TIME TRAVEL On Saturday mornings when watching “Land of the Lost,” I wished Sleestak, the lizard-men with ebony globular eyes, would decide to chase me. Then human Will would save me. In my daydreams, the young man, top shirt buttons always undone, always did. So, Will and I would be best friends in that time of dinosaurs where his family was trapped, even though I was just a boy. In the show credits, I saw the actor’s name was Wesley, just Wesley. On Saturday nights a few years later when watching “Doctor Who” on the PBS station, I’d note how Adric was cool with his alien tunic oh so bright. Because we were both teenage boys who relished mathematics (he hailed from the planet Alzarius while I came from the world of rural America), we could talk and talk about my problems from my earthbound classes as we waited to see where the space-and-time-traveling Doctor and his companions wound up next in that ship masquerading as a police box. Adric had no surname. He was just Adric. It’s a Saturday past midnight in a new century. A geeky shirtless suitor at the gay bar tells me those actors whom I’d admired had grown up, come out. I was a small-town boy in the 1970s, introverted teen in the ’80s, so gays were even more fictional to me than Adric or Will. Queer was the one-word name I hid, unable to predict its expansive future. Time travel stays elusive except in television series, movies, short stories, novels, comics, scientists’ heads, and my poems.
About the Author: Ronnie Sirmans is an Atlanta print newspaper digital editor whose poems have appeared in Tar River Poetry, Plainsongs, Atlanta Review, Fathom, and elsewhere.
Image Credit: Pawel Kadysz (untitled image) Public Domain image courtesy of Wikimedia. Creative Commons CC0
As It Ought To Be 
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