One page, carefully chosen

The Time Machine

The Time Traveller describes accelerating beyond the ordinary pace of days and nights. The sun hops, darkness arrives like a wing, buildings rise with impossible speed, and a snail seems to race across the ground. H. G. Wells turns duration into visible movement, making familiar measures of time strange enough to handle. Verbs and reversals give the passage a playful energy even as the traveller loses his usual place in the world. Choose the words that change speed when set beside one another. Your poem may rush, pause, build or dissolve, without needing to explain the machine or continue the journey beyond this page.