The Poem That Ended The Universe

An original comedy story, from WHO KILLED THE HUMANS?

Hello everyone,

It’s been too long since my last proper writing post. I’m still amazed everyone liked my brief foray into serious poetry with PUNKS, and I am currently working out how to go about publishing it. I did angle myself toward a serious poetry night, but there was a standup comedy night on at the same time, so I went and told dark jokes instead. I’ve mostly slipped away from the poetry scene now and I’m enjoying life as a comedian, but I do have a pen name (Laurence Carter) who might find himself in serious events every now and again if they’ve got free wine or something.

I was a decently competent poet at uni, having scored 1st class marks for every single poetry assignment through all four years. I was experimental, intelligent, and only near the end did I start making rhyming jokes about paying for my student flat heating bills by flirting with aliens on the phone.

Looking back, the shift to comedy was well overdue.

This long-winded introduction itself is part of the joke. Because the following short story is inspired by those spoken word poets who take so long introducing their work that civilisations rise and fall as they shuffle through their pages. This story takes that concept to its extremes, in my usual style, and slots in quite nicely to the middle of WHO KILLED THE HUMANS? my upcoming collection of dark Sci-Fi comedy stories that changes shape according to your choices.

If you haven’t heard, WKTH is the sequel collection to my debut book WHO BUILT THE HUMANS?, signed copies of which are still available. Both books are collections of mind-bending Sci-Fi and comedy, and you can read them in any order, but there’s a bigger, weirder narrative to unfold if you have both.

I am sharing this little first draft story here, for free, in the hopes it might convince somebody to support WHO KILLED THE HUMANS? This is one of the tamer stories, where I’ve tried to tell a science-fiction story and a comedy story at the same time, wrapping them around each other.

I like it, but I am still going to polish it a lot before publication.

---

Okay, that’s enough meandering.

---

The Poem That Ended The Universe

Barry Binbag banged on about berating the local bards in bars. He skulked up to the stage and ruffled through his pockets for notes, pulling loose a considerable wad of crumpled paperwork.

“This,” he said, “Is my best work yet. And if you’d be so kind, I would like a moment to explain it to you. It shouldn’t take long.”

The audience fell silent. The host mouthed the words ‘ten minutes’ toward Barry, who had a reputation for not understanding the concept of time. Barry nodded and began the short preamble to his poem.

“This is a poem I wrote. Now I didn’t always write poems. Once when I was a baby, I was too young to write, and before then I didn’t even exist. But when I was a baby, I also had quite chubby hands and didn’t know how to control them. I couldn’t hold pens, nor did I have the finger strength required to operate a typewriter. But I did hear poems on the television, and I was introduced to poetry at a young age, when I was quite young, in fact I think I first found poetry when I was about four years old, which is quite young of an age compared to other ages. Other ages are indeed available. Back then I had a cousin who was six, and another who was thirteen. Lots of ages.

Back then when people were four years old, we were asked to go down to the shops to buy cigarettes which was bad but not as bad as being made to operate machinery, I guess. A few of my cousins operated machinery. I am a big fan of machinery. It is nice that things are automated now. There was a factory near my town which was very tall and sometimes its shadow reached all the way to the town hall where my grandmother would sell little cakes. She made them herself in her cottage. The cottage was made of bricks taken from an old farm wall. The farm had fallen into disrepair as the owner had died, and his remaining family was not large enough to maintain it, so they allowed a few hectares to go wild, including the section from which the bricks were taken that built my grandmother’s house. She could see the factory from the cottage. The factory-made garments. It was a very big place. I bought my first paperback book in the library in the village and from the library you can see the factory.

This poem is about the factory and the people who looked at the factory and said, ‘oh look, there’s a factory’ and also, it’s about the people couldn’t see the factory, who would say, ‘oh look, we can’t see the factory because there’s a church in the way’. And it’s also a poem about those who worked at the factory and also those who couldn’t work at the factory because they were disabled, and also those people who worked there once, but became disabled due to an accident and then could not work at the factory any longer. So really this poem is for everyone. It is family friendly too, so I would appreciate it if the children in the audience would stop crying. Thank you.”

