by Mark Pirie
Trevor Reeves
they’re keeping tabs
every time i smile a hole
appears in the card in the fi le
at the computer bank
i’m plugged into –
they’re keeping tabs,
even as i run scared
and haunting, another hole appears
which i’m not expected to dodge
as they bug my stumbles
aware of their hollow echo
when i pause,
tie my shoelace –
threading the holes
carefully – holes
in my teeth, shivering
as i labour, bent,
up george street to the bank
to have another hole punched:
i’m drawing out all my money
and i’m going to stand for election
and have a punch-up with the government –
they’re keeping tabs,
as i stand in a hole in queen’s gardens
preaching to the people who pass
unaware a pattern of holes
accompanied by tapes whirring
wormlike in my inner ear
is impressing itself into the card
at the computer bank –
they’re keeping tabs:
my lawnmower, wife,
electronic magnolia cultivator –
59
my stamp collecting machine,
my poems,
are being loaded by robots
into their time lorry
at my house.
masses of switches are stirring in alaska –
far distant stars, out of sight, are spinning
signals to each other –
they’re keeping tabs,
but my tirade in queen’s gardens
goes on
while machinery burns
hollowness in my cranium
brain like blue vein cheese
berating punch-drunk pedestrians
screaming of my fateful fateful
fate
and my death
as i die –
but they’re keeping tabs;
yes, another hole
and the card is a picture frame
its innards in tatters;
an arm has transferred this card
that my soul has sieved through
to a fi le-machine marked D
and the time lorry has arrived
in queen’s gardens
and a robot emerges to push
my corpse into the hole
along with my stamp collecting machine,
my electronic magnolia cultivator,
lawnmower, wife,
and all my poems, including this
one:
they’re keeping tabs,
and they’ve levelled dirt
over the hole and pedestrians are
60
mincing their sticky soft stiletto heels
over my sky
and packing my fl esh and possessions
into a lightless holy bundle.
you may just hear D-fi le machine
humming softly over my card
at the computer bank;
i’m dead,
yes
i’m dead,
but they’re keeping tabs –
they’re keeping tabs
61
Mary Cresswell
Metastasis
Tiny and trapped – the littlest name
a bit of a buzz, a wing of fl ame
melts amber back into waves
unleashing ten thousand years:
dragons and fi re fl ies, damsels and may
fl ies spring from resin to molten seas
in their turn, no longer pinned down
but going where wide fast rivers
fl urries, freshets, fl y, leap, sing
down the sides of all the world
to swamps to standing water
where the minutes start again.
62
Simon Williamson
Japan 2030
The robot writes
such wonderful poetry
it may win the Nobel Prize
63
Tony Beyer
Kron
kron left his hands and oesophagus
to complete their supper
while he ushered me through
to the yellow inducement room
his diction was so precise
that he had no need of gestures
and i soon began to regret
the distorts on my laughter tape
then the vibrations started again
and the walls pouched and sagged
and slid across the fl oor in ropes
of living yellow between our feet
friim he shouted can you hear me
and i looked up from what seemed
miles away at the alloy plates
on my console fl ickering
kron raised a thin blunt arm
and his robots hissed away
on their sleek baffl es leaving
the brief-cassette inside me
he told me again that the task
would commence at earthrise
and that my reactor must be switched
to reserve in the meantime
64
before i was dismissed kron’s hands
and the vulgar little thread
of pipe he was so coy about
came fl uttering back to him
i thought once more how frail
my master’s components were
his seamless casing and the bright
unjointed tubes it protected
as i trundled down the ramp
to the android garage i wondered
for the ten thousandth time
what power had assembled him
only later when i replaced
a damaged bypass coil did i
remember the vital questions
i had intended to ask
65
Louis Johnson
Love Among the Daleks
At fi rst it does not compute; but later
a current skips a beat and a new ballgame
emerges. (Or consider that pride can take a fall
out of cold reason.) Told, perhaps, that love
is what ennobles and fi res the human, hardens
resolve, makes worlds & wheels cohere to purpose,
imagine the novice Dalek, set to excel
and master the universe, who fi rst decides to outdo
the suburban Casanova at mating games
and makes his fi rst call.
