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.
A play’s last scene has often served as trope, where theater, as metaphoric scheme, enables authors to compose a dream of Life as it exhausts its mortal scope. The actors in our own Life’s play, we “hope” and “love;” some “challenge fate;” some “sob” and “scream,” but all personify Forever’s theme: that with its ending, Life must simply cope. I cannot speak for others in the cast, but my bit-part as extra in The Show — as son and father, husband to the last — gave me such joy as any man could know. I’ve lived a lucky life. Of this I’m certain. So when my last scene ends, ring down the curtain.
*****
Michael Murry writes: “The background concerns the passing away of my 48-year-old son, Stuart Langston Murry, in a freak accident while visiting his mother in northern Taiwan. As part of the grieving process, I turned to reading some of my favorite poets – especially Edna St. Vincent Millay’s ‘Dirge Without Music’ – before composing an elegy for my son’s funeral: ‘A Song for Stuart’ published as a Memoir in Bewildering Stories Issue 1032, followed by a companion sonnet ‘Anticipating Anonymity’ published in Bewildering Stories Issue 1042. So much for the composition’s background. ‘Inconspicuous Conclusions’ was published in Bewildering Stories Issue 1043.
As for the formal sonnet structure of the composition, I chose to use as a model John Donne’s Holy Sonnet (VI) with its opening “This is my play’s last scene” for metaphorical theme. The sonnet’s 14 lines consist of iambic pentameter (5 stress accents and 10 syllables) lines: 12 with masculine endings and 2 lines for the closing couplet’s feminine endings (5 stress accents and 11 syllables): ABBAABBACDCDee.
For relevant biographical information, see my website: http://themisfortuneteller.com/ with my verse compositions under the “Poetic License” menu tab. Consider me a 76-year-old Vietnam Veteran Against The War – the one that never seems to end – retired and living in Taiwan for the last two decades. I started writing formal verse compositions in 2004 as a sort of DIY bibliotherapy for Delayed Vietnam Reaction. I haven’t stopped yet and see no reason why I should. You and your audience may find my work too polemical for most refined poetic tastes, so if you choose not to quote any of my verses, I will certainly understand. As you please . . .”
Photo: Michael Murry at Advance Tactical Support Base ‘Solid Anchor’, Vietnam, early 1970s.
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!
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!
Like ants searching randomly across a table like water dribbling across uneven ground and pooling here, running to the side, filling and flowing to the next dip, so we have walked out of Africa for a hundred, two hundred thousand years, over the hills, around the coasts, seeking the greener grass, the next best land, glad of a tree, glad of a cave, catching the lightning for our own hearth, settling, pooling, then spilling out over the next hill, round the next headland, following bird flight, following game herds, exploring then leading then fetching our families, finding and fighting with those who were there before, killing or trading, absorbing or raping, loving, despising the different, the ogres and trolls, like a stain spreading out round the world, and walking then running up as though to take a free kick, walking then running up as though to bowl, walking then running as along a diving board to bounce once, twice in the air and launch into space… Here comes, there goes the human race.
I wrote this piece as a long rambling exploratory sentence which picks up speed and purpose towards the end and a concluding rhyme. This (not exactly formal) poem was first published in Bewildering Stories a few years ago.
Where do they go, those children asleep? Do they roost, or do angels put them on shelves? Or do they go home, to some place they keep locked far away from us and themselves, Or an alternate universe? In, out, up, down? Into a not-place, past care and past fear? Past love and past tired, past smile, yawn and frown into subtracted space, full of not here?
And where do they go, the dead? We say we can’t know where they go, just that they’re gone. But the crow says, There is more to know that you don’t know – says, Better ask instead where do we go, when dead?
*****
This almost-regular sonnet was originally published in Bewildering Stories (thanks Don Webb). I thought it might be nice to emphasise (after some of irreligious poems) that I am not an atheist (except in the eyes of the organisedly religious). I am a Militant Agnostic: “I don’t know, and neither do you.”
And when we leave this planet, even leave corporeal necessity behind, launch in new realms of space, new states of matter, encapsuled and encoded, searching blind, who will we find, as we have always found, those others there before us, unconfined? How will we meet them, how will we relate, them settled formlessly, we coming late?
*****
Perhaps I owe an explanation to non-readers of science fiction. The premise of the poem is that we humans will continue to tinker with not just our bodies but our DNA, as we have always experimented with everything. We will produce ever more bizarre manifestations as posthumans, especially useful in off-planet environments (I recommend the short stories of John Varley), ultimately finding ways to exist with intelligence and control without being tied to physical bodies. (Try Vernor Vinge.) But as always, wherever and however we voyage in exploration, we will always find someone (some thing) is there before us. And then there will be all the usual situations that occur with first contact… confusion, lack of communication, miscommunication, trust and distrust, treachery, violence, accommodation, mutual benefit, all the things that social species engage in.
Appropriately this short poem was first published in Bewildering Stories (thanks, Don Webb!), an excellent weekly magazine of speculative stories both short and serialized, and speculative poetry and art. This eight-line poem is structurally pretty basic: it’s in iambic pentameter with the second, fourth and sixth lines rhyming and with a final couplet.
Religion leers “Join me, or you face death” And History jeers “Inevitable death”, But Science still adheres To schemes to postpone death… The path of a 1000 years Starts with a single breath.
It’s interesting to speculate how long it will take before humans can start regenerating enough key pieces of our ageing and failing bodies that we can uncap our lifespan. A matter of decades rather than centuries, I think–but not soon enough for me, I fear.
The last sentence of the poem riffs on the Chinese saying attributed to Lao Tzu (also rendered as Laozi and Lao-Tze) that “The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.”
The poem was originally published in Bewildering Stories, a weekly of speculative writing of all types, edited by a multinational team but headquartered in Guelph, Ontario.
The purity of space Is like an egg, a young child’s face, Unsullied piece of paper’s grace; And, as the child must age and wizen, As paper’s made for thought’s expression, The egg to break and unimprison, So space was made for human decompression.
Keeping with our recent theme of SF poetry, this is one of mine first published in Bewildering Stories #740.
The Earth Gives birth To insects, animals and birds;
Each names, Marks, claims Its stake without our tools of words.
The seas Like bees Create fresh lands like hives of honey;
Our bands Seize lands And value them in human money.
We make Our stake Without considering others’ use;
And when Beasts then Eat crops or homes, we grunt ‘Abuse’.
They fight, Scratch, bite, To chase the competition off;
We too Will sue, Or wave knife or Kalashnikov.
We each Just reach For good resources to control;
In fact Impact Each other in true Darwin role.
I’m always glad when I find I’m writing something with a new structure, and not yet another sonnet. I love the sonnet form more than any other, but it’s nice to try out something more idiosyncratic occasionally.
Form in Formless Times 