Barry finally breathed in.

“As I said I don’t always write poems but this one just came to me suddenly one day after I read a thing about writing poems in the local paper, and I’ve been to a class about writing poems and the class only cost me £699.99 because I had a special discount so I don’t really know where I got the idea from to write a poem but I seem to have written one after my teacher told me to write one at the poetry class where we are meant to write poems. Anyway, this poem is about the factory and also my recent divorce, but the factory is the most important part of the poem,” Barry Binbag explained. He did not elaborate about the divorce, but anyone in the front row could see the pain in his eyes and a crayon drawing of his ex-wife protruding from his pocket. One member of the audience remarked to her girlfriend that the proportions were ridiculous.

At this point Barry had already used up seventy five percent of his allocated time slot for his poem and had not gotten to it yet. He had dragged on his introduction for so long that time itself was beginning to bend and contort around him, like a germophobic businessman whirling around people on the morning train, or a person with good taste deftly avoiding the advances of people who like books recommended by coffee shops. The audience was noticeably older now, and the crying children were now weeping teenagers.

“This is one of my favourite poems,” Barry Binbag said. “It is one of my favourites because it contains a few words that I am quite fond of, in an order which I hope you find pleasing. It took me a long time to rearrange the words and another amount of time to learn words, which I did a lot of in school. My ex-wife used to like my poems before she realised what they were really about. She was nice. She had blonde hair and a very kind face and was adept at sleeping with my friends. She worked in the supermarket and was one of the people who made sure the bread was in the right place. She was a bread arranger. It’s a prestigious job you know. I quite like bread. Does anyone else here like bread?”

At this point the fabric of time had stretched too thin around Barry Binbag, and abysmal creatures from outside of time and space began crawling and groping into the poetry evening, which was now hosted in a crumbling, laser-pocked building that had barely survived several apocalypses. The time creatures were purple and twisted, red eyes glowing with evil light from sunken-back eyeholes. They clawed at the remaining loose souls on Earth as Barry Binbag continued to prattle on about his poem and the factory it was based on.

A short time later the sun expanded and died, the earth was scorched, forgotten, and later rediscovered by a race of hyperintelligent fish who had waited for the right time to visit the solar system, as they didn’t fancy listening to Barry, who by now was a mythical figure all across the galaxy. In fact, certain alien societies used Barry the poet’s boring forcefield as a way to time travel.

Later still the Milky Way galaxy crashed into Andromeda, the glittering tapestry of the night skies was rethreaded, and the universe itself began to grow old. It hurt when the universe sat down, and the universe no longer trusted its own farts. Wrinkles and breakages in spacetime occurred more frequently now, and yet Barry Binbag was still completing the preamble to his poem, even though the audience, and the evolved descendants of the audience, were no longer technically listening because they had long ago transcended the meaning of listening, or something.

Well, one of them was still tuned in. Her name was cube-human 40101428080. She was a glowing cube filled with the combined intellect of her ancestors. She was the chosen one, the young cube-human selected to wait for Barry Binbag to begin his poem. She was only here because eons ago, her human ancestor was too awkward to leave when Barry was banging on about his poem. In the murky and distant past, cube-human 40101428080 could see her ancestor struggling to get out of her chair without disturbing proceedings, contemplating faking an important phone call or illness just to leave. But she never managed.

Cube-human 40101428080 had been here all her life. Her mission was an obligation of social awkwardness that had now extended into cosmic proportions. She was designed to wait here for Barry to begin his poem, for it was thought that his poem would be so profound that it might contain the secrets to the very last unanswered questions in the universe, such as ‘Why do poets take so fucking long introducing their poems?’

Barry Binbag began the next section of his preamble.

“I don’t get poetry these days. People like to throw all these line breaks in, but it just looks broken. There’s no sense to it. It isn’t proper. They put line breaks in where

there shouldn’t be any line

breaks and it doesn’t ma

ke any sense.

but they suppose

it makes their poem look

a bit longer

and then they mention an ex-boyfriend or ex-

girlfriend or whatever else they are into and expect

us to clap when they compare a living human being

to a low-fat yoghurt or a straw

berry

whilst I prefer a more freeform thing me. I also like pies. There was a good pie shop in my local town in the nineteen eighties which I often frequented with my friends. We would go to the pub and then get a pie. It was our social media. I guess you could call it pie book. Hah, hah, hah. It’s a good joke that. Pie book.” Barry laughed alone, but not because most of his audience were now fossils or advanced energy ghosts, but because the joke was shit.