But its object – a petrol pump –
is utterly heterosexual and is also involved
injecting its juices of life in the eager aperture
of a fast, pulsating car. ‘Git lorst…,’ it rasps,
guilty at side-of-the-mouth: and before you can say
‘Exterminate’ – the Dalek, who was not computed to fail –
blows his stack and electrodes and is wheeled off
to the parts department.
Though
Dalek
authority
rails, raves, propagandises, nothing diverts their young
from the new goal – a notch or two in the studbook
of the propagation of the species. And so the universe
gets saved again – almost in spite of itself and
its cloudy gods – and this time without Dr Who,
absent on leave for identity ratifi cation.
Which gives us a breathing space. At the last report,
a pack of the Dalek mods in leather trim
blazoned in white letters, ‘The Onion Bunch’,
and fully absorbed in the heat of their salad days,
bristled up Main Street pursuing the town bike.
26.8.78
66
Seán McMahon
plane
t one
8th dimension post max headroom
tv shows metagalactic adventure
buckaroo bonzai cosmic clip zip
code citizens dyslexic newscast
digital media strip evangelists
ultramodern qvc cable salvation
minitel message telematic phone
company sex receiver autogenous
dial tone connexion cue hang-up
hologrammatic spectrum emission
subliminal comicscope disney id
instincts copycat advertisement
billboard desires cartoon clock
work eleventh hour psychoactive
crisis cults cryptic hoopla jam
freeway spying cypher pseudonym
panic bodies cystoxic pharmakon
catastrophes agent.o alienation
panoptic pulsars infractal gaze
surveillance sectors simulacrum
67
Janis Freegard
Beside the Laughing Kitchen
I’ve been past the unbelievable planet:
Slabs of nostalgia, the soft skin of memory
Disruptive days, now swiftly approaching
For a stolen second I was myself again
I’ve been squeezing out the careful old songs
Eyes up looking, lights down dancing
Irregular obsession, beside the laughing kitchen
Tell me again, in empty eyelid sleep
Just how you got here: overgrown and delicate
Anxiously correct in curtained ballrooms
68
Thomas Mitchell
Rituals
My cryogenic sleep begins today,
so I remake this bed, one last time,
taking care to do it well,
without knowing when I’ll need it next.
The woollen blanket, feather pillows and pressed cotton sheets, objects the radio says are now so hard to get hold of,
spread over the mattress, their corrugations
more inevitable than the recovery the doctors promise,
a full cure for the cancer inside me, all activity postponed until then, my body fl attened in rest
like the shaking out of a soft, old quilt.
69
Alan Brunton
Vis Imaginativa
(Bringing her in):
there is not one day I do not
dream of you
Miss XO,
your frozen genes about to land on Earth
from your sprightly planet –
Therefore, let me ride with you
through generations of animals
preceded by generations
of the same animal
and speak in their rosettas jauntily
So, let op!
let me ride
until everything from A to burning Zee
is written with commas
like the commentary of blind masseuses
at an upstart’s execution
commencing with the base pair La La
or a + b,
vivace:
the boomer whale’s supersonic song!
Yes, we shall vamoose
as the desert moves in
sowing silicas in myrtle trees
and nothing will survive that is not the right size
and life itself
reverts to water and carbon and incongruity
Miss XO,
let me accompany you
to your star if necessary
where no wells are dry
and everything is Yippee and hot and On The Go
70
and each word has more rooms
than a box offi ce attraction’s chateau
Miss XO
let’s go that far,
once around the showroom in your car
Miss XO,
I’m ‘Here…’
71
Harvey McQueen
After The Disaster
After the disaster cats mutated
& became the largest mammal left alive –
dominant.
Cirques have cut deeper
into the Matterhorn
(decimals weren’t reinvented)
when their archaeologists stumbled
upon human skeletons
ochre-brown with age.
On display in an art cavern
strung together
with common titanium wire
they create a commotion.
The elevated chief wizard deliberates her theosophers –
issues a viewpoint
Carbane dating establishes grate antiquity
Credence to archeforms of gyants
These things – an evolutionary cul-de-sack
additional proof of Nurture’s
Distinguished Wisdom
Greatly too gygantic
Irrelevant
clavicles
Tayl (obviously grystle) long stretch from brayn
Competition most likely cause of destruction.
