THE IDIOT

“Isn’t that…”
I asked myself
“Dostoevsky?”

he and I
flâneuring
about Haymarket

“Hey Dosty
my main man
is that really you?”

and yeah
it really was
the great man himself

it was early July
1862-ish so
he was startled

to be hailed
by a voice from
a century not his own

and also that
he could understand me
and I he

I told him
I had my time machine
parked just around the corner

that it had a language decoder
that came with it
as an extra feature

“I didn’t know you
were in London?”
said he was just passing through

“Hey man…just been reading
your ‘Idiot’ as it happens
and no you wouldn’t know it

‘cos you haven’t
written it
as yet!”

asked him to come
for a drink in The Marquis
might even bump into Charlie

“You mean… Dickens?”
“Huh huh…” I said
“…he sometimes hangs out there!”

said I’d teach him
How to drink a Guinness
In 15 seconds flat

that convinced him
but of all the rotten luck
Charlie never turned up

probably out
on one of his
endless midnight walks

he said he had to
go see his friend
Herzen

“Hear now
permit it
do not restrain me!”

I let him go
making my own excuses
parking is up on my time machine

“English girls
are something else!”
he smirked

“Yeah…” I answered
“…married one
myself!”

“I have me
a keepsake
of their faces.”

then he vanished
into the fog
a real pea-souper

should have asked him
to sign my copy of
“Crime and Punishment.”

but of course
he hadn’t wrote
that one yet either

“Ahh hell!” I stuttered
”My time machine’s
got a parking ticket!”  

*

“I almost do not exist now and I know it; God knows what lives in me in place of me.”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot