Gods! Admire us; we’re your virus formed of land and sea. Air and fire take us higher, a plague now breaking free; a wild agent of contagion through the galaxy; death-defying, modifying… infecting all we see.
*****
This brief poem was recently published in Bewildering Stories. Humans have already spread round the planet into all ecosystems like an uncontrollable virus; and now we’re seeing the beginnings of a far vaster expansion, presumably entailing endless mutations as we go. It’s going to be a wild ride and, once we’re established and self-sustaining off-planet, I don’t see anything stopping it.
(To those who don’t share this world view, I apologise for what must come across as a religious rant. Maybe it is. We’re all trying to make sense of a life that refuses to be pinned down, and quantum physics shows no more common sense than do tales of angels and demons.)
Having predicted the future in vague outline, I admit I think the future is unpredictable in detail. It is chaotic and formless… which is all the more reason for imposing what form we can in writing about it. Form is a good antidote to formless times. And understanding why we developed our cultural techniques over millennia, why we love song, dance, rhythm and rhyme, is useful in preparing ourselves for an unpredictably evolving future. We developed our cultural strengths for good reasons, and they speak to our evolving ape core. Yes, things will keep changing; but for good or ill we are social beings, and our rhythms and harmonies are part of what keep us grounded in society and prevent our mental collapse.
To poets, lovely Denmark’s not a friend: there’s too much commonsense, it’s too prosaic. These blonds just blindly make life a bland blend; but life should be a salad, a mosaic. Long live the Christiania anarchists! Bare feet, graffiti, dog shit, broken glass! Runaways, pushers, folk on Wanted lists, the type you’re careful around when they pass.
Well, maybe I exaggerate… I love museums, bike lanes, all the walking streets, orderly lines where people never shove, the clean green parks, the clean stores full of treats… And after all, I write in sonnet form: a lovely, useful, ordinary norm.
*****
I wrote this sonnet last month in Denmark, and it was published in the June Snakeskin, an all-rhyme issue. (I’ve tinkered with the title and one of the lines…) The opposing arguments for personal freedom and social responsibility are hardly new, and I agree with both. Perhaps I need to reread Matthew Arnold’s ‘Culture and Anarchy‘… <downloads> <peers>… hm… no, too much religion.
I disrespect my ancestors fighting in wars, Europeans fighting Europeans, blame without cause; my English grandfather killed fighting the Germans, my Danish uncle executed for killing with Germans, my earlier German ancestors fighting the French, my French ancestors fighting (and marrying) the English… and the cause of the wars always indefensibly wrong. Why should anyone glorify them in song? Pride, greed and stupidity – these are the drivers of war. I turn my back on all of them, stand on the sea shore, marvel at wind and wave, at sun, moon and stars, despising, ignoring, forgetting their idiot wars.
*****
I’m so sick of Putin, Netanyahu… and Bush Jr, Dick Cheney, Tony Blair… war criminals, the lot of them. But they’re the products of our genetic makeup as social animals, dividing everything into “us” and “them”, and then through crafty hysteria and massively organised mob violence, grabbing everything they can for themselves.
Anyway, this semi-incoherent rant of a poem was published in the current Amsterdam Quarterly, and editor Bryan R. Monte wanted one change in my submission: to change the last line’s “ape-idiot wars” to “their idiot wars”. As usual, I acquiesced. Also as usual, I’m not sure whether it is a good suggestion or not. Apes figure in a lot of my verse, as being an underlying reality of humans, essential to acknowledge, equally essential to try to control. In the context of my other work, I think I prefer “ape-idiot”.
On an asteroid there was an alien artefact. If such it was… a droid… I’ve no idea, in fact. Its metal (leg?) seemed (deployed?) and so I touched it, but responses lacked.
Once there were women; once I was a man (touching a leg then always brought response) before the search for life and light began to change me into this dark renaissance. The teacup storms on which I’ve tossed, when she or I have bitched and bossed till all the loves I’d ever marked were all the women that I’ve lost. They chose the certainty of Dark over the uncertainty of Light.
