THE TIME MACHINE
They, or we, will learn to stop time by studying time that has already been stopped. Even now, we, or they, are building the time machine. They are building it, or we are building it, out of the punctuation, the commas
and the periods, the pauses, and the full stops removed from the jagged sentences that they, or we, will stop themselves, or ourselves, from ever writing. As Monsieur Magritte once wrote, “I caused the iron bells
hanging from the necks of our admirable horses to sprout like dangerous plants at the edge of an abyss.” I, he said, and he was one of them, or one of us, who were building, even then, even now, the time machine from the silence
of those iron bells hanging from the necks of our horses, or their horses, from the silence of the sentences they had, or we had, already travelled in time, like dangerous plants at the edge of an abyss, to stop ourselves from ever writing.
Paul Vermeersch is a poet, multimedia artist, creative writing professor, and literary editor. He is the author of several poetry collections, including Shared Universe: New and Selected Poems 1995-2020. He has been a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the Trillium Book Award, among other honours. He holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Guelph for which he received the Governor General’s Gold Medal. He teaches in the Honours Bachelor of Creative Writing & Publishing program at Sheridan College where he is the editor-in-chief of The Ampersand Review of Writing & Publishing. He is also the senior editor of Wolsak and Wynn Publishers where he created the poetry and fiction imprint Buckrider Books. He lives in Toronto.