Poem: Wish Fulfillment


Wish Fulfillment

If I were asked what I would do
with enough money
for whatever it is
I would conceive,
I can tell you my answer:

building the town of lost times.

It would be a large town,
a bustling place
of houses and businesses,
where people
could live and work, but

each place would be of an era.

Every building would be
from some particular time
and place, a farmhouse
from 16th century Dijon,
a post office from colonial New York.

Recreations, inside and out.

Imagine: a midcentury modern house
like Rock Hudson had
whenever he was on screen with Doris Day.
Modular wooden furnishings, shag
carpets, even a vintage radio:

the whole of a place as if taken from another time.

The neighborhoods would be
arranged like normal neighborhoods
in a town, not by era or geographia,
but in commercial and residential,
low rent and high.

All the times jumbled up across the land.

I would build it and wander,
visiting the past, as close as I can get
to my own TARDIS.  I’ld go from house
to house, shop to shop, see a cave home
then it’s neighbors from the 11th century:

hop through time like a tourist.

It wouldn’t be worth it,
of course, hiring all those
actors (no one wants to live
like a serf, or even a lord, if it is from the 800s).
Spend all that money on such a thing

knowing that wasn’t really the past and you still weren’t in it.




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