By-Matthew F. Blowers III

I stumbled on a time machine

that could only visit futures

its buttons for the past were broke

by another klutzy user

who probably got eaten by

some raptors on a tear

or wound up with some ancient tribe'

minus his scalp and hair

It was hidden in a shallow cave

emitting a weak signal

on an mountain uninhabited

the controls looked rather simple,

So I set the dials to take me too

a place no one had been

at least within my present time

to the year marked 3010

My flesh evaporated

all my brain waves were truncated

into microscopic particles

that were encapsulated

in a basketball sized silver orb

inside it's shell I waited

to reach the time I'd slated

where I'd be reanimated

I woke up in that same place

in that cavern's shallow cleft

next to that cobwebbed time machine

that future folks had left

Then I heard an awful wailing

and the sounds of flesh limbs scaling

up the rocks to where I' d landed

and I knew I should be bailing.

but my curiosity of course

it got the best of me

so I peeked around the cave

and saw a monstrous human sea.

stretching miles across the earth

to every viewed horizon

its victims of some holocaust

got wind of my arriving

pipe cleaner thin their arms and legs

attached to bellies bloated

crawled up to find salvation

but the screams that they emoted

stood all the hairs up on my neck

before they took my time machine

and lef me out, not in it.

Starvation had emasculated

their overpopulation

and left an earth without an inch

Their faces filled with rage to see

of space for their stagnation

my healthier condition

demanded to know how I came

to view their perdition

bony fingers clawed against my feet

with no time left to spare.

so I set the dials for yesterday

and quickly fled from there

My silver sphere was kicked as it

flew from their histories pages

and it jiggled all the settings made

and changed my time zone gauges

I wound up in that mountain pass

near my spheres terrible crash

in the same damn place that I had left

with in that shallow cleft

back in 1847 with a group of pioneers

all looking at me weird

with a very hungry leer

My time machine was broken

and I had no way to flee

and the Donner party

soon would make

a fine meal out of me..

So if you find a time machine

remember my cruel fate

then bury it beneath some rocks

and don't dare activate

what very well could be the end

OF ALL YOUR FUTURE DATES