72
She announces
Dividend
–
For exceptional tripled production –
Day off for druid & artisan multitude
To contemplate the exhibition
&
participate
in being humble.
73
Jenny Argante
Space Age Lover
Let me be your space age lover,
teleporting to your bed.
In a psychical intrusion
let me reach inside your head.
I will lock in circuits with you
for a trans-galactic surge
in molecular abandon
as our atoms blend and merge.
In the magic fourth dimension
we will time-warp up to Mars
popping love pills by the dozen
as we sport among the stars.
We will conquer time and motion
in the saucer-bowl of space
and my kisses burn like lasers
as I rush you back to base.
I will lunar-bug it to you
from the mountains of the moon.
I will set your robots dancing
to an electronic croon.
I will bleep you down a sunbeam,
make the rainbow’s bend unfurl,
and we’ll tumble down the aeons
in a planetary whirl.
As our eyes transmit a message
in a rocket-orbit blink,
we’ll unzip spacesuits together
and we’ll transformation-link
in a mind-exploding fusion,
love-entangled on your bed:
let me be your space-age lover,
let me reach inside your head.
74
Chris Else
Hypnogogia
Look, this is a stupid situation.
I can’t sleep. She can’t sleep.
Well, I could sleep maybe, if she’d let me.
Problem is I snore. Well, she says I snore.
And I believe her. I mostly believe her.
Sometimes I hear myself snoring.
Except that if I can hear myself,
I can’t be asleep. And if I’m awake,
I’m not entirely sure that it can be counted
as snoring. Can it? Anyway,
the situation is this. I start to drift off,
I start to fl oat through that penumbral world
where you see things that don’t exist
and I start to snore. That wakes her up.
So then she wakes me up. ‘Stop snoring!’
she says. And then we lie there.
She’s too tense to go to sleep because
she’s waiting for me to start snoring again
and I can’t go to sleep because I’m worried
that I’ll snore and wake her up.
Even though she isn’t asleep. But
she wants
to be. Of course. We both do.
And the trouble is that if only she’d let me
snore for a while, for maybe no more
than a minute or two I’d pass right through
that semi-conscious state and drift into
the nothing on the other side. And I’d stop.
But I can’t tell her that. Snoring
is one of those things that nobody
has a right to. You’re allowed it if
you can get away with it but not otherwise.
75
I mean, if we were both asleep and I was snoring, who would care? Although, maybe it wouldn’t
be snoring if nobody could hear it. It’s like
that tree in the forest that doesn’t make
a sound. At least, it doesn’t make a sound
in my half-asleep world. Not that there are
many trees there. It’s mostly buildings.
Mostly I feel like I’m fl oating along, as if
I’m driving in a convertible with the top back
and the sky is soft blue-grey, like down,
and I’m looking up at the buildings drifting past
on either side. There are houses sometimes, brick
with red tiled roofs and little wooden window boxes
full of fl owers. And there are offi ce blocks
and churches. And I only get a glimpse of them.
I’m only there for a second. Because if I say
to myself, ‘Ah, yes, I’m here again,’ it wakes me up and if I don’t, I go to sleep and it all disappears. Although,
maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it’s me that disappears.
Maybe there’s a real world there on the other side of being awake, a world full of life and energy and goings-on,
a world in which I don’t exist. Although I glimpse it
sometimes through that hole in time and space
before the dark comes down and I wonder if,
for a moment, in that moment, I am there
and visible to the people in those streets,
an apparition hovering for a second
on the cusp of life. Do I frighten them?
Or do they know I’m just a phantom
passing through?
76
James Norcliffe
the ascent
he had expected deodorant
but what oozed through
the rotating slippery ball
was not what he’d expected
the bathroom fi lled with
a radiance he was forced
to fi lter through his eyelids
so that it throbbed with
his heart and glowed so
red with his pulsing blood
he was suffused with it
and then when it whispered
in a soft lubricating voice
scented with eucalyptus
he was suborned and born
anew he was climbing
the steaming stairs of
himself higher ever