The joys of life are what’s uncertain: hopes of what’s behind the curtain, knowing the results will grate of things that you anticipate, knowing your life could be wrecked by what you never could expect. And though you think you’re circumspect, you can’t deflect, inspect, collect. Knowing the harvest is unknown with crops that grew from deeds you’d sown, while all your greatest hopes and dreams will be exceeded by the future’s smallest gleams.
Because change never stops, you find what matters is never really known. You may get verbal assurance of your future status, but was it “throne” or “thrown”? The only certainty would be if, offered immortality, you feared what such an altered world would lose, would save, and chose instead to go into the Dark with furnace no less dark than the grave wherein there lies no risk of further blight. Most people choose the Certainty of Dark over the Uncertainty of Light.
But we who strive to stay alive long enough for rejuvenation hope, hope only, we will thrive, post-humans in a re-Creation, unknowing what our ape-based genes will do with power dominance, with war, with sex, Earth mined and undermined, but glad to take the chance. How else can we see scenes of how it all turns out — destroyed? refined? — unless we scrape through, level up with wounds and scars and watch a world we love and leave behind? So at last I am here, between the stars, transiting the darkness of the Void, the empty galaxy’s apparent night, chanting the mantra that keeps spirits buoyed: Let there be Post-Humanity’s own light!
Between the spiral arms in the near-void there’s still thin light of distant galaxy and star, still specks of dust, rarely an asteroid. Earth left (millennia in old Earth years ago), I cross the dark immortally, beyond, afar, through what is darkness only to Earth-eyes which myriad wavelengths up and down can’t know, but which I now apprize. Light here abounds, and boundlessly surrounds, astounds.
Take the smallness from slight, take the bad from the blight, take the fear out of flight and you’re left with the light, the light, the light. We stumble from dark caves of night into day, trying not to tumble; our parents the dark; post-humans the light; ourselves just the stumble.
*****
This poem (published in this week’s Bewildering Stories) is a response to conversations in which people have expressed pessimism about the value of life extension, rejuvenation, cryonic preservation and resuscitation… anything beyond the certainties of a clear end to life after a normal lifespan. “How will you… why would you… what if they… you won’t understand… you won’t have…” Ah, but everyone who has immigrated into a foreign culture has done this: had to learn a new language in order to find a job and start making friends and find out how everything works. Some of us are comfortable doing this; some people aren’t. I’ll take the uncertainty, and enjoy its discomforts… because it’s just so interesting!
The days have come unhooked from passing time, its little Brio trucks are off their tracks; the past and future mix to make their rhyme, with pieces placed at random in fresh stacks. Clear memories blend their present, future, past. The days stretch out, and yet the months fly by – you turn in circles, facing first, not last. As childhood deepens, old age pools go dry. Behind its smoke and mirrors, whores and pimps, its harshly lovely playful attitude, reality is thinning – you now glimpse an indescribable infinitude. The game is won – your enemies are no more, yet you don’t end it while you max your score.
Two hundred million sperm in one ejaculation; and we are standing firm and spouting with elation, though but a single germ survives to incarnation.
And much in nature throws vast clouds into the ocean, where myriad embryos become a magic potion consumed by all that goes with food its only notion;
yet one or two survive to adulthood and, later, will make the species thrive and serve up like a waiter new young crowds that arrive like cargo crammed on freighter.
This is how nature lives; we should not think it foolish eight billion of us gives but forty fierce and mulish posthuman narratives, godlike as much as ghoulish,
in retrospect appearing nature’s plan for how we cross to Nietzsche’s Superman.
