The Reinvention of Time Travel

Viewers

The pretexts and purposes of travel

are wealth, survival and wonders to marvel.

But we have to baulk at transport in time

while the great “Space Age” – like ice skaters, slime

molds and slate - skim on thin margins, and I’m

glazing stained memories salvaged from grime?

The Traveller proposes to use memories
of his life to journey backwards in time –
though reliability could be an issue.

A warning from history

Our pasts and futures are tales of what’s known

about us – choices made and what we’ve done,

ancestors, descendants, those we’ve called friend,

the places we’ve been, where we plan to end.

We can log and manage our connections

centuries before there are conceptions:

no other saga, record, bulletin

can rival our internal time machine.

Technology will always be suspect;

but, say my ship is all I recollect

and reconstruct, and I sail life backwards

till it docks at wharfs of still-life waxworks

that capture scraps of real-world history?

The hitch? This inverse chronicle could be

impartial and true, or just about me… 

 But it’s clear the passive

 viewer won’t get far

Viewers 1: Play stationery

My camera and phone record and recall my moves

my telescope spies on the other side of night

my microscope picks at matter, lets in light

I see people who no one knows or loves

share secrets with those who don’t care

and my avatar acts as it likes with theirs.

The music of Caliban and Ariel fills the air;

dangerous truths spoken in ancient Greece

use the same “play” switch as jokes about cheese.

I have no need to imagine disintegrating stars,

or cities, or lives – their cries assault me in bars.

I watch those protecting me spy and cower

in bunkers of privilege and power

everything flows to my door – I’m safe behind walls.

Yet while I control space-time with my toys

there’s no room in lifetimes to use them all.

I’ve no need to move: I’m helpless with joy.

Viewers 2: Relative distants

I never found that churchyard or the tombs

where generations of my family

parade their ages and their fading names

in the photo that somehow came to me.

But they must have known staying in one place

for long would leach into geography,        

then nowhere else they strayed was this erased

by casual lies or casuistry.

Paralysis offends the traveller’s view,

but standing still’s the safe way to look back;

while visitors are always passing through,

context and correlation’s what they lack.

Meanwhile, our moment has already passed:

entanglement’s the lesson we learn last.

Viewer 3: Landmarks

Twin Towers fell as Lakelands flaked with dread

and Lennon’s bullets burst a sleeping head.

Kennedy sat by the fire as he died.

But music sparkled diamonds in the sky

that earliest of good morning mornings

the day that Pepper fixed the whole within.

You don’t always need to move to be moved

or young to keep the stupefying new.

Viewers 4: Time machines

The windfarm miles away is whiling time,

walking with clouds, questioning, widening

our view: it wins, and whisks us back across

the interwoven wilderness of woods,

wild hills and winter barley; breathlessly

it greets the warming westerlies – the source

of its whip and wheel and the power it wields.

Some warn its one-way whispering blades will swipe

away the warp and weft of ancient landscapes,

and yet its twisted wistful swirl may wave

farewell at waste and a squandered wounded past.

It’s willing us to wake, to be weaned and free,

and now to be whorled like twine and slowly wound

forward in time where meandering winds

weigh the sweep of these welcoming arms,

winnowing wealth and wisdom from nothing –

from air – while its blades wear zeros in the sky. 

Your information doesn’t correlate;

can you produce your birth certificate,”

enquires a man who represents the state.

“If not it would appear you left too late.”

2. Sightseers »