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.