*****
This poem was originally published in the Amsterdam Quarterly, although without the final couplet. I usually allow editors to make changes if they suggest them, and often the changes are an improvement that I retain. But in this case I’m afraid the science fiction speculation may be lost without those last lines: the idea that the present billions of us are on the point of being superseded by the first handful among us who achieve a godlike state of posthumanity… and that this ratio of 200,000,000 seeds being sacrificed to achieve one mature adult in the next generation is not unusual in nature.
The sun is always setting, always setting on your day; you sense the dark approaching, wish that it would stay away. Do you want a life unchanging? Wish to still be a newborn? Don’t you know life’s not a rosebud, but has root and leaf and thorn?
The sun is always setting and the black drapes are unfurled; but notice that the sun sets on your world, not on the world: it’s rolling into brightness in another’s happy land, and the dark is evanescent and the brightening is grand.
The sun is always setting on the dinosaurs, but birds are flocking into being, as are Serengeti herds; and the sun that lights humanity? Of course it’s going to set, and elsewhere light new tales of which we’ll just be a vignette.
The sun is always setting, but that view is just your choice; I say the world is turning and evolving; I rejoice.
*****
Sometimes I’m told that my poetry is too bleak. But I think that’s only so if you want everything to stay as it is now. If, on the other hand, you expect change, and that change will ultimately provide more benefit than loss to the universe as a whole, then <shrug>… so it goes.
This poem has 14 lines but is hardly a sonnet. It was recently published in Pulsebeat Poetry Journal. Thanks, David Stephenson!
How brashly brave, embroiled in this brief life, we chance our challenge to the unchanging gods! Strike poses, strut the strident stage of strife, take optimistic oaths against all odds.
Fearless of foes, false friends, futility, we wrack our reason to reach, undestroyed— though usually of no utility— a burst of brightness bettering the void.
*****
Although I prefer to maintain an unobtrusive persona myself, I subscribe to this philosophy of bravado existentialism. The florid alliteration suits the message.
This poem is published in the current issue of Light – thanks, Melissa Balmain and all.
On a dead spaceship drifting round a star, the trapped inhabitants are born and die. The engineers’ broad privileges lie in engine room and solar panel power. The fruit and vegetables and protein co-ops are run by farmers with genetics skills: the products of their dirt and careful kills help service trade between the several groups. Others — musicians, architects — can skip along the paths of interlinking webs. Beyond these gated pods that the rich carve for their own selves (but still within the ship), in useless parts, are born the lackluck plebs. Heard but ignored, they just hunt rats or starve.
*****
This sonnet was republished in Bewildering Stories in April 2024 – original publication had been in Star*Line five years previously. I find something very satisfying about using a formal sonnet structure to express science fiction and speculative fiction ideas – the ideas are by nature open-ended, unconstrained, and it feels good to tie them down as in a neat package with a bow on top. Topiary.
As for what political comments can be read into the poem, read away!
Her ashes spread on Skirrid that she loved; and his bones buried by the Harbour bay… Why choose views for the dead? Once in earth shoved, dirt in the dark is all they’d see, not day, even if they lived. And if cremated, well… So is it for our own guilt’s absolution? Or status, that their graves our standing tell? Or rites for social change’s resolution? Those who were always here are here no more – Their alwaysness runs out when they decease, and life will now sound different from before, like insect shrills not heard until they cease. Dead ghosts sleep twittering in our heads’ domed caves, waking to fill night skies from dreams and graves.
*****
This sonnet was published by The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press as a response to their ekphrastic challenge for the illustration, a painting by Žofia Katriňáková. It was written for my parents who, although they died decades ago, are still a background to my thoughts. My father is buried by the bay of Governor’s Harbour, my mother’s ashes were scattered on Skirrid Fawr, the Welsh mountain she loved and lived within sight of in Abergavenny. And I have another short poem for them, published in the Amsterdam Quarterly:
In the night’s jam jar of my memory my long-dead parents live as fireflies. My thoughts of them worn by time’s emery, their faint light still suggests where my path lies.
Is it reasonable to hope to be a firefly for your children and grandchildren?
Form in Formless Times 