(I am sick at the moment so the audio isn’t brilliant, but it does exist)
The following poem is from an upcoming collection. It was written less than a week ago and follows on from the style of False Vacuum and Branch Density, which I plan to republish near the end of the year.
This isn’t a silly poem about door handles. It’s a serious one. Yes, I do write serious poetry sometimes. I won a scholarship for it once and got my highest grades in uni for this weird style I invented, but I haven’t posted much here because I didn’t know if anyone would entertain it after I graduated.
So I hope it makes sense here.
The book it’s from will be out in paperback, hopefully, by the end of the year. I’m also working with someone to make an audiobook for it, which will pave the way to audiobooks for longer books,1 so anyone waiting for a Who Built The Humans? audiobook can set their coldbeds to thaw you out some time in the next year or two. It’s happening.

Here’s the poem.
It’s one of those weird, modern ones that doesn’t rhyme on the surface. But it does have some underlying structure I think you might like.
Sum[m]er (05/06/2024)
trudging through the depths of summer
I slink through time, wade against the current
of what little we remember
the silt pools between toes and you
hold up some piece of pottery you found down there
and we pretend it’s ancient
further still,
paddling pools put away one year
and kept away forever gather dust
and dust invites more of itself
and fills sheds and garages
I have memories of punctures found
by drowning swimming toys in tepid water
flies writhing to death on the surface
Lego boats, custom-built, bobbing along soundless, endless oceans
and characters looking out, embarking on soundful, endful adventures
and beyond the paradoxes, huge dragonflies loom impossible
on echoing wings2
and never show up again, their sleek chrome greens reflective
of that single glowing crystal our adventurers once3 set sail for,
the colour outliving the creature by orders of magnitude
and time is a swamp we cut a path through
it is humid air and the cracking of mud into chasm
and the organising of the ends of things, a procession of heat-deaths
for each imagined cosmos, a line of grasses trodden
and sand compressed
Please do let me know what you think. It’s about as close to a first draft as you’ll get from me (I edit whilst writing, and performing4).
I want to get into posting more poetry and it helps if I know what stuff everyone likes, as I have loads. I wrote about 600 at uni.
You can click the banner above to pre-order WKTH or get WBTH now. Both are filled with sci-fi written in my signature ‘poetic style’ (paraphrased from an Amazon review). And they also have comedy poems. The comedy poems have a lot more alliteration and dark jokes than this one, as that’s their style, but they retain my voice throughout.
My poetry collections sometimes reference events in my stories, so there’s a real multiverse building here (a proper one, not one of those multiverses where dead characters come back to life just to sell more toys).
Unrelated note: Anyone want a Lax Morales action figure?
Substack doesn’t let you get comments on paid posts or posts with paywalls, so I split this post in half during development. I wanted you to be able to comment about the poem, feedback is fun.
So the second half of this email (coming soon) will cover how I wrote this poem, what inspired it, and will feature a bonus poem written way back in 2014 or 2015 which is thematically similar, and which also has yet to be published. It’s about the anthropocene era, something which I found endlessly fascinating back then.
So you won’t have seen that poem before unless you’re one of my poetry professors.
That second email will be content for my paid subscribers, or anyone who brings in enough new readers to my publication using the referrals feature.5 because you can slink around my paywalls with the referral system.
I won’t do email splits like this often, but your opinion on this poem is important to me so I didn’t want to lost the opportunity to read it. I’m hoping that in the future, Substack will allow comments on posts with paywalls, from everyone6, but that’s not how it works right now so I found this workaround.
See you next week!
-Phillip
I know ‘ai narration’ is possible for audiobooks now but people like my voice and I like putting time and effort into my stories. I think my audience deserve it.
I had thought about describing them like stained glass but that came about whilst I was writing this post, and it felt rather cliche. Also, turns out you can’t insert footnotes into poems on substack if they’re formatted as poems, so I’ve sacrificed some formatting fanciness for these asides.
Note, the word ONCE was not actually in the poem, but during the audio reading it got added in both full recordings, so it looks like it’s in there now. I quite like the idea of keeping the strikethrough.
I first noticed that live-editing was out of the ordinary in October 2013, when someone pointed out that I was doing it during a reading of a short story I had written. I think it might have been Stretch, or Pineal… both of which I need to get round to publishing.
About that, my $20 gift card giveaway hasn’t got any entrants yet, so if you enter now there’s a 1 in 1 chance you’ll win. I did imagine it might be more popular, but you really never know with these things until you try them. If it doesn’t get any entrants I might have to cancel it, which will mean I won’t make any more in the future.
It makes sense for Substack to block comments on paywalled posts because people might be inclined to comment on part of a story that the public can’t see yet, but I wish it was an optional toggle.
Your poetry is nice. I liked it.
Excellent 👍