On a warming vent

Outwards from a molten core,

a fiery heart to which all hearts draw,

leaving other hands to fettle

to lick the walls of liquid metal.

A hearth surrounds with fierce grate

a ponderous flow of silicate

which floats a plate so gently curved

where some are saved and some are served

and on this dish we'll find a spread

of all things upward from the dead.

Past hubbling bubbling pockets black,

through toiling tubes that suck them slack.

From carbon to calcium, marrow dry bone,

look at what's been set in stone.

Time's passing fragments firmly stuck

where bodies marinade in muck

and splash the wheels of the circling truck;

death then life, eat and fuck

live then die, fuck and eat

ad infinitum, and its repeat.

We reach the playground in the mud

which boys have filled with dry grey blood.

Will mother laugh at how they played

or damn them for the mess they made?

We reach the burrows of clanking worms

who rattle us round the languid turns.

Follow the tracks of the tunnelling train

and maybe you'll come back round again.

In pallid carriage, avoiding sun

it's none for all and all for none.

Climb the ladders, climb the seams

To papered pockets full of dreams.

Up spine, up belly, up back, up vein

To a grey and sloshing brain

Where the head-case bookcase fills each shelf

With blank-paged manuals of the self.

Rising onward as before;

one man's roof, another man's floor

To the station's coursing crowd

whose feet drum chaos loud and proud

And for all that chasing, all that stress,

their motion tallies to motionless.

Look! Above us. The One True Light

The sun we sang of in the night.

A grubby shaft

A rising draft

A gap gapes open as we pass.

The light diffracts through dripping glass

held by a lost and desperate clutch;

a hand forced to extend too much.

Baptising memory in lament,

to splash the head of time long spent

with heart and cloth and spirit rent

such cost for so little consequence.

Past one cocked knee so harshly bent,

lies a lonely man on a warming vent.

Blink

“Cold” he cried to a distant brother.

“Aye” was the long reply.

“Come” he said into the following silence, an idea that had formed over so many eras.

He came, and others. They sat, packed close, and watched and realised that they were on the borders of a movement, a society, I guess.

They were cold no more, “quite the opposite” they would joke. Ha. The distant capital began to glow.

The capital grew and many of them held hands and danced around it, seemingly forever, although nothing was and everything seemed to be.

As everything grew they joined and separated in ways not immediately obvious, so different when seen from the minor or the major. Once again a centre began to appear and warm.

They swung around the light

“I am a giant” one rumbled happily as he rolled on his fat, hot belly, nudging at his brothers. Like the great plates of the turtle they jostled.

A cooling sweat grew on his back and it would scream and evaporate where it meet with the bright, liquid power below

At his border he fought millennia in inches. He and his brothers rutted their ugly heads above water and rippled spikes into the moist sky.

Clouds swirled in the changing ether as he struggled for position and he spat himself hundreds of miles into the sky, and he also remained.

From the sky he fell, reeking and dense, into the ocean that shaped his darkening surface.

There are many like him and they spent many happy moments rocking. Ha.

As the moon pulls the tide and the tide is the water and the water was all around, he moved and evolved, each passing second diminishing his form.

Goodbye to weight and size, back to the speck, the nothing, No! Not nothing! He crawled to land in a swirl and lay there to dry.

His peaceful sleep disturbed by the gargling ether, which whipped him sharply in land.

He passed over the natural land and saw what else had come from sea, come from the sky, from the space. Oh this new thing knows itself alright (or they know themselves, he supposed they would prefer), but what does it really know. He knew. He blew up the garden and landed on a soft white globe, which began to blink.

That is why I cry love, not for you, never for you, even as you close the door behind you.