[ Setting: A rotifer farm on Triton. A middle aged couple is busy preparing dinner. They are awaiting a guest. The scene outside is bucolic. In a bubble away from the planet’s freeze, Dr Firn and Dr Jones have created an ecological island where plant life is in harmony with water and wind, and feng shui coincidentally exists. Inside the bubble, many species of trees thrive, and leaves and fruit from exotic to well-known, all waiting in a green shade, thinking of poetry and unheeded dreams. ]

Student  Good evening, Dr Firn. I hope you don’t mind I came a little early.

Dr Firn  Come in, welcome. I am just working on the carrot cake.

[ Student walks in. The living room of the rotifer farm is halfway between a laboratory and a meditation room. Many plants populate the veranda which is joined to the living room. In order to step in the living room, one has to step down, a bit like a roman bath. Down, to nature and potted dreams. Dr Jones is busy working in the laboratory side of the room, looking down microscopic creatures floating in water, architectures of otherworldly beauty ]

Dr Jones  When you hear the voice of the crane, forget the past. Pray to Poseidon of the Sea and to pure Persephone to make Demeter’s holy ecology sound and heavy.  When first you begin calibrating the geometries of rotifer life, when you hold in your hand the end of the microscope-tail and bring down your syringe on the backs of the cells as they draw on the pole-star by the whale’s way, be mindful of your environment and your self. There’s a delicate ecological balance, the spirit works in the ways of the tonoplast. Breathe in, and cosmosmois will take place.

silence a thousand voices in unison fire

the fall

striking solaris with crushing might

kyniska dreams entomb’d

soldiers at dawn in chase full battle array

the heart’s dearest wish self destruction

a blackhole-size cosmic galleon bobs up in the skies

wild with lights and cosmic bolt

restlessly kyniska hurts in permanent sleep

god and the prophet the living dead have sailed in

down and across crimson cloud an array of albatrosses

peddling lies for a safe passage arion flees

there was a wedding

kyniska sees the curvature of her broken dream

there is a pathogenic disease out there – the nun has methods

to resist

the undead crew thomas-mann-ing the frigate flying dutch over the whale’s way

shield shuck fighters sabre-wishing shoregunners coming ashore

rebel battle back along sea-paths sea-cliffs riddled across the shingled shore

the dauntless angel-xin commands in joyful ire she sings the songs i’ve picked for the

tarantula kyniska hurts to love you as assaulted by the praying mantis

the relentless hexapod soldiers walked with you once upon a dream

visions are seldom what the place for the dead for ever more

without eros sea-faring ships shell the land a white plague comes

with flames streaking red-shifted sea and sand sheepshank fighters

solaris is done trespassing on the beyond

the undead soldiers take the place as they find it

in the process of extinction they fight aimlessly restlessly

voluntarily embracing the good life cracking bones and head

swinging rebels and reverie across the sheer cliff flung

sea-storming limb-naked soaring pelting bullets boring through

their finely attuned war-cry sherrying under shells

shilly-shallying while gunfire shills

the shrieks of shrill rebels shright shrieks

blundering blasts shift the damned

shilpit swifter fighters a shim of life

remains brief candles shimmer

damned to journey eternally from wedding

to wedding kyniska dreams of her own infection

shock of death on a shoestring the ship split in half

waders are shot the shots sting

the stars glisten

shed blood in the waters

waves slink in silence

a blink

headlong the wolves on the buffalo go

the exhausted capitalist self immolation

too dead to live groaning shivering

kyniska sees herself begging

her ghost wants to come in the tomb

let me in

a survivor is undead

xin commands the self-explotation

captain of the capitalist black hole

spreading the infection from city to city

from marsh on solaris

to everyone’s baryon

the burnout crew on an adrenaline thrill

have disbanded the rebels

captured kyniska

burnt out the field

slaughter’s the heart’s dearest wish

god and the prophet kyniska is unsure

what to believe

corinth on siege has bent backwards

turn the wheel reader turn

[ Bachelor number 3: She has always been too fat, round as an orange in fact ]

The ecology student and the nun are alone in the field, chased by storm troopers.

Student: It seems that we are going to die. They will find us and send us to the merry-go-joyride.

Nun [ … ]

Student: That’s right.

[ Bachelor number 2: I wish I could see her face now that she’s old ]

Student: Do you have any conditional wishes, desires, regrets ? I am empty. I am running out of music. It was music we were making for the thrill of liberty. It now seems all so very transient. Tugging Truth from the machine…

Nun [ … ] just sit here until [ … ] let’s talk [ … ]

[ Bachelor number 1: It is important to remember, she did not stand out. In fact, she had that stupid grin on her face at all times ]

Student: What do you believe in? What did you want to be? I’ve always admired you.

Dusk in the marshes, the deafening cry of insects.

Nun: [ … ] excess and transgression [ … ] babushka [ … ] did not wait [ … ] seashells [ … ]
face down [ … ] hold fast [ … ] the road run by [ … ] desire and regret. Thus the slave [ … ]
thoughts were theorems [ … ] puzzling to me [ … ] the shimmer of night [ … ]
not ready [ … ] the Gordon’s body [ … ] in love with Danae [ … ] sinduced by a child [ … ]

Student : Our working objective is not survival, but understanding the organization and distribution of interstellar gas, dust, cosmic rays … the flow of baryons.

