waveform

Our timelines span decades in each direction.

Fingertips at either end stretching towards the infinite.

This lines waveform is in constant flux.

It dips and soars as a seagull caught amongst the Long Forties.

Played out against a longer timeline, the birth and death of a mountain perhaps.

Our waves become flattened.

Our complex existence a mere flashpoint of static.

We drown in the noise of cosmic background information.

Scale, I think, is meaningful.

ice

The ice sheet moves with the tide.

I had not considered this before.

You cannot feel it moving though.

The same way you cannot feel the rotation of the Earth.

Cut a hole in the Ice.

Tether yourself to a stocky Russian and to drop into this hole.

The cold will burn your lips and cheeks. 

 Needles are being driven deep into your understanding.

Momentary panic.

You are not supposed to be here.

We left the oceans millennia ago.

At the right tide you can touch the seabed and the ice

Atlas style.

Swimming shallower.

Kelp fingers snatch at you threatening entanglement.

Shallower still.

Till you are wriggling between the ice sheet and the seabed.

A primordial being  

Body shaped by the water.

Dancing with light.

My head is numb now.

Thoughts no longer flowing freely.

They come in jumps and starts.

Hard. To. Form. Coherent. Sentences.

Trace the umbilical back to the real world. Reality

It’s just enough to float here at the surface.

The stocky Russian grabs me and lifts me out of the water.

My fingers won’t move so he strips the equipment from me. 

An efficient midwife.

I lie on the ice.

Then crawl.

Then walk.

The Ice sheet moves with the tide.

You cannot feel it moving though.

line caught tuna

He was descended from the first fishermen,

His ancestor was the first to carve a hook from a bone,

To weave a flax line and cast it to the Deep,

His youth was spent in the belly of a Chinese factory vessel,

It stank of Clove cigarettes,

 Of Fishes guts,

Of sweat,

The belly was kept in a fluorescent daylight,

Strung out on amphetamines he no longer followed diurnal patterns,

Existed as a cog that grinds its teeth to the low rumble of the engines,

Every few hours the great net would be hauled in with spluttering hydraulics,

Thousands of fishes dumped through the hatch,

His hands,

Not yet scared,

Not yet arthritic,

Seized the fishes.

 and danced a long thin blade through the fishes bellies,

And tossed them into freezing storage,

In port the frozen carcasses were offloaded to the Cannery,

The labels all said,

Line Caught Tuna.

fluid dynamics

In the long ago there was nothing but the ocean and the land.

They halved the planet.

And, for millennia, there was balance.

An equilibrium can only exist for so long though.

Time will unbalance all things.

And so, it was for the ocean began to carve herself into the land.

To beat against his shores.

Pulled by that she will never reach.

To run her streams and rivers over him.

To kiss his earth with rain.

Millions of years pass in no time at all.

She split the land.

Carving mountains with the force of it.

Pockets of consciousness developed against this.

Civilisations rise and fall in the blink of an eye.

Blind to the dance of the ocean and the land.

There was one who saw a wave crash to land

She captured it made it a part of herself.

Little did she know the wave on her ribs.

Mirrored the first wave.

The first time the ocean dared caress the shore.

The wave that grew.

An ocean that was to drown them.

A tempest of their creation that was all consuming.

The storm eclipsed her understanding.

The wave finally crashed.

The universe shifted within her.

For a moment there was nothing.

And then, with a gasp, she let herself get swept away.

Let the wave ripple her body.

amuse

You amuse me.

You.

A.

Muse.

Catalyst noun a substance that causes or accelerates a chemical reaction.

Without you I would be inert.

You’re the cigarette ignition point of a forest fire.

The iced O-ring on Challenger.

Lady Macbeth.

Destructions a form of creation too right?

You can’t help it.

It’s your nature.

I close my eyes.

Wrap my hands around the planet till my fingers wrap about your heart.

Till it beats inside my fist.

I’m a million miles away. Separate

My hands are covered in blood.

