He woke each night with War in the east and Love in the west, and his heart right in the middle. For, when the Sun and Holy Ghost had long since set, the old gods were always watching.

To him, life was always in retrograde, a ceaseless cycle of recursion and reduction. Ubiquity lends itself all too readily to redundancy, just as omniscience is itself subject to ridicule and scorn. All should be sparing with their miracles.

What is majesty in a celestial court?

What is cruelty and violence at a cosmic scale?

Reality, he saw, is a quantum state: to the right, the road, to the left, the hearth, and his heart right in the middle.

Yet here we are, caught between the atoms and the stars. Through the human lens, this quantum state is a prison, not potential. In the awe of our creation, we are frozen in indecision.

He grasped at the night and fell back into the earth.

And then, one day, Death turned the scythe on herself.

And then, one day, Death turned the scythe on herself.

It had finally got too much: the sobbing, the pleading, the bribes and promises and, worst of all, the lies.

No, wait; the prayers. The prayers were much worse. What sort of vacuous marketing executive had decided to associate her with evil? It was moronic and, were she the litigious type, she’d go as far as negligent.

She had stuck through it all: the quivering lips, the screams and cries, the pleas of innocence (what was that about?). How many millennia had she trod this earth?

She thought back to when she heard only grunts and gasps of wonder.

But the last century had worn on her. Not satisfied with delaying her (and to think they had once called her Mother), they had come up with increasingly inventive ways of rendering her irrelevant.

She trod these cities, these battlegrounds, to find them already husks, hollowed out by Power and picked clean by an ever greedy Time.

And she wept for those who fell, sobbing with relief, into her arms.

So she stopped and sat. She watched the war zones grow and merge, and saw hatred and fear (more powerful than any of her viruses) spread across the earth.

And so, at last, she turned the scythe upon herself, and fell into her own arms, satisfied humanity was doing well enough without her.

Sextant

Less than a whirr, but more than a hum;

These engines sounds so different this far from home.

I set my sextant to the northern star and find myself no less lost.

Is it not wondrous that we time travel at night?

These flickering fingers of light, beckoning to us from the distant past.

I imagine myself bathed in their warmth as I wander among their barren children;

I feel the sharp nick of scarred rock, of ancient ice,

And see my terrestrial blood, alien on this surface.

Yet here I lie,

Blessed and cursed by my transience;

Servant to this universe, and master of none.

Yet here I lie,

Blessed and curse by my sentience;

Master of this universe, and servant to none.

And here I lie,

For my boldness and bravado whither in the vastness of this chaos and elegance,

And, from this scale, my fervor is seen as aimless drifting.

But still, these lights, they sing;

But still they twirl and swing in their navy gowns.

And, clothed in this night, I follow.

Townsville, 26/8/19