Upward-reaching hand
Fingertips touch cardboard tube
God doesn’t love you.

*****

Inspired by this comic.

Oh, lovely, lovely, lovely Lily,
how you make our hearts go silly!
And so Tim and I met, without reserve,
In the Derbyshire nature preserve,
we faced each other, eye to eye,
I glared at him; he at I,
and, without a word to say,
we began an awful affray.
He managed to land a few quick blows,
and in response I bit his nose,
and then he pulled upon my hair,
and so I got WWF with a chair.
As we tousled on forest floor,
rain, upon us, started to pour.
Our shirts soon clung, transparent, to our chests,
we sparred on, thinking only of your milken breasts.
Four hours we wrestled on muddy ground,
but no clear victor could be found.
Alas, alack, we collapsed, resigned,
the contest now continued in Lily’s mind
- how intolerable this would have been,
were it still the century thirteen!
So, fair Lily, who had been watching all the while,
her face fixed in a bemused half-smile,
after some considerable consternation,
decided – to my great devastation.
Oh, alas, alack, eheu!
if only fair Lily had a twin, or two…

Procrastination is staring out the window. He’s been doing this for five minutes, now. The cup of tea in his hand has cooled to an acceptable temperature. It’s 9:05 on the East coast, and workers in hundreds of Manhattan office buildings are sitting down and working. They’ve yet to make themselves a coffee, rearrange their desk, ask their co-worker how their weekend was or any of the other thousand mundane trivialities which usually fill the first hour of their work-week.
Procrastination takes a sip of his tea, and watches the waves breaking against the rocks. So this is what this is like, he muses. He’s never done this before. He’s never found the time. He watches a seagull struggling to land in the strong head-wind. He sips his tea. He wishes he had a desk to rearrange. With a sigh, he returns his cup to the kitchen and washes it. By the time he returns to work, the DOW has already jumped 300 points.

*****

Inspired by Procrastination by John Kelly.

I wanted to keep you

so much

when I saw you sitting next to me

arrayed in red and black,

your finery majestic.

I wanted to hold you,

and take you with me.

I wanted to share my world with you,

I wanted…



But we both know that couldn’t be.

You’d leave eventually,

you’d have to

and I…

these hands are too clumsy

to hold you.



And if I tried to keep you,

for as long as I could,

who knows where you’d be, when you finally left?

What dark place you’d find yourself?



So I took you,

so carefully

to where you’d be safe

to where the sun shone,

to where the leaves swayed,

to where the flowers bloomed,

and said good-bye.

I hope you have a wonderful life

I’ll miss you, Lady-beetle.

At first, it had seemed like a peculiar technical problem – some slight hitch in the software, no doubt. The incidents were almost universally embarrassing, of course, but that was hardly surprising. The idea that there might be anything malicious behind it, however – how could there be? The effort required, if it were deliberate… and for what purpose?

The first time it happened, it was to a twenty-something graphic designer, who found himself in the enviable position of sitting opposite a rather beautiful young woman on the train, who kept looking at him and smiling – while Britney Spears lullabied Toxic into his ears.

The most publicised time it happened was to a high-school student, who just happened to find herself in the middle of a tram filled with the (somewhat conservative) North Brunswick Silver Foxes – who were on their way to blitz the Melbourne Bridge Club Congress for the fourth year running – while the Electric Six promulgated their desire to take her to a gay bar, gay bar, gay bar…

The worst part about it, really, was that the poor saps had no idea. When the iPhone’s speaker started blaring the music, it was, of course, perfectly in sync with the music that they were already listening to through the earbuds – so they didn’t notice it at all. Until, that is, the reactions of those around them gave it away.

And then it was mortifying.

Initially, everyone was certain that it was just an unfortunate glitch – but the incidents started to become more common, and they always seemed to be perfectly timed for maximum humiliation, and then a technology website decided to investigate a previously unidentified circuit found during a tear-down of the device… finally identifying it as a mischief chip.

Steve Jobs, it turned out, had a twisted sense of humour.

“What are they going to do?” he smiled impishly when interviewed on the subject “Stop buying iPhones?”

“Besides, it’s not a bug. It’s a feature.”

I am War, polishing his armour
I am Peace, dusting his mantle.
I am Love, brushing her hair
I am Hate, sharpening her nails
I am sky-fire, falling into the acid oceans of Titan
I am the irrepressible silence of the Moon
I am a thousand voiceless poets, chanting in silent harmony
I am a million squawking idiots, clamouring incessantly
I am Fate, weaving her thread
I am Chaos, knotting it
I am the personification of apathy
I am the antipathy of pathos
I am the day-star, setting
I am the night wind, howling.
I am.

