Six times life has trembled,
At the passing of apocalypse.

Each time,
Three causes were possible:

Heaven,

Hell,

And Earth.

From heaven, asteroids could fall,
And throw up curtains on the world,
Or passing waves of cosmic fire
Would strip away the clouds.

From hell, the waters of Styx
Might slip through terrestrial cracks,
Then rise as gas,
To heat the world as sheets of floating glass.

Between the two:
Animals themselves
Could mediate the flow
Of Earthly poisons.

Of the three apocalypses
Born on Earth,
Their horsemen are:
The progenitors of atmosphere:
Primordial Cyanophyta,
Then Archeopteris, first of the trees,
And inventor of the root,
And last:
Humanity ourselves,
The apes who play with fire.

Apocalypse number one was caused
When Cyanophyta -
Named for the blue-green colour
Possessed by these bacterial worms -
Learned to inhale the Sun.

They breathed in photons,
Filtered through a heavy atmosphere,
And exhaled an ocean of oxygen,
That filled the skies with ******.

Then the world was a canvas painted
With a single simple transformation:
The land – which then was only iron –
Was touched, naked
By the breath of blue snakes
And so the wide metallic continent of Ur,
Was racked from coast to coast
With rust.

The world’s iron skin absorbed oxygen like cream;
So that, when the global epithelium
Could take no more,
The new air rose,
And thinned the heights,
And all the gathered warmth of centuries
Escaped into the stars.

Then – an interlude of flame –
Comets fell on reddened ice,
And the planet’s molten core restored
The stratospheric glass,
And the world was hot once more.

Next, Archeopteris:
First of the trees,
As plant life rose to giants,
The primal soil of Gondwana
Was infiltrated
By the evolution of the root.

As vascular limbs drilled down to earth,
They plundered minerals,
From which these new goliaths
Grew fronds,
And then, upon the giants’ deaths,
Their carcasses were ill received
By little lives
Who could not hold their salt.

Then came the chaos of holy war:
Heaven rained and hell spilled up,
And so passed end times three and four,
Up to the kaleidoscope of teeth and claws
That was the age of dinosaurs.

Now the fifth apocalypse
Was Chicxulub:
A worldstorm in a meteor,
So named for baby birds
And the sound of Armageddon:
Xulub!
A knight in igneous armour,
Who killed the dragons of Pangaea.

Now, to the sixth.
As yet far less fatal than the rest,
But the first apocalypse
With eyes and ears,
Who sees the fire its engines breath,
And to its own destructiveness attests.

We began in the trees,
And once the planes were cleared of predators
By mighty Chicxulub,
We moved out onto the grass,
Stood up and freed our hands,
And learned to play with fire.

With it we loosed the energy
In roasted meat,
And poured the new-found resource
Into intellect,
Then wielding sapience,
We humans spread:
The first global superpredator,
We preyed on adults of apex species,
Tamed the world,
Then dreamt of gods
Who placed us at its helm.

We noticed then,
The manifold atomic dots
On the cosmic dice that cast us;
And stuttered in shock.

Our dreams of stewardship
Were dashed on revelations,
That we are the chaos
In the inherent synchrony of dust.

Refusing all potentials
That mirror the errors of our youth,
We let the title ‘sentinel’
Drift from loosened fingertips,
Any now by morbid self-assertion,
We mark ourselves:
The selfish sixth apocalypse.

I am walking in the park
After a night of empty talk -
Looking for something beautiful,
I find myself reaching down
Taking from my pocket a piece of gum.

Now, I am actually chewing God -
I’ve taken him from the trees,
I’ve stripped him from the fields,
And I haven’t even tried
To look for him in town -
Why bother?
I've got him in my mouth.

Compact and easy to manage,
At worst he might get stuck
To the outside of my lips:
So what?
It's a small price to pay,
For the luxury of compacting all divinity
Into a single pointless blob.

Once, he breathed life into the world,
Now he breathes minty freshness
Up my nostrils:
What's the difference?
He was, at first, the nonsense of the universe;
Now he is the nonsense
That I ****** with my tongue,
For no particular reason -
Same thing.

