The Time Machine

 

Two strange and shriveled white flowers
in his coat pocket are all that remain.
Drawn by the mystery of the earth’s fate
and speculating the destiny of our race
the Time Traveller departed
on the plane of his Fourth Dimension
   and vanished like a phantasm into time,
never to return.

I sit in his laboratory and ponder.
Was he swallowed by some Cretaceous sea?
Or devoured by a Jurassic monstrosity,
perhaps an Ichyosaurus?
Had he escaped our time of weak experiments,
fragmentary theory, and mutual discord
only to spin to a futuristic end
to witness the spectacle
of the last planetary eclipse
of earth's fading sun
while hungry giant crustaceans
   tickled his cheek from behind
with their antennae?

 

    

 

His curiosity was alive with appetite.
Did he venture into the future
to see a perpetual twilight
and the end of the earth? 
   -An earth that had long since stopped spinning
and was slowly falling back into the sun...

Or was he back with his lovely Weena
and the nightmare of the bleached,
   nocturnal things,
those human rats, known as Morlocks?

 

  

 

ah, Weena,    
...It was a time when the intellect of man
     waned from a lack of necessity-
     the result of a utopian society
     where change, challenge, and trouble
     did not exist to stimulate the mind,
     where habit and instinct
     were sufficient for survival.
        It was where he found himself
     without arms, without medicine,
     without Kodak...

    

 

This is the fate of a dreamer
obsessed with traveling through time.

Taken from his own words,

  “Expound a recondite matter of fecundity
  free of the trammels of precision 
  on mathematical planes
  and controverting a geometric misconception
  upon a cube that has length, width, and height,
  but does not exist beyond our introspective state
  without the added dimension of time.”

So he discovered how to travel 
   along such a fourth dimension
as easily as the other three...

      

Such are the dangers of thought.
Is his story believable?
Thought plausible this evening,
   it is better left to be tested
by the common sense of the next morning...

As you travel down the long, drafty corridor
and enter into the laboratory of the Time Traveller
you'll see the gleaming nickel bars, brass rails,
ebony, ivory, quartz crystals,
   and the saddle
of his unstable time machine,
but do not touch the levers!

You pull the lever  
...Night follows day like the flapping of wings,
   then merges into a continuous gray,
   the sun turns into a streak of fire,
   the machine slipping like a vapored haze
   through the interstices of intervening space
   all the while the risk of stopping,
      molecule by molecule
   into an object laying in your path
   and being blown into the Unknown...

   or, like our Time Traveller,
   discovering what remains of human tenderness
   in the far off future...
 
         

He brought back a story of the future:
ruinous splendor,
derelict remains of vast structures,
the whole earth had become a garden-
man, the harvest,
history, neglected and decomposing
amid the childlike inhabitants.
   No signs of struggle,
commerce had stopped,
a social paradise.

Yet fatally flawed.
No hardship or freedoms to cause vigor
in the capable, patient, and restrained
members of humanity.
He surmised how it happened-
   First energy and security,
then art and eroticism,
and finally languor and decay.

No workshops, no machinery, no appliances.

They played, bathed, made love, ate, slept.

Down in the subterranean depths below
   a faint odor of freshly shed blood rises from the shafts
as the new moon rises,
the sound of shuffling and the smell of fear
rides on the uneasy darkness
   of another night settling
over a strange twist in the fate of our descendents…