Killing Time Poem by Percy Dovetonsils

In the beginning, there was all the time in the world. Time was undefined, and swirled in a senseless chaos, indistinguishable from space.

Then God said, “Let there be light, ” and the light was the sun and the moon and the stars. The sun marked out the days, and the moon the months, and the stars the seasons and the years and the millennia.

Prehistoric time took many forms: There were geologic time and maritime, airtime, planttime, and animaltime. Of course, all those general divisions of time were subdivisible. For example, animaltime included time for vertebrates and time for invertebrates. Invertebrate time include time for mollusks and time for arthropods. Arthropod time include time for crustacea, and crustacean time had time for crabs but no time for clams, clamtime being included in the kinds of time passed by mollusks.

But certain characteristics were true of all kinds of prehistoric time: It was free time; it was neither good time nor bad time. Each moment was equally full. Prehistoric time was never empty. Neither was it wasted.

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And along came history man. Self-conscious man. Time-conscious man.

He began to domesticate time, even enslave it. He trapped it with sundials and water clocks and grandfather clocks.

He marked it off with star charts and calibrations and chronometers and calendars.

He exploited it and used it and abused it and polluted it, and it was no longer true that all time ran as free as the wind. Trillions of hours were pressed into man’s service, were regimented and make to march in lockstep.

Seconds and hours and minutes were made more and more uniform, were crafted to tolerances so fine that they seemed identical to all but the most perceptive minds.

No two pieces of time, no matter how short or long, no matter how fast or slow, had ever been identical before. But man sought to make separate seconds interchangeable parts in order to facilitate the mass production of minutes.

To give man his due, there was a single instance in which he improved on time.

He froze it, time which had always flowed, and then shattered it like ice and cut the icetime into gorgeous, multi-faceted jewels which could be preserved indefinitely. These jewels, called paintings and movies and books and songs, enriched the moments they memorialized, illuminating them for all time.

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Plenty of time continued to roam free. There were tigertime, and dreamtime, and wormtime, and birdtime, to name but a few.

All the time of all mankind was not yet enslaved.

Some men still passed a great deal of freetime, while the time of others was completely tied up, every second.

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But the trend was toward totalitarian time, corporate time, planned time, slavetime, and away from freetime, wildtime, surprisetime.

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Man bred the seconds and minutes and hours to suit his needs. He cloned them and imprisoned them in enclosed spaces called factories and schools and institutes which were always equally illuminated. They had artificial suns and stars and moons called fluorescent and incandescent lights, and these lights shined day and night, so that many of the finest nuances of time were erased. Daytime and nighttime disappeared in these enclosures, as did morning and evening and noon and afternoon, not to mention twilight and dusk.

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Still, great schools of wild minutes and hours coursed through the seas, and herds of time thundered across the savannahs of Africa, and flocks of birdtime followed their ceaseless migratory cycles.

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There were men who wanted to conserve these varieties of freetime forever, but their voices were not as strong as those of the men who wanted to subjugate time.

“It’s important, increasingly important, ” said the conservationists, “for people to see what a wildtime is really like. Without wilderness preserves, the few untamed times which remain are doomed. Caribou hours and redwood centuries don’t have a chance against advancing technology unless the technologists choose to give them a chance.”

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But the totalitarian technologists just laughed. They did not want people to have a whale of a time-better such lifetimes be exterminated altogether. They didn’t WANT citizens to see examples of time being spent freely because they knew that wild seconds could grow to wild hours and wild years and that manhours spent too freely would engender that most dangerous and subversive of creatures, the free man, who advocates freedom for all time.

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Therefore the technologists devised pathetic re-creations of wildtimes, and called them amusement parks. Within the amusement parks were areas called Adventureland, and Fantasyland, and Frontierland, but none of the time spent in Adventureland was adventurous, nor was Fantasyland fantastic, and Frontierland was anything but a frontier.

All these places were controlled environments where one person’s time was spent exactly like another’s. In these environments seasons were not important, weather was not important, sunrise and sunset were not important. The only thing which was important was the ability to pay in order to pass more predictable time in the controlled environments.

And the only way to pay was to make money in other controlled environments, the factories and schools and office buildings and shopping centers and eataterias.

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So it came to pass that almost all time was homogenized. Time became money, which is countable, one dollar being exactly like another. Therefore one minute, or hour, became exactly like another.

And there was no longer tigertime, because the only surviving tigers were in zoos. They were trapped, and circled round and round their cages, chasing their own tails, and all their days and years became identical.

The greatest, most magnificent examples of wildtimes disappeared first: Of course, the wild millennia had long since become extinct. And the wild century disappeared around 1850. The last wild decades held out in Siberia, the Amazon, and the Congo until 1955. Then they were no more.

The last wild year was spent by a Hottentot in Angola in 1978.

It is estimated that the last wild month will disappear by 2006. There are still wild months being passed in remote areas of the Himalayas, but they are so reduced in number that they can no longer find mates, so they cannot reproduce themselves.

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It seems to the more complacent of us as if there are still plenty of free hours and minutes and seconds upon the earth, but this impression is misleading.

The balance of natural time has already been so grotesquely upset that precious little time of any kind, controlled or uncontrolled, remains for mankind to while away.

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That is why this writer urges each of you to savor every free second, and even fraction of a second, which remains to you. They are in more limited supply than you may imagine.