Nothing is enough.

I don't mean that thing does not exist

which in itself would be sufficient,

but sufficiency is already achieved. 

We are complete in our own absence. 

Either we understand this second sense,

or if we don't, the first is inevitable,

because we will never be satisfied, 

and the vanity of self is a kind of grammar

which ensures we do not understand. 

Indeed, this seems to be its purpose:

to permit only the wrong interpretation. 

This presence, this very act of listening 

to the unending monotone of the universe

twists the harp key of the world

until we take dissonance for reality.

We can only hear it by not being there. 

The immortal part of you was never born,

never bundled out of another's womb,

a knot of contradictions seeking truth.

It always existed. It never existed.

These are juxtaposed and made problematic 

by a grammar that cannot accommodate it.

It is best to remain silent, 

because nothing is enough. 

Blocked

I am a poisoned acre. Nothing grows, 

and furrows forced by blunted plough expose

open autopsied earth to starving crows.

A cannibal crop, exhaustion, slowly feeds 

upon itself and blights all other seeds.

Sing

Imagine you are the voice

among the ashes,
the last voice ever.
What would you say?
How would you describe the waste,
the immeasurable waste of everything?

We lived in suspended animation.
We lived in cryogenic deep freeze.
We lived in a dream.
We put reality on hold
for half a century.
We kept our mouths shut
for half a century
so that the rich could grow old

rich, and now they're dead
we inherit the shallow void and vacuum
of the grave they left for compassion
and justice and truth
and every virtue rendered meaningless
by the laws we surrendered to their will
while they lived, and now the world burns,

and a sad Moon watches
as every prediction she whispered
to those men who visited her
half a century ago
comes true, words lost
in the heroic static of their transmissions,
and we are consumed by the obvious,
the quicksand static of the obvious.

What will you say now?
Sing your reverse prophecy
among doom revealed.
Push your retro vinyl against the needle
to hear the hidden message
like the fucking child you are.

Be the modern pornography
of the inside out Cassandra.
We all saw it coming.
It wasn't a secret.
We just remained silent
until it happened, so sing
your fucking reverse prophecy,
you coward, you destiny butcher,
you fate farmer, you fucking expert,
you person who saw it coming
the whole time, a mile off,
a megaton off, a millennium off,
and stayed silent. Own up,
you fucking coward. Sing.

Imagine you are the voice
among the ashes.
Speak for failure and cowardice.
Find your voice at last
now it's too late,

and with your last breath

broadcast your beacon of failure
to every civilisation
that made the mistake
of expecting more from this planet.

Dalbeg

Combing the beach

for fragments of former selves,
encountering bits of debris,
I bask in their intriguing lack of context,
turning over litoral litter inspected
during the brief rapture of my curiosity:
fixtures gone astray in heavy seas;
cargo misplaced between calamity and calm.

Days like pearls slip from their thread
and sink into the dark from which they came.
Noon is lost in the compound eye
of a thousand blinking rock pools.
Seaweed tongues report orbits
unravelling in every tide.
The infinite amnesia of the sea
claims our broken memories,
then casts them back transformed,
washed up, their pasts all washed away.

The broad spectrum of the surf
breaks on the rocks, while a curtain of rain
some indeterminable distance offshore
conceals Atlantic vastness,
leaving me in a world of details and noise
and the vanity of reconstructed lives
that exist only in the imagination.

I make a mark upon the sand
to record my brief presence,
arrange some stones according to conceit.
Nothing will survive the storms to come.