He started it at seventeen
That most fantastic time machine,
Whose power to manipulate
The basic fabrics of our fate
Eradicates the Clock's control,
Who executes the midnight toll,
Whose hands have strangled man's ambition,
Whose sands designed decomposition,
Both talkative and taciturn
Now caged; the ravenous cuckoo bird,
And man, once puppet, now pilgrim, soars
O’er crystal skies and dusty shores
And Dimension's seas with waxen wings,
His fourth realm wrinkling like a string,
Testing theories in time traversed
Of history, life, the universe.
He finished it at forty-two
In subterranean solitude,
A pallid, daily de-livered mess
With faceless pictures on the desk,
So he sighed with earnest evanescence
And scuttled back to adolescence,
To own the life he would have seen
Without that hollow time machine.