Rememberator 2000 (c)

This is a poem about time travel

I mean:

This will be a poem about time travel

Or rather:

This was a poem about time travel

More precisely:

This has been a poem about time travel

Without being overly technical, I would say:

This was now going to already have always been a poem about time travel. Yet.

Now I come to think about it:

This is more than a poem about time travel - this is a time-travel machine do-it-yourself starter’s kit - a time-travel machine called the REMEMBERATOR 2000.

This poem is a time machine hurtling us towards the future at the vertiginous speed of one second per second.

This poem is a time machine that can use dramatic pauses and prolonged silences to …

slow …

down ...

time.

This poem is a-time-machine-that-speeds-up-time-by-stringing-words-together-with-hyphens-into-sentences-verses-and-stanza’s.

This poem is a time machine that can fold the past on the future, like an origami - and we are hiking together on the mountain and valley creases of this paper-thin present.

This poem is a time machine that can peer into pasts and futures - a window with double glazing I install in the concrete and naked walls of the prison of the present, and from where I can look back at my few past successes or look ahead at the incalculable amount of mistakes I still could make. It’s like the wind-shield of the Delorean, the porthole of the Tardis, the bubble of the hot tub.

This poem is a time machine that cannot rewrite the past - but it won’t stop me from trying - I’m just not a first-draft kinda person.

_________________

I look back at the time traveler convention of 8th May 2005 - held at MIT in Cambridge at 10PM local time - which I am sure I will have attended in the future.

I stand still at the moment when I’ll swat a butterfly inadvertently causing the third World War of 2027-2042. Sorry for that.

I remember the time when my friend and I used to play in the wasteland where now stand anonymous apartment blocks and I can look ahead to the time when our children will play in anonymous apartment blocks where there will eventually lie a wasteland.

I can see my mother understanding less and less of the world and her son.

I can look back at my daughter this morning squinting and peering into the infinity of possibilities she held, like a baby bird which fell from its nest, in her delicately clasped hands - or were those hands praying?

I can see my father building a hut.

I can regret all the words I didn’t utter, all the silences I didn’t keep and put them in an Excel spreadsheet.

I can look back to the things, places and people, like this poem, this room and you, that I, unknowingly at the time, had seen for the last time.

I travel to now.

I can look into the moment when I’ll finish this poem on Substack on the 5th of June 2026 knowing perfectly well time doesn’t actually exist and causing a paradox in the temporal continuum.

I expect my future self - let’s call him Future Philippe - to come bursting through the door of this room I’m in screaming and pleading: “Don’t do it, don’t publish the poem about time travel, it will cause a tear in the fabric of the space-time!”

According to my calculations and my imaginary watch he should arrive in less than 30 seconds. That leaves us just enough time.

Because, man, fuck past and future Philippes.

And fuck the fabric of space and time. Enjoy it while it lasts, folks. Where we’re going, we don’t need space and time. Or roads.

Start up the REMEMBERATOR 2000. Meaningless and infinite void, here we come!

This always was, presently is and forever will be a poem about time travel.