“Anyway this poem is about that chapter in my life and some others, and the factory and my failed marriage. I hope you enjoy hearing it as much as I enjoyed writing it. And I do enjoy writing. It is one of the greatest things you can do if you discount eating cakes, not having a divorce, your kids still speaking to you, going on holiday, a very nice pie, another holiday, finding a nice pair of shoes in the shops, being loved by a beautiful woman like my ex-wife, having a best friend that doesn’t sleep with your ex-wife, and having an ex-wife that doesn’t sleep with your best friend. Anyway where was I? Ah, yes. Writing. The beautiful art of using words in good way so bad way look not good when compare.

I have had such a fascinating life that it would be criminal not to write some of it down. Just think about Pie Book. Hilarious stuff that. I should be a comedian. Anyway I have been writing for a long time now and I love all the poems I have put together. I am pleased that I get to share them with you. Thank you for being here to listen to my poems. I hope you like my poems,” Barry Binbag said.

At this point even cube-human 40101428080 was beginning to feel the strain of time. Even though she was immortal, she could feel parts of herself peeling away like heavy makeup in a rainstorm. She no longer cared about the mystery of Barry Binbag and how he managed to outlive the human species. All she cared about was finding a way out of this poetry recital. She looked to the ancient fire exit, still perfectly preserved, and considered sabotaging some of her circuits to start a fire that would probably kill her. She then turned back to Barry Binbag. He had finally flattened out the crumpled mass of paper and put his glasses on. He was about to read. Cube-human 40101428080 was astonished. Out of countless silent watchers she would be the one to witness the fabled poem. She could hardly contain her excitement. This would be the last poetry recital in history, as the universe was about to end.

Barry Binbag breathed in and sighed. Outside the arts bar the universe ended, rogue pockets of spacetime breaking off and drifting away like unlikely couples at the ends of house parties, some becoming their own writhing, pulsing cosmoses. If Barry could see this cosmic dance, he would no doubt have something to say about his ex-wife. But he wasn’t looking, he was carefully admiring the piece of paper. It was time.

Barry finally looked up from his paper, seeing cube-human 40101428080 and also those time demons from earlier which my editor told me I should have brought up again for consistency. For narrative reasons, Barry was unperturbed. What perturbed him instead was the paper in his hands. He checked it again and began.

“Milk, eggs

and something else scribbled.”

One of the time demons clapped its hands. This was the best piece of poetry it had ever heard.

But there was silence on the stage.

“I’m so sorry,” Barry Binbag said. “This is a shopping receipt.”

Cube-human 40101428080 had had enough of being alive. She initiated her self-destruct sequence, detonating her cubic form, obliterating Barry, and the time demons. Unbeknownst to her because she was dead now, the explosion reacted violently with the stretched and tormented spacetime around Barry Binbag, imploding the broken universe and starting it again. Barry and Cube-human 40101428080 would be reborn, their matter seeding the procedural generation of the next hellish universe.

This time a new Barry Binbag would walk onto a new stage in a new bar in a new universe. Unbeknownst to him, Cube-human 40101428080 had survived this apocalypse, crawling out of the fires of the last universe to intervene in this one.

This time Barry would pull out a piece of paper and open his mouth for the preamble, but at that precise moment his head would be obliterated by a time travelling cube. As this was an arts bar, nobody in the audience would question this occurrence, believing it to be some artistic statement, which perhaps it was, and business would go on as usual. Teenagers with bad haircuts would order their drinks, their hair covered in bits of Barry Binbag. None of them would know the fate they had been spared from.

Until Sandra Saltlick clambered up onto the stage.

You can check out WHO KILLED THE HUMANS? and my other books, by clicking the link below or in my email footer, which explains it a bit more.

See you in the next one!