Broken Galaxies

Broken Galaxies is a zine series that features poetry, comics, illustrations, and prose with sci-fi and fantasy themes. The series is organized and produced by Vlasinda Productions.

I contributed a poem about time to Volume 1, Issue 3.

Here's the poem.

Artificial time

Astronauts floating around in space
as they go through their daily routine

Eating their rationed, regulated breakfast
Checking temperatures in the hydroponics lab
Making sure the telescope is snapping photos

Sometimes astronauts need a break
from floating
from weightlessness
that starts to feel like nothingness

So they turn on the artificial gravity field

And their feet touch down, stay down
For a little while they feel grounded.

Time travelers need that, too.

When you spend days in fast-forward and reverse–
Cyber future robot war
and medieval plague darkness–
Sometimes you need to rest
To stop running
To stop floating through the time stream

So they turn on the artificial temporal field

And they stay put
This city, this time
For a little while they feel grounded.

They find routine in artificial time.

Does that sound like a dream? Something we haven’t invented yet? 
A method to hold down time, and hold us to it, and let it pass.

Does that sound possible?

Because consider this:

Each year is counted by the Earth going once around the sun
Each month is counted by a set of moon phases
Each day is counted by the moon and sun, taking turns in the sky

But what about the week?

Seven days counted by…nothing. 
Weeks are man-made
Nature doesn’t determine how long a week is
We do.

Our weeks could be 4 days, 6 days, 9 days long
It doesn’t matter, really. But we chose 7.

Weeks are artificial to create routine, to hold us in place.
We control them
and we could change them.