Cats can see the shadows in the flat
of the people who nearly moved in instead of you,
who are putters up of posters of the Zanzibarian Moon Landings
or breeders of chattering bonsai dinosaurs
or campaigners for the legalisation of alcohol whose proposals
got left in the taxi last night (again),
who are fans of Janis Joplin's late nineties collaboration
with Portishead, though they also claim
that pop music in general never really recovered from
Sid Vicious's born again Christian phase in the early eighties,
at least not in this parallel.

Come Quick!
The Aztecs are here in their steam-powered airships,
we must tell the Caesar!
Quick!
President Scargill lies slain,
slumped at the wheel of his Leyland Philby!

Every choice had the other alternative,
a shadow world where the battle went the other way
and anyway why do we base our currency on sea shells?
No wonder the Arch-Shaman of Canterbury
refuses to join the Single European Conch.

You see, I've been around the quantumverse
and I've seen all kinds of
audiences but never one like you
except obviously that alternate version of you
in a world where you're only slightly different,

the one where an Aegean tidal wave drowned Midas
and Croesus and Lydia and the very idea of money at its birth
like a sackfull of kittens;

the one where we hold these truths to be self-evident
that all men are created equal
and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights
and that among these are life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness
and the common ownership of land;

the one where Jesus spake before the multitude saying
“Come on unto me and have a go
if thou thinkst thou art hard enough”;

the one where Will Holloway
is a little-known pub poet.

I can't get enough parallel universes
so it's lucky that some interpretations of quantum mechanics
predict an infinite number,
at least they do in this parallel.

Parallel universe novels are always disappointing.
I don't really care how Wat Tyler outwitted King Richard,
I want to know where we'd be now
600 years after the Peasant's Revolution
loading up the giftships to potlatch with the Iroquois,

because history could've all happened differently.
There's nothing specially inevitable
about the world we've actually got.

I'm going to be a time tunnel refugee.
All I'm taking with me is a globe and a bottle of tippex.
But when I finally get through, I'll probably find
that Thomas Cook's have got there first,
that temporal tour-guides are golfing
at the foot of Pope Galileo's column,
that proliferating franchises
are making all the universes so indistinguishable
that these days only cats
can tell the difference.

© 2005