Colossus

O my broken soul, 

we are termites

under the Colossus' feet. 

We are children 

of a doomed future

burrowing into the past.

Call us vermin.

Call us an infestation. 

Celebrate those future ghosts

whose wandering you rehearse

as if they were your ancestors.

Raise statues to celebrate them.

Our memories are fragments

of a shattered planet

drifting towards the end of time

intercepted by machines

we cannot begin to imagine

whose wild speculations

form the basis of our history

as they try to reassemble

what they find, what we lost,

into something that makes sense

to them at least, if not to us, 

and everything we think we know

is just something they got wrong,

and everything we think happened

is just a jigsaw of the past they made

from the bits and pieces left over. 

My broken soul rebels against repair. 

Let me remain an insect. 

I will slowly eat my way through 

all the truth and lies

cast into the foundations

of this Colossus.

It makes no difference. In the end 

it wasn't an asteroid that ended us, 

it was an idiot. 

The final analysis

We must volunteer for oblivion. 

If we try to avoid it, we will only find

our every brave and resourceful stratagem

ends up looking like cowardice anyway

in the final analysis, 

and there is no reason,

no watertight logic we can deploy

that is not revealed to be lies

leaking cowardice and extenuation

through a thousand desperate excuses.

You do not live by being a death dodger.

When you were young did you run in the woods

and occasionally encounter a carcass

and interrogate it with a stick

and lay flowers on the remains

of that poor animal or bird

just to give childish expression 

to the profound sadness it evoked?

That was your own grave. 

Have you ever fallen asleep

as rain covers you in a blanket of sound,

slowly dissolving you in its incessant whisper?

That is death. When I was very young

I lay in the garden under the rain

and lost myself in the sensation of it

and although my irritated impatient parents

summoned me indoors and offered me a towel,

and we subsequently moved house,

and an entire lifetime has elapsed since,

I think I am still lying there, under the rain.

I think I will always be lying there, 

in that garden, even after I am dead,

and perhaps someday, when everything 

has been reduced to indecipherable ruins, 

overgrown by a riot of vegetation,

some child will rattle a stick between my ribs.

Scotia addresses Sir Alexander Seton IV on midsummer eve

Pick a side. 

You know where you are. 

You know how you got here. 

Was it worth it?

You'll never know,

you can only believe

and never stop living your life

in a way that makes amends

for all the sins you know about

and the greater number that you don't. 

No sacrifice entitles you to anything. 

There is always a greater sacrifice

offered by someone else

to weigh against your own. 

There is no argument you can make

for demands that are irrational.

There is no king worth any ransom

but you must pay one nevertheless, 

therefore, pick a side, 

and in that choice

find a truth you can defend

against the odds, 

against reason itself. 

The garden

The flower does not wilt

nor does the flesh decay. 

Yes, there is a change, 

a season, a cycle, a shift,

but we choose to describe it 

this way, as if that marks an end,

all cadence and no modulation. 

There is no end. 

There is a choice of words, a slur. 

The grave is a trove of words

we drag mud-tongued across the world,

slandering it with our own mortality, 

as if we crouch beneath the low ceiling

of a bunker just big enough for our grief.

We retreat into this place from another,

open, bright with love, free from time,

and occupy an underworld 

where time passes and we let death

mark its passing and be the author of our lives

according to his grim schedule.

It is the poet's duty to declare

that only love is real,

and sometimes this may require us to sing

of what a world without love looks like

but make no mistake: we know the tomb

from which we broadcast our sombre report

is an illusion, the words we use

scripted for us by liars and cowards,

and there is another song to sing

beyond the threshold of a worm's ear

in a garden that is always in bloom,

where the flower does not wilt

nor does the flesh decay. 

Olympus

Perhaps truth has always belonged 

in another dimension, a parallel reality 

where all things are true

and falsehood is inconceivable. 

We have been hoodwinked by visitors 

from this other plane of existence 

into believing. Perhaps this world 

is a joke they refuse to share with us.

They observe us arguing. They are tourists

cosplaying divinity. They point and laugh 

at our ridiculous earnest disputation,

fighting over the most plausible lies,

satisfying ourselves with verisimilitude

because veracity is beyond our reach,

then persecuting those heretics

who hope for more than mere claims 

whose degree of accuracy cannot be determined, 

not in any absolute sense, anyway, 

because we ride an asymptote to truth.

We are not the only animals

to manipulate their environment. 

We are the only ones who do so

in order to bury their dead. 

That is how they found their way in, 

these tricksters from another universe. 

They peered through the darkness of the tomb, 

whispered through the silence of the grave,

telling us of this other place

and filling our heads with promises

of unattainable and eternal truth,

and we believed them! How many wars

testify to the sincerity of our belief? 

What entertainment we provide them!

Out of body experience

As you look down on your body

your memory is restored. 

You are an angel with amnesia 

whose cure looks like death. 

Infinity floods in. 

Are you ashamed of what you did

while you didn't know who you are? 

Or perhaps it is only now that you know

the reason for every mistake you made

you are finally able to forgive yourself, 

even though that is no longer necessary.

Afterwards

The strangest thing the miracle taught,

the thing we never expected,

that took us by surprise,

more astonishing in its own modest way

than the miracle itself, 

not beheld in a state of awe and wonder,

but no less a revelation,

is the utterly untransformed normality.

How is it possible not to be altered?

Why are we simply walking away

talking about bread and butter, 

discussing what to have for dinner,

when God just appeared among us

and answered all our questions?

We raise barriers to prevent the miracle

penetrating our mundane reality, barricades 

made of milk and cheese and laundry.

We sit the miracle in the back seat

of a broken down taxi to nowhere

and pass it a bottle of cheap sherry

then drive off in our fancy cars

squabbling at the narrow exit

of the crowded car park,

and when we get home 

we discuss how amazing it was

over boiled potatoes and fried fish.

We are happy to witness miracles

as long as nothing changes afterwards.