My eyes are open.

You amuse me.

exciting 64

Hot pink bubble gum font.

Tire print tattooed cover girl.

Rainwater bleeds the ink.

Blurs her figure.

Did you know you can drown in 3 inches of water?

Are you having a quick intense emotional reaction?

A found object.

Nude woman shaped cigarette lighter.

I am 11 years old.

The flint still sparks.

Fire lost a long time ago

That lighter is still out there somewhere.

Disposable novelty. But we all know it isn’t.

Law of Conservation and Mass.

Matter is neither created nor destroyed.

Some impotent immortal piece of plastic far removed from purpose or place.

A lost object.

bird

Every morning she soared.

Caught flight as if for the first time.

Danced with the wind.

Who kissed her feathers with his breath.

Every day they met.

Every day he took her higher.

Treetops.

Mountains.

Planes.

All eclipsed.

Till the little bird saw the curvature of the earth.

They continued outwards into space.

No up.

No down.

Just directionless movement.

Just this dance spanning the solar system.

The galaxy.

They danced across the whole of existence.

Everything that is.

That was.

That will come.

And then.

At the edge of understanding.

At the edge of all things.

They embraced.

a basic life support

The brain floats like a peanut in its shell,

When were you last perfectly well?

Words tumbling out in chaotic fashion,

Flashbacks of the event,

Push down on the sternum,

Feel for exhaled air on your cheek,

Shock does not refer to a strong emotional response,

Typical symptoms of psychosis,

Birth,

Bereavement,

The start of a new job,

Falling into or out of love,

Falling into or out of love,

The patient loses contact with reality,

Continuous sound hallucinations,

Continuous visual hallucinations,

The border between pink coloured lip and ordinary skin,

Disturbance of sense of touch,

He clenches a fist over his chest trying to say what he feels

Reassure the patient; although alarming the condition’s harmless,

Extensive crush,

Blood is supplied to the heart by two coronary arteries,

A feeling that the heart has stopped,

A feeling of oneness with the universe,

Adjust the dose to keep the patient obviously drunk,  

The chest wall is about three to four centimetres thick,

Have the patient tap out the rhythm

Use the nipple and bellybutton as landmarks,

Smear with honey,

Through the spinal cord,

To the brain,

Till you are too exhausted to continue,

When there are tears in the eye,

Ask

“Do you feel that?”

ivory

Our ancestors worshiped her,

Tattooed her rituals on cliff faces across the steppe,

Tattooed her rituals deep within a collective memory,

Planting the seed of “that dream”,

Teeth cracking and shattering,

Spitting up blood,

“See your dentist if you experience tender gums”,

A collective insanity,

She has always dealt ivory,

Used to hunt mammoths,

Spent long days and nights,

Chasing them across the Siberian Steppe,

Hounding them relentlessly,

Till exhausted they collapsed,

Bodies overheating,

Brains short-circuiting,

She does not harvest tusks any longer,

The endling she watched slaughtered by barrel chested men with spears of flint,

In Africa she began the ritual again,

Elephants are becoming harder to find though,

And they do not tire as quickly,

And she moves slowly now,

Weighed down by the heat of this continent,

No longer strong enough to hunt she spins a story,

Millenia in the making,

The story you already know,

Withered hands search pillowcases,

Her believers are too small to be of much use,

Their teeth are not the violent tusks of yesteryear,

We’ve all had that same dream,

A collective insanity.

medusa: a love story

I immortalised every lover I ever had.

Flesh flashed granite the moment they glimpsed me.

Proof that beauty can be terrifying.

There was one I loved back.

Blinded by crows.

I found her stumbling about the base of Mt Olympus.

We spent her life together.

And when she died I vowed I would too.

Find a way to end my sentence.

I became the monster they labelled me.

Medusa.

Synonymous with fear.

Their “heroes” loved me.

When Perseus decapitated me.

My blood flowed into the sea off Ethiopia for days.

Staining its waters a deep red.

And I was free.