from July:

 11

  
 It was a tawny copperhead   world-deep
 in a tangle of choking vines in the moist
 hanging gardens over babbling stems of
 moldering books in a greenhouse   a pen

  
 charcoaled your frozen forms   and a whisper
 wanted to embrace me   through the endless
 waste of frittering   time  (present stencilled
 intimate brakes)  until   a spare spear-spirit

  
 like a salience   in the armored swamps of July
 began to build for me   this doubled arc
 of a dangled   green or jasper   Dirac radio
 to carry its tacked-on   vernal missile

  
 and   it is possible to experience events now
 that will in part be an effect   of my future
 resolves   by making a round trip
 on a rocket ship   in a sufficiently wide   gnu-

  
 maison?   Mais non, Noé!  May we?   Wheee...
 bring the Jubilee   out of Willie's blues
 by way of a Technicolor Time Sub (used)
 or mobius clock   through a Birch Clump Cylinder

  
 down the River Road?  Through the stubby
 singularity pool of a snail's wombhole?
 The future is all hieroglyphical   lumbers
 ultraluminal   "Beep"   spooky but   sweet keen

  
 smell   pressed among advanced waves of a
 mad worldline cruise-saint looping close now
 as Buckaroo Bonzai's   old friends across time
 go   alley oop   a-brim with   dense evidence

  
 of the man who folded himself (asymmetrical
 rabbit) into a symmetrical hat and Hugo
 Gernsback and becomes her sylph.  Arghgh!
 Poe, again!  Whitman, attached! – helendrigauss!

       
                        2.8.2000

from July:

 11

  
 I saw Eternity the other night   said Henry V
 once more   unto the breaching whale
 for often as I stretched my lips toward
 the lucent wave   so small a thing it

  
 is that separates   our loving hearts
 the darkness had materially increased
 hereupon Nu-Nu stirred   within the secret
 unfailingling J.A. J’s omvalejoss   stretched

  
 postpartum   like a red seed   from
 now-now   to yes-yes yesterday
 deep in Maxwell’s stirry equanimity
 a little kip o’thorn goes o’dell   morphed

  
 the length of a tinier tin plank   forth
 Hendrix   (in tune with a low-rent
 transformation)   (turning
 toward the wall and)   walks on through

  
 Lex Luther’s bilking paradox   (using
 simple OM radio junk from the shack-ham)
 he shows if Shakespeare types out Hamlet
 on his tachyon transmitter, Bacon receives

  
 (in sing-sing) the transmission
 at an earlier time (via chronocomputer)
 settin on a photon clock   spacelike
 timelike and   likelike   Sommerfeld’s

  
 first apple-fall of free-falling world lines
 in a lightcone tipped over by Tippecanoe
 Tipler into the river   just a bit   o’Henry-
 phlegm   caught in the throat   (between

  
 wormholes)   (mouth a and b)  like a frog
 couching for flight through a fog or griffin-
 like surfaces (what exotic matter!  Figure
 it out yourself!) an undersod of the rogue

      
                             2.8.2000

Why do scientists have such trouble with the theory of time? (Einstein turned it into an aspect of space; Godel seems to have denied its existence, except as a kind of subjective illusion.)

Maybe because time is not a thing.

Time has no tangible properties in itself - it's only manifest in its effects. It's not even a mathematical object - it can't be quantified (except in "relative" terms - & the theory of relativity has nothing to say about time as we know it subjectively).

Godel's interpolation of the General Theory of Relativity hypothesizes "closed timelike circles" open to "time travel" (though it's not strictly time travel, because there is no time).

Fiction (& sometimes poetry) - & not just science fiction - provides forms of virtual time travel. As we write, we relive. A la Recherche du Temps Perdu.