I often imagine a little face
On his lumpy plastic body,
Whining petulantly
As I chew him with irrational force -
And I find this very funny!
But then I think:

Perhaps he does not mind
How hard I squeeze,
Because really he is sad
That his real home is, you know,
Everywhere,
And instead he's getting chewed,
Whilst I’m laughing at a piece of goo,
When I should be laughing at the world.

Now I'm not laughing
At my gum anymore.

Instead,
I've cast him out,
To this open graveyard on the floor -

And his epitaph reads:
'I was only ever paste'
And he becomes another God
Who I have no desire to taste.

Cloud Trick

I am writing on a plane:
An airbus A380 cruising
Through the emptied rooms of heaven -
The place seems larger,
Now there's no one living here.

The clouds below are thick
And suddenly I wonder:
Why is it, every time I fly,
I cannot see the land below?
Yet when I look up from the ground
I often see the aeroplanes,
Travelling through an open sky,
Angels encased in corporate livery.

Now, in my seat by the window,
Staring down,
I see little specks of light -
Perturbations in my visual senses -
Errors of the mind -
Highlighted on the canvas of the air -
And on these flickers of illusion I fixate.

What if there is no land below?
Could it be that every flight we take,
Is a computer-generated fantasy?
An elaborate scheme dreamt up
By secret powers,
Who wish us to believe in forces
Beyond all reach of human mastery?

Maybe they catapult us
To this virtual place -
A hologram of God's old house,
Designed to bring the memory near:
The hope that humanity might have
A parent in the atmosphere.

Then,
Upon taking us up
To the promised land
They showcase the sacred vacancy
Of all our dreams of paradise.

Just as I begin to fall
Into the particulars
Of this miraculous conspiracy
I stop, and realise how poor I am -
I always buy the cheapest flight:
Always leaving early in the morning,
Just at the end of the night...

Do clouds form like dew
In the darkness?
As the Earth spins,
Are its hemispheres
Alternately cloaked in veils of white,
Like an eye that opens and closes
In both directions?

What I would give to witness that.

One is the glider,
And one is the gust,
And the cliff is the question:
Trust land or trust ******?
It depends on the wind,
And the wings,
And the rider:
Not their skill;
But their union -
One was built for the other.
But if the plane was built wrong -
Built wrong for the breeze -
(For the breeze it was built for!)
Then here's our message for the air:
For the love of your nature,
Give the glider to the sea!
Let canvas rip on water's flame,
And writhing currents cut
And fracture frame.

For you were conjured to fly higher;

And the pilot isn't fooled;

The pilot's watching other lovers
As they escape into the sun!

Grateful to be in flight,
But always with an eye
To greater, warmer height...

We know it's hard to let them fall,
For an airman dropped amongst the waves
Is left to die or swim to shore,
And if they make it to the beach,
You know the tattered remnants
Of their aircraft's waiting there,

Waiting to be built renewed
Built stronger on a memory
Of the time they flew on you

But let them fall
You must or you die
For the waters are coming
And also:
Death can fly.

The waves never end,
Instead they break
A thousand times;
Sometimes so many in a moment
That opaque waters multiply,
And the sea turns blank
With far horizons of white-on-white.

And the moment's calm
Sat besides unbroken walls
Of white colts charging;
Sent off on unknown courses;
To far-off lives and places,
In lands that lie so distant,
That not a part of you
Will touch them,

But -

When the wave-ranks break -

Deep oceans bloom like retina,
And tell you something's waiting -
Something's drawing in the darkness -
Calling to whoever loves it
To fall between the breakers,
And land beyond their memory
In a place with no waves marching.

And then the trick;

The fall doesn't end;

And life is stuck
Between the depths and the deserts,
Where the waves are ever waiting
To spread like glass on deepening oceans,
Or force the united death of motion,


And leave us waiting on the surf


And waiting for the break


That will cut the long horizon


And our visions of wave and wake.

