How might universes reproduce?

A poem about black hole cosmology

The other day I was invited to host my pal Leon’s WORDS open mic night. I had already done some stand-up comedy (and karaoke with my punk singer Issy Sutcliffe) the night before, so I was fairly docile when I got the first train into town. Fragile and ancient, I was quite happy to read a Julian Gough article about how universes reproduce while I was sobering up, not least because I’m already writing about that kind of stuff already in The Stephanie Glitch.

I got to Manchester and absorbed an entire energy drink on the walk through the gay village, which is not technically a village but does seem to be popular among gay people, so it’s at best 50% accurate. I got to the St Peters tram stop, where the first three trams I could have gotten were too full for me to bother trying.

I gave up on the tram, having grown sick of people walking into me, and walked to Oxford Road train station instead, secreting myself amid the much sparser train humans on a train to Urmston. This was delayed because apparently “A wheelchair user was placed on the wrong end of the train” which shouldn’t sound as funny as it does. I imagined them picking the train up with a big claw and flipping it around.

Moments later I had moved back to the black hole imagery. I wrote this poem on a piece of A4 paper, which now also has some notes about the jokes I would tell some hours later.

It’s a first draft, and my writer and reader friends on my free writing and comedy chatroom agree that it’s best it stays that way. It’s too easy to push poems over the edge.

Cosmology 01/11/2023

Floating in on old momentum

The starship spins in place

Forever falling somehow

Always a little bit ‘out there’

Mixing sin with dream retention

There’s little else to know

A starship shaped like a human body

A ghost putting on a show

And in the shell. Under it all

Something older, primal

A life that bursts into myriad forms

And trembles, splitting into

Predator and prey, a consciousness

Branching out like mycelium

Strangling itself and the universe it takes

Taking oil and gold

And sap and nectar

And fusion and fission

And star and star

Until it’s got the lot.

And in its last days, as those

vast cosmic furnaces burn out

as night falls upon it all

life will kick-start it again

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Today’s writing music, for Earthloop, is this