“I can see you want to,” says Miss Polkinghorne.
And I do. I smile as I hold open the pages of my Early Reader.
Which is when it happens: ‘Janet can run and John can too,’
But I myself am pinned to the desk by the photographer’s flash.
And I see the sign:
-Last black hole for 20 billion light years-
Wow!
I throw the book into my spaceship’s airlock,
Press eject, watch my childhood disappear over the event horizon.
And engage hyperdrive.
I’m five-years-old.
Goodbye Janet, goodbye John,
See me, see me, see me run,
I wonder how a five-year-old can read and fly a spaceship.
One day we will know,
In the meantime, on and on and off we go.
At eighteen, it has become obvious to me that time is not linear:
From my bubble-topped intergalacticar I can see both past and future.
They lay before me like an unfurled map of everything,
Which is how I‘m able to read the previously mentioned sign.
I have, on several occasions, been waved down on the intergalactic highway
By someone I believe to be Miss Polkinghorne.
I hadn’t stopped, “I could see you wanted to,” she would have said,
Then she’d have asked me where I was going
And I wouldn’t have known,
At twenty-five, I arrive.
As advertised, it’s a world without end.
At thirty-six, or thereabouts, I discover the Instantaneous Transfer of Matter:
Cataphlatrix Six appears suddenly in the co-pilot’s seat and wonderful she is.
However, our love-making organs don’t conjoin as well or as often as I would like
And there are other issues, (steering wheel matters).
Soon our happiness is in tatters and she begins to not-so-instantaneously fade away.
“Given you can see into the future, this must come as no surprise,” she gurgles
And is gone
Before I can tell her of the parallel universe I was counting on,
The one in which we were to live happily-ever-after as dad and mum
To a little Janet and a little John
But on and on I run.
Happy birthday to me, I’m one hundred-and-three.
The leak in the airlock blows out the candle.
By the time I turn a thousand, the gift of foresight has lost its appeal,
Every day the same surprise, and I switch off the engine.
Then I see this new black hole and realise how far I’ve come.
I pop on through.
There’s nothing here but perfect peace
And my old Janet and John book.
Which must have wormholed its way through time and space.
Look. Look. They both can run.
Good luck Janet,
Good luck John,
On and on and on and on.
Perhaps at my old school they’ve still not solved
The mystery of the boy who disappeared.
And yet I was an open book
So I’d be surprised,
Surely someone saw the faraway look in my eyes.
