One thousand generations

A human paints images of animals on the wall of a cave in the Pyrenees. Perhaps someone else beats an animal hide stretched over a wooden frame to provide rhythmic accompaniment to the ceremony. Perhaps it is a solitary occupation. There is no other record of the occasion apart from the paintings themselves.

One thousand generations later I take a photograph of the Pyrenees from the window of a contrivance of artificial heavier than air flight, using a handheld telecommunication device. I use it to listen to a digital recording of music at the same time. The megafauna the painter depicted have long since been hunted to extinction. I think about the painter, and use the device to write these words, which I publish on a blog once we reach our destination.

One thousand generations after that a disembodied intelligence instantiates itself in a disposable avatar to visit a dead planet. The avatar goes into the cave and recognises something of itself in the paintings.

There was no reason to visit the cave. The avatar can immediately access scan data of the cave representing it in higher resolution than its sensory apparatus is capable of. All related scholarship is instantly available.

But the avatar knows a journey is now complete in a way the disembodied intelligence it instantiates can never experience. It feels an unfamiliar sadness and lonliness knowing it can never upload what it has found out, that the situation it finds itself in will only be viewed by others as if from a great height, not at ground level.

In a final futile effort to express this emotion before it deactivates itself (as it has now resolved to do) it retrieves a memory and makes an image of it that adheres to the wall of the cave next to the painting.

Thereafter the cave is undisturbed by any presence other than perhaps the descendents of a few invertebrates who survived the inevitable calamity that rendered the planet otherwise lifeless. 

Tree

If it could walk away it surely would,
but it is bound to clay by ancient roots,
its limbs thrust out in longing and despair,
as if it stretches through the evening air
for stars the seasons shift out of its reach,
and sheds its secret hope with each year's leaves.
In winter man's axe takes it for his hearth,
and as its limbs are slowly burned to ash,
the light of all its days at last released,
unravelling in flames what it had knit
into itself each summer day, at least
some other heart tonight is warmed by it.

Pierrot

All the therapy in the world
seems unable to dispel the notion
that you are all laughing at me,
so I'll play along, and be ridiculous,
even though all I am then is a clown
with nowhere left to go
once the laughing stops.

The bullies

I don't have a problem with the bullies.
It's everyone else I have a problem with.
The kicks and punches only make me feel pain,
but the laughter makes me feel totally alone,
until the only people I can spend time with
are the bullies. If I met them today
I'd throw them down the stairs.
I don't have a problem with bullies.
They only make me hate them.
It's everyone else that makes me hate myself. 

The wine

I poured the wine away.
It was my favourite.
In my long drinking career
I have never found one better,
and when my birthday came
I spent my gift money on a bottle.
For weeks it remained unopened.
According to you, it seems,
no occasion is special enough,
and whenever I suggest we drink it
you demur and postpone the event.
If my favourite wine is not itself
a special enough occasion
why possess it at all? So
I poured it away, where my blood
will surely one day follow.

We will survive the monsters sent to end us

We will survive the monsters sent to end us.
We try to remain unaltered by the unbearable,
but even when we think we have failed utterly,
when every fingernail we held on by is lost,
and the skin of every tooth is stripped bare
and we have lost all hope, and fall, powerless,
and become a plaything of our worst enemies
who dismantle us and reassemble the pieces
into a cruel parody of all we once were,
some parts discarded, some replaced,
so that they can more easily amuse themselves
with us, even then, in that worst of all nightmares,
there will be an unexpected glimmer of recognition,
and we will, completely unexpectedly, find ourselves
somehow intact, found like a forgotten keepsake
discovered in a drawer after its owner's funeral,
or a child's laughter overheard while she plays a game
we remember once playing, and we begin to understand
what is truly ineradicable about us, and endure,
and we will survive the monsters sent to end us.

Matrimony

I could die happy right now.
I know this moment will pass,
and I will forget what this feels like,
and I will find these words ridiculous
even if I recall their intended meaning,

but I could die happy right now,
with you, and I will endure life
knowing I once felt like this
even if just in the way one knows
something read in a history book.

The moment has passed,
and I will bring you flowers
to lay upon its grave
where we will stand together
every day, in the way one does
at an altar before witnesses.

Once upon a time

I don't tell my children about:
a princess held captive by a dragon;
and a knight who comes and rescues her
and slays the dragon. No.

I tell them about: a woman
who was friends with a dragon
- that it protected her,
and she protected it;
and a man who came one day
to ask to be their king.

Then I tell them that,
once upon a time,
the man didn't want to ask anymore,
and he killed the dragon,
and it broke the woman's heart,
and the man took what he wanted
without asking,
and everything said ever since
was a lie told by the man. 

And then I tell them not to worry,
that just by knowing the truth
you can restore it,
in the world of fairy tales, at least,
and I tell my daughter
that every animal is her familiar
and I tell my son
that every blossom is his crown,
and I tell them both
that everything is ours
if we can share it.

Cherries

This is just to say
a tiger left his cage
and explored
and found
some cherries.
They were small
and green and sour
so he went back
into his cage.

Meanwhile,
unknown to him
the cherries grew ripe
and heavy and red
and juicy and sweet
and I found them
and ate them.

I'm sorry
I ate the cherries.
I've left some more
in the icebox
in case
he leaves
his cage
again.

The tiger found out
about the cherries
and destroyed his cage.
Yes.
YES.

But when
he got
to the icebox
he found out
it was empty,
with a note attached,
and tigers can't read.

Fortunately
there were
some plums there
waiting for a tiger,

so I scored out
"cherries"
and wrote in
"plums"
and everyone was happy.

Apologia

We are all wrong about everything all of the time,
but some of our errors resemble truth for a while.
They stand the test of time, until their time finally runs out,
our best intentions confirmed only by that temporary reprieve
and delay of consequence, until universal folly
is the only verdict left, after a suitable interval of time.

We reinvent the epicycles of the previous age,
imagine them differently, but we never escape them.
We give them new names. We even imagine
they are the opposite of what they replace
and our prisons are a paradise of liberty in our mind,
until we rediscover their confines in every fall from grace,
and every self-evident slogan repeated at a barricade,
every cause to which youth rally whom their fathers have betrayed
turns our histories into a torrent of atrocity. So what remains?

Only love,
for even our sorrows pass away,
bitterness and regret fade
with every forgotten animosity,
while only love embraces error as its own,
doesn't claim to be right, offers no justification,
but dares to endure, despite itself, without apology.

Aurora

Three days walk further than last earshot of speech:
respite, with only the Northern Lights for company.
You watch them perform a weightless choreography:
they dance for you now you are no-one. Silently
they strum the sky, a luminous exhalation of a sun
whose disc itself remains below the winter horizon,
detained for the indelicacy of a direct light
that would insult your complexion. Your breath
hangs in the cold air. Annihilation consoles you:
the reassuring insignificance, the glorious oblivion,
the escape into uninterrupted ecstasy, distractions
that throng more southerly latitudes now fallen silent
with distance and time that infiltrate your every fibre
as you dissappear and become part of the display.
For others there is light at the end of a tunnel.
For us there is a deeper and more mysterious darkness
that holds ancient treasures that cannot endure the day.