The clock in the kitchen ticks
inexorably, until the battery’s flat,
undirected, purposeless in time.
Causality suspends us
at the neck
of our hourglass.
Tag Archives: apocalypse
the wildebeest
A bearded wildebeest
blocked my way, dressed
in a handwritten billboard:
The TheRmoDynaMic
ApoCalyPse Is NigH
It WiLl Not Be DeNieD
RePenT By NexT TueSdAy
WeDneSdaY At The LaTesT
delfina
In an unsatisfactory narrative sequence, the forgettable protagonist, who is alone even in his dreams, realized he could hear the motor that turns the universe through timelines. A while later, an apocalypse came along, and the humanoid Delfina told him it would be best if she buried him alive in sephine.
We’d escaped the alien mechanisms,
their aleatoric annihilation of all life,
and reached a stretch of cratered
parkland at the Menai.
the anaerobic flow
2021
In the beginning, my home was a barracks
filled with strangers.
With picks and shovels in gloved hands,
we dug sephine from the earth,
from glimmering veins of pale crystals,
soft like melting snowflakes.
the apposite planet
“I cannot find a single word
I favor,
not a one, and my heart,
it pulses
like a stroboscope,
in flashes.
“Still, I started life as a half a packet
of Tim Tams, so I have no reason
to complain.”
transit authority
While forests of rain
are tumbling from the clouds,
she sleeps.
From each exhaled breath,
swarms of insects, transparent to opaque,
spiral fluttering, butterflies to birds
inflating,
to armadillo exhalations.
And soon there will be humans
in the aisles of nature’s
megastore.
In a flurry of her own creations,
the goddess wakes.
I will not take that path again.
the fifth season: eponymous
This is the third part. Tenuously connected first and second parts are stored as data on a server.
A pointless unnamed human
was locked in stasis by Célia,
an interstellar traveler
who has a name.
A week and forty years pass by
in a single line of text.
The stasis ends, and one apartment block
still stands on planet earth.
the fifth season: storm before the calm
A mostly irrelevant first instalment exists.
An aerial steam train winds across
the Kangaroo Valley skyline
with interstellar Célia and
a nameless human on board.
On the ground, a stray sheep comments:
looks like a little smoky weather on the way,
and high above,
like a Canterbury pilgrim conglomerate,
Célia tells her tales.
todays: early and late
I remember when we lived
beneath creation
with our language suited
to the fatuous and fantastic.
When we never wondered
what our slide rules might not measure,
we saw our ambit through camerae obscurae,
pinpoints of the truth inverted.
constructions
Last night I dreamt we went together to the sea
and joined the others gathered on the beach,
figures made of sand who dreamed within a dream
of alluvial forgiveness.
From the kitchen doorway
a flock of shadows flies out on the ridge,
and in the gullies yellowed smog
is bleeding from the ground.
The earth is sick, reclaiming its own,
and the far horizon is a never ending fuse,
unquenchable linear fire.
the invisibilities of ilhabela
This is what Jandira told me—
The invisibilities will ascend from ground and green,
from fields of stubbled corn and furrowed dirt,
from the Amazonic jungle
through the tree lines to the turbulence above.
Now I’m perched in a jacaranda,
and set to fade like Carroll’s cat, the great auk and the dodo,
with my telescope trained on the far horizon
where the welded night’s creation is rising with the dawn.
the shallow end
The i-coupé makes its debut.
So silvery and sleek, and quiet
as a mouse trying to purr,
no steering, no gearstick or pedals.
The salesperson kept on talking,
but I was already sold.
It doesn’t have a motor at all.
A universal transport moves you
to a nearby timeline, where
the i-coupé’s a little further
down the street.