The furthest I travelled from home – a poem

I suppose the furthest I went from home is when I went travelling on the intergalactic bus replacement service – that was a long imagined journey! I wrote a poem about it, believe it or not…

Time travellers on the intergalactic bus replacement service

The worst kind of time machine,

A replacement bus service of

Earth, water and carbon,

The decrepit engine splutters and spins

in decreasing circles,

Sucking existence into

A black hole traffic jam

It is volatile and thirsty,

Heavily burdened, oil slicked passengers

The sat nav doesn’t work,

Keeps dropping the signal,

No one is listening, blinkers on

headphones in,

disappearing like the landscape through glass

Apart from the moon, perhaps,

This planetary mechanic,

Sucking its briny teeth thoughtfully, gravity

Treading water between its cratered gums,

Estimating hefty bills

Version 2.0 may upgrade to a full

understanding of the universal map,

Navigating its route through

relative dimensions in space and time,

But without a reverse or forward gear,

It is admittedly a poor design flaw,

Overdue a service

With a top speed of one thousand miles per hour,

The wheels on the bus go round and round,

All day long, orbital,

Its core is molten violence,

hungry and explosive,

The moon bobs in the rear-view mirror,

wary of the fireball in its reflected hazard light

Mercury and Venus, embarrassed

Do not acknowledge us now,

Mars in passing gives a derisory nod

‘I was like you once’ it says,

Red faced

This machine is still turning over but is

battle damaged, mostly by meteors

broke the radiator, ice aged for millennia,

created an involuntary factory reset

The earth is a time machine,

But not like in the movies,

Broken down by the roadside,

Only the black box keeps a record

of everything that has happened

So far

More recently it has become infected

with a human rust,

For which there is no known cure,

you know how they get into everything

This amazing earth,

Heading for a planetary scrap heap,

It’s one last destination, like a bus replacement service

Is getting closer, limping onwards

Taking all its melted passengers with it

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