Time Traveler
In A World Without Time
The plane set down in 1957
A Friday morning on a cold wet day
Even though I had left the day before on a warm dry Sunday night
And the sun had been shining for four months in Spitsbergen.
I was rather sleepy, having not slept
For twenty-two minutes or so
And my yawns sounded somewhat musical
In a braying donkey kind of hee haw way.
Peter Cushing was starring in the movie
They'd been showing on board, I remembered
Some horrible thing called a horror movie
No, that's not right, it was a terrible film
And it was silent. (Except for all the snoring.)
As a matter of fact, there had been
No in-flight movie of any kind that night
Only a couple of Saturday Evening Posts
And Photo Play magazines, muchly thumbed through.
I hailed a Black and Purple taxicab
That took me to my hotel, some modernistic thing
Called The Holiday Out
Where no one with even half a reputation would stay.
There were hardly any doors to speak of
Only thin slits in the bricks to squeeze through
And after you'd lost ten pounds in the effort
You found yourself, confusingly, somewhere outside Marrakesh
In 1965.
65??? What? I hadn't even been born yet!
Or had I? My mother hadn't told me, you see
Any details about that happy occasion
Or if, indeed it had been happy or if it had even happened at all.
I just seemed to wake up one morning
And there I was. Yawning.
Wearing soft white pajamas with little giraffes on them
Mysteriously holding an orange object that could have been a ball.....
Or an orange.
But enough about me. I'm a boring subject
The really interesting people are all in there
(In the places you come out of when you realize
You're in the wrong place)
I've met a few characters in there, believe me!
The bi-polar clown, the man with no heart,
The invisible woman who could only be seen
In the glow of the full moon,
The song that sang itself.
I rode through the desert on a horse
With no.......
Name? Yeah, that's it. No name. Or saddle. Ouch!
Time travel can really be tiresome at times
Especially if you are travelling in the time before Time
Or before Timex watches
('Cause Grandfather Clocks were just too big to carry around.)
It's always 4:30 when there is no Time to be told
I forget who told me that. Oh, now I remember!
A chap in a porkpie hat selling pork pies in Trafalgar Square
He wore a bowtie and short pants but only one shoe
(Probably because he only had one leg)
Ah, yes! The porkpie guy. Rupert Something.
In between times, you can't laugh
No matter how funny something is,
You can only weep
Bizarre, really, but no more bizarre than most things
I've experienced on those invisible pathways.
There's a very tall building in one realm....get this....
With absolutely nothing in it but seesaws
And unadorned Christmas trees
Looking for presents to hover over.
But December never comes there
That month is totally skipped over
No December 25ths at all
You go directly from Thanksgiving turkey
To New Year's Day hangovers. Or thereabouts.
In one place, it was continually Halloween
And in another, it was always the day after tomorrow
Bankers in thousand dollar suits scrubbed floors
And poor people counted money.
I quite enjoyed that.........
(I was poor, you see)
I was always bloody poor
No matter what time period I ended up in
(And I was always looking for french fries.)
I fell in and out of love several times, I recall
But always with the same fellow, oddly enough
He, too, was a time traveler stuck in a rut
Between here and there and he always carried a Polaroid camera
Heaven knows where he got his film!
We spent three glorious weeks in a library once
Camped out in the stacks, perusing books of all kinds
Trying desperately to figure out
What the proverbial "Birds and the Bees" scenario was all about.
We had hitched a time warp back to that awkward age
When we were both going through and pushing past puberty
But without embarrassed parents to tell us
What it was that we needed to know but did not know
We found books with ghastly pictures that implied
That babies came from a boy/girl conjunction but we were dubious.
By the time we had figured it out and got caught doing it
We were kicked out of said library by a cross and startled librarian
Who appeared to be from a seventeenth century nunnery
Even though she was wearing a Fitbit and sole-less shoes.
Once, we had a mere fifteen minutes together
It was in Paris and we were drinking frozen wine
At some little outdoor café called Vin Congele´
(It was very romantic but it was January and twenty below.)
We never knew where we would run into one another
Or if we would or how or when or why
Time travel is a game of chance, a draw of the cards
And often not exactly a pleasant experience
If you haven't gotten over that quarrel during your last encounter.
The most bizarre I suppose, took place in 1849 in the wild Wild West
When I found myself coming out of a teepee clutching a tomahawk
While my love, a sexy and disheveled cowboy, lay staked down to an ant hill
Begging for mercy and a Bud Light.
I will not tell you how that turned out
Neither will I recount several centuries of incidents
That will either turn you against me
Or make you fall madly in love. Maybe both.
Oh, look! A squirrel!!!
Let's just say that the Earth looks pretty from Mars
And that there is one planet out there
Totally inhabited by women that look exactly like me
(Except they are blue and speak in a Swahili/Russian dialect
They giggle a lot and wear bikinis made entirely from their own hair.
Perhaps I should end this saga here, my faithful readers er.... reader
And take the tale up again when you have digested everything thus far
And wrapped your mind around the incongruity of it all
And when you are sober............or sane
©by Voo Shining Stone, Poet, Writer
And Involuntary Time Traveler
In the year 2020
(possibly)
(probably)
(They told me there would be a year like this
somewhere in the future) So yeah.....this must be the year
It's so 2020-ish
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