There is nothing like the moment of transition,
From the flickering interior
Of the place I work –
Where reality itself
Seems as though it could be toggled
In a single motion,
Deactivated at the flip of a light-switch labeled:
‘Warning: don’t turn off!’ –
And out, unexpectedly,
Into the prehistoric empire
Of the thunderstorm,
Where despite the growing import
Of an industry of explanations,
The emperor still retains
His wild anthropic breath:
The air that sparks
These eerie, contra-zoom effects,
Whereby the colours of the world draw close,
But meaning sinks
To strange electric depths.

We are spiders that fly on silk
Each strand put out to snare
Some seemingly solid structure;
A branch we may build a web on,
Or the windshield of a moving car.

Our goal is a perfect circle,
The web that bears its own foundations -
The guarantee that we no longer have to glide,
When branches fall
Or whole trees begin to drift into the air.

With each cast we amputate
A single silken limb;
And lose a little of our weight.

We reduce and suffer,
But still we send great tracks of gossamer,
Like checkered see-through wings,
To search the sky;
How else could we capture flying things,
And drink their memories of flight?

We flew once or twice ourselves,
And friends that build on flimsy branches
Assure us
That flying is more beautiful
First hand.

But some of us believe
In eating flight;
For flight is life,
And when you eat life,
It dies,
And death is real,
And death wants to be alive.

So we try to build circles,
As we can think of nothing else,
That could bear the weight,
Of meals that teach invincible demise;
Of flies that we can drink eternally,
Who will tell us always,
That flight both lives and dies.

Occasionally, we catch the like -
Great butterflies like birds,
These guests we gladly drink for years,
That eat and grow besides us,
As banquets of prey
Fall fast on our deep-woven webs;
Enticed to suicide
By the net that's built from butterfly.

Sometimes, if we cannot build enough,
Then web and body and captive bug
Together are nudged,
By the demon eating life and death,
Whose name is silent hunger.

In fear, our captives struggle,

And sometimes,

They break free.

And then, we utter that awesome plea
That only spinning creatures know,
The unjustly beautiful:
'Come back to me!'

And sometimes,

They do not come back -

And webs decay -

And fall to earth -

And riding them,
We wonder:
'How dared I build this clinquant web?
Or drink to death
That fearless butterfly?'

We suppose:
'In the end, as it struggled,
I forgot myself,
And spun enormous rails of binding anchorage,
To keep it on the line;
I forgot the earth,
And now I've felt the bloated eyes of silent hunger,
Who lives in life and death,
And draws them both as slaves in chain
To tend its nature,
Which is the hunt and prey,
By night or blind,
Of crawling, flightless game.'

We panic:
'If I eat one maggot on the earth,
And my health is restored,
Will I remember then
The state I knew when first I flew?
What then, if my feet stay grounded?
For now I also know
That hunger waits
Beside great flying things,
And I fear the sky,
And I fear the trees,
And the web that builds inside my heart;
I fear it all,
And stay on earth,
And eat the dirt,
That looks most like
My brilliant mortal butterfly.'

Our terrors muster, sheer and stark:

'What if, by my nature's mark,

I am not born to eat the sky?'

The choice is yours:

Spin or die.

Of every death
Preceding this moment in time
As I stand before a painting
Of a young woman hanging drowned
In a scene inlayed
With thoughtless flowers,
Which death is it,
Exactly,
That renders Millais' Ophelia
With its beauty?

The work alone has form:
Flora, depth, the colour of minute lights
And the image has concept:
A woman, dead in water.
Ophelia lives in an image and a play:
One moment, one story
Resting on the temporal slopes
Of this painted pinnacle of signs.
Why did Shakespeare write
About a woman pushed to suicide
By the death of her father,
At the hands of a heroic lover feigning Spiritual vacancy
At the request of his own undead parent?
Does every woman share this fate,
Or is it fantasy -
Attaining psychic substance
Through a kind of impossible insanity?
In other words:
Is Ophelia's death,
So chosen by Millais
And Shakespeare in turn
(Whose names are poetry)
A mimetic echo of a million mortal moments?
Or is it the prophecy of a time yet to come
For which death has been moulded
In a looping narrative cast,
Made into a word describing
Some sacred foreseen feature -
Which is it:
Does meaning sink into the past
Or fly into the future?