The martyr

Some lives are lived backwards.

Consider a martyred saint.

What if the murdered innocence 

by which their sacrifice redeems us 

is siphoned from the child they become

in the next life, their death 

a moment of de-incarnation, 

a reverse re-incarnation 

that pulls the child from birth

in the future life, as we see it, 

into the one they have just completed 

that must now be lived in retrograde, 

its end a beginning, another birth, a vertigo

through which they fall again, and again

until they become at last the first human,

finding their way back to Eden,

bestowing on it the accumulated innocence

of all subsequent ages, only to fall from grace,

and embark upon a concatenation of lives,

incarnations lived forwards once again,

and again once more backwards, in retreat, 

oscillating between Eden and Armageddon,

until we realise all lives

are just different paths of a single soul

in its peregrinations through time,

recycled through every depth of despair 

and every moment of ecstasy and bliss, 

every extreme of ignorance and enlightenment,

all knowledge, in the final analysis

serving only a moral purpose, every idea 

ultimately meeting only emotional needs,

each discovery a spiritual revelation. 

The human soul is a multiverse,

a lung containing every breath, 

a garden tended by many hands, a chart 

on which we map a route through a strange land:

the tangled lives of all who lived and ever shall. 

As we riccochet down the centuries

we find life is, as Khayyam said, 

a chequerboard of nights and days. 

A chair is painted black, 

then white, then black again, 

and in between we sit on it, 

thinking we become someone else,

because the world is seen 

through different eyes, but all eyes 

that have ever opened and shut 

are arranged in a sequence, 

their lenses lined up 

like Galileo adjusting a tube

and turning it to heaven, 

to form a telescope used by God 

sitting at the end of time 

looking back at the moment of creation.

Or perhaps the martyr 

finds their way back, 

not to Eden, 

but the first grave, 

a ditch they stand next to, 

the first human to experience grief 

in all its cold kaleidoscopic strangeness,

and God is just the sense they make of it,

and all words since are echoes of that howl

acquiring meaning in the soul's recoil

from the horror it has just witnessed,

describing the world as waste and decay,

all history just the sadness of one day. 

 

Armageddon

It is the end of meaning.

We can't kid ourselves on anymore. 

Our ideas have always met emotional needs

but we pretended to be rational,

objective, dispassionate.

We pretended not to pretend. 

This is difficult now.

Our words are dust devils

as the megadeath calculus

on the bleached rib cage abacus

accumulates, a skeletal tally 

kept by bony fingered history,

its bad breath sour 

with radioactive decay.

We are determined to be stupid,

summoning armies of straw men 

to defend our feel good truth.

There is nothing you can say

that will persuade us, and anyway, 

the time for discussion is over. 

Radio

I'm not a camera. 

You've heard it said, haven't you?

"I am a camera". Well, 

I am not a camera. I am a radio, 

an old fashioned radio, 

with stations marked on the dial, 

and in between song and sermon, static,

dead stars and electric discharge

of more mundane and domestic origin:

faulty washing machines going supernova

while distant pulsars on their own spin cycle

fill the frequencies I scan through

and testify to the emptiness of space. 

A camera captures and image. 

If it was blank, how would we know

if an exposure had happened at all, 

and we were looking at a picture of nothing?

A radio is empty already, silence

interrupted by accidental voices

from invisible cities written on the antique dial, 

civilisations that may as well be light years away

whose vagrant transmissions

may already have been reduced

to Geiger counter crackle by now

for all I know or care. 

Perhaps all technology 

is an antenna for a future apocalypse

when we will finally open our chests

and release the void we caged inside, 

broadcasting horrors 

to consume our dreams

and peel back the night

and reveal a darkness

we cannot comprehend

so that our final thoughts

are ones of confusion,

and we turn the dial 

and tune through hiss

and buzz and fluff

trying to find something

that makes sense,

something we recognise

as human, and only find

the depths of space

and broken appliances

talking back to us

of failure and indifference. 

Perfect life

It's over. We all lost. 

We lost different things, perhaps, 

but we all lost something. 

If we gather it all, assemble it, 

stitch and sew scraps and patches, 

glue and weld the fragments together,

can we make a single perfect life

none of us could live as individuals

but all of us can feel good about?

The world leaves us all with needs, 

some in common, some in conflict, 

but all met and reconciled in this life

that we can imagine for each other,

precisely because we don't have to live it. 

Higher learning

The lesson we learn is up to us. 

Nothing is more confusing than cruelty or neglect.

We may conclude the pain instructs us we are bad, 

or those who hurt us are bad, or both, 

and there's no point trying to be kind, 

that no-one benefits from our doubt, 

and only strength redeems our weakness,

and only as a tribe can we be strong, 

or we can dissolve in doubt our certainty, 

these inflexible axioms we cling to, 

these articles of unyielding faith

that fossilise into dogma

to be dug up as an excuse

to repeat patterns of violence

and create more victims. 

Take the hard path of compassion,

and forgive yourself for being weak. 

Step to one side. Parallax past the cruelty.

Look beyond the neglect. 

See those who hurt you in the world, 

victims of it themselves, failures themselves.

Stop letting them define the world. 

It's time to look for what you could not see before, 

and when you're ready, drop those assumptions

you have discovered you no longer need. 

Use the momentum of the past

against itself. Set yourself free. 

The lesson we learn is up to us. 

Lost souls

We are all lost souls. 

Either the world or ourselves 

will be deprived of salvation, 

and we can only know which 

after a tragedy of discovery 

once it is too late to choose.

Either way we are alone.  

The interior void 

you immerse yourself in 

is unique to you. 

No description of it

can communicate to others 

the horrors and ecstasies 

it contains. 

We either explore terra incognita

or we are terra incognita. 

Life is an archaeology of loss, 

a process of unearthing 

some pale prehistoric gem 

that contains a decision 

you forgot you made, long ago, 

a brief moment of lucidity 

buried under the landslide

of elapsed time, a moment

that explains everything since. 

We find it, and deposit it 

in the museum of mistakes,

file it in the archive of error, 

perhaps linger for a short time

in the gift shop of excuses,

then make our way to the exit. 

Trigger warning

Twelve billion bullets

were manufactured

last year.