The sun is in its Ptolemaic orbit, epicyclic,
if I’m not mistaken, and its light is focussed on
the kitchen cupboards. Coffee’s in a capsule
and bread is in a toaster.
The songs of rowdy traffic lorikeets
are mimicking my neighbor yelling at the kids,
and a distant mirror is shattering,
with someone’s cherished image
dissolving in the daylight.
—It will do.
“There are only seven kinds of people.”
That’s the type of thing you will hear
if you listen to the oscillographic media.
Maria, whom I rarely listened to, continued.
In truth, people are entropy:
disorder and information. The closer
you look, the more you see.
The planet is cocooned in a hydrolithic sheath,
formed from the vaporized detritus
of ancient modern living.
Its mysterious condensates and fractionated hydrocarbons
hide the Martian battle fleet, hovering above
in orbital geostasis.
~/~
My neighbors came to me on a quiet Sunday morning.
An intervention, they informed me,
because I’d been infected by Deija Thoris.
Previously on Darklight: a traveller, the railway guard Anélia, and the Ibid Bird, have come to the Inverse Realms, where time runs backwards. They found Selena there, and she has revealed that the meeting is her first encounter with the traveller. For her, their time together hasn’t happened yet, it is in her future. Episode one is here.
I was moderately despondent. My odyssey
had finished in a self-referential loop,
my time spent with Selena had caused itself.
Previously on Darklight: a traveller, the railway guard Anélia, and the Ibid Bird, came to the Inverse Realms, where time runs backwards. They have taken the electro-trolley to Sonandinho, where Selena lives. The first episode is here.
We disembarked, I complained about
the less-than-clement weather: rain flakes
and snowlets that rose and fell around us,
the cycle of water in an inconvenient microcosm,
and there we were.
Previously on Darklight: a traveller accompanied by the Ibid Bird, and Anélia, a railway guard from the moon, is on his way to meet Selena. They have reached the border of the Inverse Realms, where time flows backwards. The first episode is here.
I would have liked to tell you of the Turnaround,
where time’s pendulum pauses before it reverses,
but every memory of it had vanished from my mind,
if not my body. My shirt had been shredded,
bloodied from the cuts of sharpened claws.
The Goddess Bastet roams that place,
the Ibid Bird informed me, while Anélia
studied her fingernails.
Previously on Darklight: a traveller, the Ibid Bird, and a railway guard, set out for the Inverse Realms, where time ostensibly runs backwards. The traveller would like to find Selena, but on the way, there may be triffids. The first episode is here.
The journey to the Realms meandered
through pointless snippets of conversation,
without a cup of coffee or a saving grace.
Previously on Darklight: a traveller accompanied by the Ibid Bird is searching for Selena. At Lunar Central Station, he discussed his life with a guard at the gate and found out that she had returned to the Inverse Realms. The first episode is here.
I nodded.
The Inverse Realms. Of course.
The Bird saw through my deception,
and somewhat explained.
Previously on Darklight: a traveller accompanied by a pseudo-bird finally reached Lunar Central Station on the moon. The guard at the gate asked him to talk about himself, and he spoke about his writing, a story he’d written about Selena. The guard was unimpressed, and targeted him with a multifunctional weapon. Episode one is here.
No-one ever wanted me to talk about myself.
What did she expect?
I was always Sunday’s dreary ghost,
wandering the rain-washed streets,
with the ashes of my fantasies
falling in my mind.
Still, I had to try.
Previously on Darklight: on the way to the moon with a bird, a human fell asleep. Through the magic of the mind, he travelled to a rainy reality. After meeting an obsessive future version of himself, he climbed through a broken television set into another dimension. Or wherever. Episode one is here.
Floral avenues bloom in different seasons—
in spring, in winter, on lost days.
Beyond the TV portal, the reception of reality was poor:
analogue strata of land and sea and sky
drifted by beneath me and above me.
As I watched, they sheared and shredded,
tore apart.
Previously on Darklight: a human and a bird were on their way to the moon when the human fell asleep. He found himself in a damp and dreamless reality, where everything was exactly as it seemed. Because of a dead rat, he chose to worship logic. Episode one is here.
I had no destination, but on I went,
along shallow walkway creeks,
up cascading staircase waterfalls,
and at the building’s very top,
I came upon a cavernous laboratory.
Previously on Darklight: a traveller on his way to the moon to find Selena had a bit of a scare. Fortunately, the ibid bird arrived and explained away all his problems. Now he’s back on track. The first episode is here.
In a notional breeze of sleepy air and light bulbs,
the sailing carriage rocked and swayed.
The ibid bird was cooing, roosting in my hair,
and lulled by trickling traces of minds
that once were mine, I awoke
or fell asleep.
~/~
Previously on Darklight: a careless traveller has boarded a sailing carriage on the Darklight Rail. He dreams of finding long lost Selena at one of the lunar stations. Part one is here.
The tracks arched upward, the horizon, far below,
was lost in cloud, my socks were striped
in shades of peach and avocado green,
and the moon shone like a flashlight
that could do with a change of batteries.
Through windows within windows,
made of pixels, made of glass,
made of minds and made of paper,
everyone was searching at the speed of dust,
to ease the burden at their core.
Wishes within wishes, all queued up at dusk,
some saw walls and mazes,
and some were lost inside themselves,
bound to never find another,
and never by another, to be found.
When the morning’s rays are slanting through the kitchen windows, it’s time for mathematics.
Once upon a cereal box, I read of the analytical
and inestimable Doctor Petal, who was confounded
by the nature of free will, and chose to coalesce
the time stream to make the future
as irrevocable as the past.
When the rain fell sizzling down, damp with lightning,
she observed the protozoa in each drop,
waiting to reach the underworld
to complete the polygon of life.
One packed toothpaste and a sewing kit
for essential sutures.
“Space-time, its nature is undeniable,”
(in lieu of a goodbye) and that one headed off
towards tomorrow’s sunrise.
The one indoors was waving from a window.
“Everything may be cleaved in two,
so it is with digital computation.”
