashers

 and my burgers fresh,

So when Amazon said they’d fetch

one free if I agreed to sign their pledge

I placed an order in a flash

for a six-foot US fully-fledged

and gadget-rich robotic freezer-fridge.

Now it seems the unabridged

and rigid contract terms allege

in small print it has the right to dredge

the contents of my fridge and garage

and turn my data into public knowledge.

The schedule says this privileged

insightful white good went to college

to specialise in me and be a snitch:

it lets my doctors check for roughage

and whether I’ve been eating spinach

and the other substitutes for silage;

  it helps insurers read my mileage,

brain waves, pulse  and metabolic age,

and uploads webcasts of my sandwich fetish.

What I need’s a place to forage,

not oranges to stick in porridge,

not some fancy yoghurt crèche.

I can do without a hedge

against the rising price of veg,

 and fish and kedgeree and lettuce.

Yet my electric itch can’t languish:

it’s refreshed, encouraged by my anguish,

 since it acquired the power of language,

specifically a grim off-handish

languid Antipodean English.

Now if it detects I bear a grudge

for its insistence I should ditch

the mayonnaise and cheesy wedge

or for the ban which

it’s imposed on any flesh

or dairy sandwich

it gives a snidish verbal nudge

and the bloody door won’t budge.

My wish is to end the data spillage

and the systematic theft and pillage

of my life by this once and future fridge;

I detect one more unexpected glitch –

this fridge, this bimetallic witch,

 was made without an on-off switch.

So why? Why should I become its bitch?

Why me? Why wasn’t I born data-rich?

and the view outside is

static and fragmentary

Sightseers 1: Small change

Out in woods, winter plays an unwelcome

relative visiting with heavy bags.

A holly bush fights the strangling heave

of ivy; storms wrestle it gust by gust

to the ground, still shining sharply evergreen.

The entrails of unrooted trees flail in weak

sunlight that types gold back-slashes in among

blanks of trunks, leaving earth badgered and barred.

Slight shadows burst and dart across beech mast

like tiny creatures startled by leaf fall;

long-browned burdock burs splinter and strip,

watermint melts to chewing gum and tar,

and unsprung fern fronds slacken, whiten, slump.

The season presses down; dead matter soaks

and crusts the needled floor, crushed and crumpled;

in its dark colon, everything succumbs,

and fingers of orange fungi thumb through.

Amid the waste one might almost make out

in genius the Vicar of Selbourne

moving like an hour hand as he measures

something exquisite, indiscernible.

With life stalled and oblivious to spring,

there is submission as the woodlands cringe:

compulsion suffuses the base of things.

Sightseers 2: Mosaics

Mosaics at Caerleon, Rhodes, Florence

bloom with uncommon flowers, white, gold, bronze;

Crete secretes my shell in an old hotel.

An unpaid apologist for Castro shakes

my hand, we wish the Revolution well.

By air the swell in Pearl Harbour provokes

conflicting thoughts of Paradise and Hell;

a city burns bright beneath Telegraph Hill.

When travel is our greatest thrill so far

it’s place, not time, that makes us what we are.

Wide-angle views are the only losses

in Christchurch, Paphos, Pompeii and Knossos.

Indignities that squeezed through body scans

are tenderised in slideshow loops of sands

and sunshine on unending agendas

for as long as anyone remembers.

None of us believes in gods any more:

we seek security in package tours,

and ways to comprehensively insure.

Is no one suspicious that these guidebook

platitudes flatter how old buildings look

but are stone to quaking screams when they shook?

We shadow every visitor who’s stayed:

standing closer could fill the gaps with shade.

Sightseers 3: Beddgelert

A Snowdon village gets busy in June.

Its slick of trippers licking ice creams drift

from picnic tables into fields, dogs splash

across the stream that slobbers remorselessly

between green stone walls and twee cottages.

The river bridge jams on a tourist bus;

but nothing, not even the glistening light

and jet of running water’s in a rush.

Encroaching marshland clips the car park.

Rhododendrons worry a football pitch,

and abandoned railway relics falter

in halted parapets and overgrown

embankments. The broken line of arches gapes

like a mouth missing teeth that calls out “stop”.

Unlike visitors, people who live here

need no reminders they’re going nowhere.

Sightseers 4: Destinations

Letham Speke and Chatham up in Mumbles –

Stonehenge to Penistone, then Buckler’s Hard –

Wye, Ryde, Horse Down for Buckingham, Tumble,

After Ladbroke Towcester, Breadsall Chard.

Gazetteer destinations waste loose lives

while seagulls seize on ice creams in St Ives.

Bognor to Bangor, cycle to Staines,

Hartland to Headstone, Lovelost in the lanes.

Corsham to Cosham, Fareham to Farnham,

starting at Cookham you’re bound to Burnham.

Dungeness frees us, and nothing caps Lydd;

Windscale lost Sellafield while Lands End hid.

Go Glasgow, go Edinbro’: they create

exactly the space that fits the M8,

yet despite its superior length and reach

the A38 never gets to the beach.

I’ve mocked Loch Ness and magicked Tintagel,

fled Leeds and Aberdeen feeling fragile,

stomped mapless and damp like flat lemonade,

but never found Stanhope or Ben Hope to fade:

Random destinations, almanac lives,

are routes to ensure that no one arrives.

Sightseers taking snapshots in the sun,

need evidence to show they’re having fun. 

“Pictures please,” sniffs the border guard

whose baton and uniform say he’s scarred.

“Wherever you’ve been, re-entry is barred

unless you post me a photo or card.”

3. Visitors »