Two Sci-Fi poems

Plus Fiction Friday 2, return of the fiction

I used a photo of my real uni accomodation for this. I lived behind where the camera is. I didn’t take the picture though, this was taken after I graduated. Annoyingly, I prefer this quick image to the original cover for False Vacuum.

Here are two poems about the end of reality, time travel, and university.

I have kept the footnotes in these two because they reference each other. In the poetry book they create a sense of time passing, as the story links did in Who Built The Humans?

I was briefly a serious poet at university. From 2013 until 2017 I occupied myself with trying to mix wordplay and my dubious knowledge of quantum physics. I also sometimes tried to make the poems sexy, because I noticed a distinct lack of that in the poetry scene, despite people’s attempts, and I liked the challenge of writing so far out of my comfort zone that the next day I would not even be sure if I wrote them. I would wake up next to a poem and not remember its name.

You get the idea.

And as you can tell, I have since evolved to write more comedy than poetry, and more sci-fi than comedy. Though sometimes, on special evenings, the three of them reconvene.

Blood cell (01/09/2021)

some unassuming mote, that’s how it starts

in the moat of rainwater ancient step[pe]s

become colonised by lichen. Cig packs

and fresher’s flyers lie sodden

as if some student exploded here

and I sat [t]here only once - to write a poem

and lost it apart from a slim memory slipped

between those two lines above

(where drones would one day film the place as if anyone

ever sat there to do anything other than film the place)

and a slimy line or two made their way further

and I slipped into something more comfortable

like the greasy feel of blood before it dries

and I coursed through the courses

with coarse suit coarse jokes of course

and caricature, carcass and canvas bags

like a tourist, cracking jokes about terminal Taurus

and bleeding my way through tube

to tube to tube station back to corridor

to back to back with the more famous ghost

of a future self, standing where the world was s[p]lit

from past to present

where spiralling half-fossils scoffed upwards

at cheap dress shoes, clip-clopping like horses

every July as we coagulated

then to reconvene on younger feet

each September, to survive half the night and fracture

during the last-minute clotting of darkened bodies

under thump-thumping mock-ambulance strobe

somewhere else it’s about to begin again

and I’m still dancing on old momentum

somewhere else someone else [false][1] in love

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[1] To find a better match, visit APPENDECTOMY

Appendectomy

had I known

this was merely

the lingering

smoke, trailed

from pursed lips

merely the design of

a mind poised behind

furrowed brows

browsing libraries hidden

behind [falls][1] walls

doctrines and doctorates

where others waited silent

I’d have done something

whilst I was still fire

burnt through the last chapters

of your books and mine

without a glance

just to light up

just to suck in some final fuel

now it’s clear what it was, what I was

the appendix to an organism

I never knew I’d be tweezed from

an evolutionary afterthought

in the growth of an art form

a writer sits on the first floor of a modern building

waiting to be abducted by the aliens

he has learnt to call people

whilst the aliens in his journal

strange voices / strange looks / strange ideas

make more sense

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[1] To find a better match, visit BLOOD CELL

It’s Friday again, so time for another Fiction Friday. I am tempted to move FF over to the Halfplanet Press Substack in a few weeks, to make more space for all my personal writing projects here. It would also click well with the Science Fiction short story and poetry award I might secretly be creating.

Anyway.

This first is MAY THE FOURTH BE WITH YOU. True to its title, this one contains a healthy mix of spacefaring sci-fi and epic fantasy.

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The second is Starships and Cyberpunks. I’ve been part of this one before, and it’s part of why this Substack is so popular. There’s some spacefaring adventures, sci-fi romance, and the odd touch of sci-fi horror in this one. All themes I’ve borrowed from in my own writing. My pal John Coon is in this one as well. I always know I’ve picked a good bookshelf when I see he’s there too.

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AFTERTHOUGHTS

I am a big fan of Substack’s new tags. It means I don’t need to keep creating subletters for everything. I deleted the poetry subletter some weeks back, thinking it couldn’t justify its exitence if I barely posted on it. Tags are much better, and you can use them to navigate my content. This one, for example, is tagged with Fiction Friday and Poetry. Nice and easy.

We are also almost at 500 subscribers. I will be doing a giveaway for a signed copy of WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? when we reach 500. You don’t have to do anything to enter, just be subscribed to this free newsletter. The winner will be picked by a random number generator and will be emailed upon winning.