Undead

Here lies a defeated, apathetic people, 

as accepting of the belt as a broken cur, 

grief-cracked hearts grateful for the attention,

dreaming distraction, nostalgia-racked for glory

like the bone's memory of a familiar old fracture,

loitering bruise-badged in the graveyard casino

seeking warmth in the worm's embrace. No riot, 

no revolution, no righteous indignation stirs them:

they rise up from the grave in search of bargains,

summoned by the corvid call and discount choreography 

of those who despise them, animated by cheap enthusiasms

and consuming the brains of any that do not share them.

The song

They bombed our church

but still we sang.
Among the reeking ruins
we raised our voices in praise.

They turned our gods into a joke
and made our temples brothels
where they pimped their parody
of what they thought we worshipped,
or what they were able to imagine worshipping,
homogenised, commercialised, bought and sold,
but still we sang.

They took every mirror
we would hold up to ourselves,
and replaced it with the cruellest caricature,
and taunted us with the impossibility
of meaningful self expression,
with the inherent ridiculousness
of the very idea we had anything to say,
and still we managed to sing,

even when it wasn't heard,
even when no-one was listening,
or when we were shouted down, or ignored,
turned off, unplugged, and banned, we sang.

They cut our throat, but still we sang.
We sang with blood pouring its red melodies
from every wound. We made agony a song.
We twisted every fibre
of whatever being was available to us
into the song,
whatever existence we could preserve,
for however long we could preserve it
from the void's rank claim,
every fugitive breath, every renegade heartbeat,
pressed into service of the song,

until at last the song no longer needed us,
and every law prohibiting it was a record
of the very thing it prohibited,
and every agent of that law sang the song
in every condemnation of the singer,
and death was finally defeated.

Atom

They said you were indivisible. 

That's literally what your name means,

making their statement a tautology,

a single idea divided by pointless repetition,

and they were wrong of course, 

as the victims of Hiroshima 

and Nagasaki would testify, 

if they could: you split and they ceased to be, 

your nucleus susceptible to division after all. 

But division is unity: 

all emotions originate in fear they say,

in one form or another, masks we wear

to conceal a single terror we all feel,

a pantomime where we pretend to be human,

not bears baited at a stake in solitary anguish.

It is a joke we play on each other, 

a pageant in which we all participate

in the theatre of common understanding.

I write this because I was not in on the joke.

I was too literal, so I will chronicle

your every brush with sulphur, 

your every gasp of argon, 

your every plutonium pulmonary.

I will catalogue these variations 

that are not really variations

on a theme that is not really a theme

to expose your fraudulent chemistry,

tabulate the variety of your periodic lies

that leave me feeling nothing but numb, 

like an atom, indivisible and alone,

like the joke was on me all along. 

Bug

Have you ever had to kill something?

Maybe it was easy. Maybe it was a bug.

Maybe you could even say it was an accident, 

something you stood on inadvertently

and were only aware of afterwards. 

What if it was something bigger, 

something that struggled, big enough

that you had to see it through, 

and there was no way to pretend 

it wasn't deliberate. You held it down

and waited for the struggling to stop, 

hung it up by its feet and shook it to drain 

the last few drops of blood from its carcass. 

Have you ever killed a planet?

Maybe you think the long, slow decades

it takes to wrestle the climate out of balance

and the blink of an eye in which an insect expires

are the same, and in that equivalence

you can file away your qualms. It's all the same:

the bug, the world, and everything in between. 

Don't congratulate yourself on your petty guilt.

Spare me your meagre regret, your mere culpability.

I'd rather you know your indifference

when the alternative is cowardice. 

Meteor

You were a meteor,

briefer and more bright

than any star.

In the midnight of the soul,

when we lose faith in love, 

and despair

(for who knows anyone anyway,

and isn't the most we can hope for

infatuation with the masks we wear

in our mannequin embrace?)

you burned

and gave up everything.

We looked up,

and at each other,

and believed at last,

because there was

no other explanation

than your poem: something

it was impossible to say

until you said it. 

Quick

My limestone heart,

made quick and caustic 

by the proximity of your heat,

slaked with blood brought 

by this strange new beat,

shrugs off its oxide shroud 

and crumbles in your hand. 

My calcium heart, 

ductile, like lead, 

under the edge of your blade 

made of more stiff and brittle stuff,

is sliced and cut and shared,

a grey metal eucharist 

of apathy and unbelief.