A new story, told through three poems
I know, it's a change of style.
Hi everyone.
Double post today. I’ve got the Earthloop Kickstarter promo out of the way, but I still owe you all a new story. I have been working on one about time travel, and I’ll include it here, but I’ve been looking back over my poetry too.
The poetry usually tells a story (if it doesn’t, it’s boring).
Please tell me what you think. You have a say in the future of this newsletter.
(there are footnotes with these poems for the eBook, but they don’t need them)
Geodesic
and some soft satin geodesic[1]
rolls into a new bed - tracing the paths
of fingers, bodies [and other, though others came before]
lace-edged entrails of youth
now s[p/c/pl]attered
like light beams
/against darkening floral wallpaper
/bounding around inside bedside cabinets
/split through your broken blinds
/harnessed in that little box you cradle
(when it rains outside)
my Rock n Roll suicide
but I’m no geodesic
I’m de Broglie–Boh[e]mian[2]
I’m the waves in the pink silk
the candle melted past its scent
[the ghost of something]
I’m the cherry cinnamon event horizon
I’m riding the curving time that bends around the fa[c]t
of conversations we planned to trim.
and waxblood drips to the carpet
clinical/senseless/broken/ritual
we stretch in time so that our toes can curl
around the missing warmth
of an unbuilt fireplace
whilst our hands grab at the present
not knowing it’s all fraying, fraught, unstable
we stretch like daydreams through oblivion
[1] a geodesic is the quickest path between two points on a surface
[2] de Broglie–Bohm theory / Pilot wave theory, is a deterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics, in which a particle is accompanied by a pilot wave
And now the next poem
Geodesic ii
orange window ghosts scale an Edwardian ceiling
with fur-like branches in the frame
a choking car horn beeps, an injured fox cowers,
someone outside knocks my cider can
into a patch of moss cryogenically preserved[1]
frost particles adorn the window’s edge
glass steams up with our names
(our hands already imprinted
from several nights before
like the smeared picosecond after lightning)
and even the fabric of spacetime is cold
between two superclusters
between two time-displaced bodies
as galaxies of thought and feeling activate
the weight of your eyes keeps me rolling inward
over membranes and dimensions uncharted
but life moves too fast to fall all the way
so, caught up in this orbit, I become your centrifuge
I wish you’d spin me faster
and faster till the best of me
condensed at the bottom and I
never needed a backbone anyway
it only crumples when I see you
that’s why I never came back
[later, civilisations rise and fall as we slumber
the mood changes, the sun grows fat]
and in the morning after all mornings
there’s a new world outside
an orange feeling in the room, a future unwritten
and sunbeams fat enough you feel like you could balance on them
this is the warmth before the shockwave
before the supernova
[1] for another time, another poem
Geodesic iii
and what’s that? A looming sense of dread
you never hear about in the rom coms?
a cartoonish moment in my head
the idea of rolling out of your bed and still rolling
and not stopping, slowing only in ditches
and false hopes and vacuums
and now the ghost of me appears behind my own living head
as I eat breakfast, and he looks at you as my younger self
once did, but he’s busy staring idly at rapidly cooling beans on toast
and my ghost tells you
“it’s metastable, this metanarrative
and there’s no time to explain so listen
I could be your spin[e]less particle
I could roll around unseen
I could be your geodesic
or I could cause a scene
there’s a void above this kitchen table
where longing hands can’t go
this whole place is too heavy
no wonder it went too slow”
and at that precise moment my younger self, future-deaf
and ignorant, will say
“could you pass the sauce?”
and my future ghost will vanish like foreshadowing
or the lingering smoke at your front door, his style snuffed out
before it starts, his return to rhyme a fleeting embrace of nostalgia
at a bus station, a dimly remembered fondness ten years hence
and he still remembers you sometimes
and it’s over before it starts
the time traveller falls back home
the alien falls back out of love[1]
[1] To play it all again, flip back to Geodesic