Time travel is a discipline without redemption
And mercy is unknown. Most travellers through time
Were kidnapped as children and taught to devote their attention
To the cultivation of self-restraint and perfect rhyme.
Swordsmanship, music and astronomy
Prepare them to kill without conscience on their journeys
And bouts of violent, nonconsensual sodomy
Encourage murderous rage at their academic tourneys.
On Graduation Day at The Academy of Time,
The Principal performs The Ritual of Deadly Violence
And inflicts catastrophic damage on every graduand prime.
Reconstruction would exceed by far the competence
Of the greatest surgeons and exceed the promise of their art:
Severed limbs, bloody trenches too wide to suture,
Organs hacked from their fatty beds, private parts
Torn off, eyes crushed. Students must seek surgeons in
the future
To restore their physical integrity; they gather up as best
They can what they have lost and make for the back of the hall,
Where time machines stand ready to transport them. Each guest
Who steps aside to let them pass can recall,
Or imagine, his own first journey – not gliding across time,
But picking through broken meat, searching cold pools
Of blood for fragments of himself; the human stink, the grime,
The well-wishers on all sides, the smiles of ghouls.
It takes necessary years to recover from the violence
Of the ritual. Any student traveller who chooses
To return before he’s regained the cosmetic excellence
Required to graduate from The Academy of Time loses
His eyes. Good students remount their machines and set the dial
To return at the moment of their hideous departure.
The illusion of instant restoration makes the Principal smile;
His hapless guests stamp and blight the air with laughter.