How are you?

For those of you who have never heard of them before, I should clarify that there are two kinds of future-archaeologists – antespective and postpective. It is, of course, naturally impossible to meet a postpective future-archaelogist, for the simple fact that they do not exist. And, in much the same way that it will never be tomorrow, no-one will ever actually be a postpective future-archaeologist, except in relative terms. Naturally, then, my meeting was with an antespective future-archaeologist.

Dr Gradden was kind enough to show me around his laboratory, and, as I am sure you can imagine, it is much like most archaeology labs; scrupulously clean workspaces littered with an array of peculiar tools and deceptively unremarkable artefacts. He presents one of these to me: a seemingly uninteresting lump of metal.

“This is a piece of titanium from a dig site in the Ukraine. Part of a fairly rich deposit, actually. Like all the artefacts, it will, naturally, be returned once we’ve finished studying it. This particular piece will become part of the SS Godwin’s Law, one of the medium-cruisers in the 3rd Battalion fleet that will be launched in the closing days of the Second Moon War. A rather interesting conflict, actually. One of the first to perhaps truly defy that old adage that ‘all wars are but wars of trade’…” Gradden continued for some time on a fairly dry academic exposition of the causes of the war, from which I will spare you, before I could steer him back to the business of future-archaeology. I ask him how one goes about finding out the fate of an artefact.

“Well, there was a time that it required a certain amount of speculation, and, frankly, guesswork. There were of course, some embarrassing misinterpretations – the Australian Uranium deposit that Artner was convinced would be ignited over half the cities of the world during World War III, but which we now know will be the principal power source for the sky-city of New Sydney – which, in a way, makes him not entirely wrong. Then, of course, there was the clay deposit that Hammerstein was convinced would become the ceramic uber-computer powering the New-Earth Life-Exchange, but which is currently a series of toilets at the Watford Junction tube station. However, these days, technology allows us to be far more accurate – inverse carbon dating is fantastically precise. And, of course, there’s that.” He points to a small, sleek looking computer terminal in the corner of his lab.

I ask him what it is, and he responds as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. “A Haecceitic spectrum analyser, of course. Most important tool in a future-archaeologist’s arsenal.”

I ask him to explain what it does. “The core idea comes from the 13th century philosopher, Duns Scotus – Haecceity is the essence of something, those bits of it which make it it, and not something else. As Leibniz subsequently surmised, an object’s Haecceity ‘includes once for all everything which can ever happen to it…‘ all the analyser does, then, is find those parts of the object in question’s Haecceity which include its future, as opposed to its past; which is what most people see when they look at something. If you imagine a paint tin, with a few spots of rust on it – most people would say it was just that; the Haecceitic analyser, however – if it could talk – would say that it saw rust, with a bit of paint-tin still stuck to it. The rust is the future of the paint-tin, and so, to the analyser, the principal object. Humans, on the other hand, see things in the reverse – to us, it is the past object which is the principal.” When I ask him how it works, however, he is less certain. He shrugs. “Something to do with quantum. No one really knows. I suppose we can ask the man who invented it – he’ll be born next spring.”

One day, I shall travel
to the centre of the Earth
and find the man
whose stationary bike
turns the world.
Bleary eyed,
I shall utter only
“6:30 a.m.”
And then I shall hit him
so hard
That all the clocks will be stuck
at 3:17 in the afternoon
for a week and a half.

I tried to build a temple of my love
but the columns were improbable,
nonsensical, and structurally impossible.
I tried to build a temple of my love
but the thousand windows,
each with aspects of you,
rarely caught the sun.
I tried to build a temple of my love
but the insulation,
which consisted entirely of the warmth of your arms,
and the heat of your kisses,
has now been stripped away.
I tried to build a temple of my love
but the light-switches were too fanciful,
the work-surfaces too porous,
the arches too erotic,
the door-handles too affectionate.
I tried to build a temple of my love
but now, I see,
I should have been a poet,
to articulate
that
which architecture cannot express.

You have adorned the meta-space
of my aether
for so very, very long,
aspatial, atemporal, ideal.
So perfectly beautiful,
so undefinable.
So it breaks my heart to say this,
I am sorry my darling, I truly am,
but infinite egg, you simply cannot be.