Nun [ … ] not freedom [ … ] came to float it  [ … ] the dead die hard. Xin [ … ]

[ Bacherlor number 3 : Talk to him. See what he has to say. I am sorry to antagonize you. I’ve always been intimidated by you. I thought I could learn something from you. My love for you has always been self-love, and self-love only. Because I see myself in you. ]

The only way is forward, but wisdom can be extracted
A feat most painful, Arion in old age looks backward
to the days on Solaris, to his former lover Kyniska,
before he escaped in a tin pod, before the explosions,

before they were dispersed into oblivion by the empire
before delusions overpowered them, before the
permanent sleep of Kyniska, before the delusions of

her sleep. He recalls his many nightmares, the engine

sound the only sound he could distinguish for days
for weeks, for months, that was a recurrent nightmare

The veil nebula hovered midinterstellar
in the dream he kept on walking, it was an earth June
the planet was spinning but everything had ground to
a nothing.

In the cut, flowers hanging while a song played
over and over again.

In the dead of heat, he had observed
the window’s perfect stillness, he had

remembered, not forgotten the room of
his illness, from deep-space, from the tin pod he could see
the rebel-aliens, Solaris reducing
its size smaller and smaller
until the vanishing, the banishing

hornet-filled anger passing
came hurling as tumour
solidarity would die
a cadaver obstacle among us

Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes
a gift had been found
inter poenas et tormenta

In Stoke Poges, many a gem – full

In Aquae Sulis, the fall of the balcony of a man
he barely knew. The dead live on, in night-mares.
Serpents rise from the deep, coming ashore
unless you give me your own true love
in the chambers of the sea, till human voices

memories of his days with his former companions

the soldier woke up back on Enceladus
in the service of the empire
he wakes up from a nightmare, too
they had been drugged; he walks corridors of ice
in the castle snow nor packed nor groomed,
the impression of temper, the cosmos
the wrongful accusation of icicles

Kyniska in her deep sleep wakes up and screams,

her nightmare is cats on a hill, a castle by the sea, her bed burning,
the red chest of a robin burning deep into the night
in the universe, at that time, and at that space,
the outcast were not citizens – that’s not right, Kyniska knows

“it’s all so damn wrong, I am willing to clean toilets,
to work in a sugar-caning factory, to lay waste to academic
studies, to be a renegade, to throw aside all reason, to be
different, to be special, to be successful one must destroy all links to
civilization; therefore I will renege all there is to renege
I will be come a fundamental denier, I will deal in absolutes
I will see the desert and the light, the serpent shall dictate
my beliefs,

I believe in Moby Dick, in the search
I believe in crashing out of civilization
I believe in the destruction of the empire
I believe in the good savage
I deny the existence of the ideal defunct
I choose to believe that mutilating women is for their protection…”

How beautiful, the rage in youth
The absolutes, the idealistic folly,
and the resulting muscular dystrophy
when God refuses to accept what you have become

Long before that, in some deep forest infected by disease,

mosquitoes storming their bed of love
Arion and Kyniska in another age had been mating
and from the bushes, an old woman had been spying on them

But now Kyniska dreams in permanent sleep, locked in a tower
the empire retains her body and feeds her intravenously,
in her dream she rages into a new-found and new-lost religion.

Arion from the future looks back many hundred years
one of the first most religious, most Anglo-Nixon poets was buried at Whitby.
In old age, Arion hence lives in seclusion, surrounded by slaves
hiding far and away, chased by his former rebel-companions,
far forward in shadow lines, he looks back to his days in a tin pod,
when he was flashing back and flashing forward, when travelling up the river
he had been waiting;

he presently saw a star, and then he saw

the break of multiple interstellar days
he wish’d he could stop flying away, catching a billion billion tears
and every one that had been linked to betrayal and abandonment
in his sorry existence would be endlessly looping on his mind,

and so from his tin pod, he would endlessly wander-cross
because something must make you run
a rolling interstellar medium catches no moss

now that’s a dominant source of energy, it forms the stars
in the flow of baryons we all vanish , the invisible dark matter
is collisionless, and so are our emotions, our memories
the visible nature of our lives is

derived from fusion between stars
and also derived from the the release of gravitational love in accretion disks
around black holes, where we spend most of our lives spinning
around in circles, like a loopy song that’s caught in the net of our mind,

again and again it sings

our human lives are evolving as gas evolves to stars
some part of interstellar gas may be ejected
from the veil nebula and other galaxies
in the form of galactic winds, and that’s what pushes this tin pod

effortlessly
through the horror and the moral terror.

Now, you – friend to woman,
dig up her bones, friend!

“You! Hypocrite lecteur! – mon semblable, -mon frère!”

Wyrd
“I pray every day in this major sink, you fairest creatures,
that the ancient Giants may stay soundly asleep. Your lusty
days are numbered, halophytic plants feed on your light-flames.”

Foe or friend, the marsh holds grip on the twelve rebel-aliens,
immigrants to this planet, roaming, still hoping crystalline-eyed.
Half a local, Wyrd sprung from salt and from a cow’s tongue,
symbiotic with metalloid winters and potential consequences.

Soft, syrupy waters; the stench of adaptive response bogs.
Deep trenches in the field of beauty. Broken stones of marble,
bending back from a past where a civilization existed here. In the
hot steamy air, a splutter of arthropods, busy with gaudy spring.

The formerly superior formerly mother nun plods forth laden
with indecision and forgetfulness. The leeches murmur at her slow
skin, acne butters her face and arms. She is helplessly itchy sore,
angry but has forgotten why. Her heart misses a step then quietens,
a throb of contemplation relaxes into a meditative stroll.

Wyrd leads the way in this scarcely existing planet where the
rebel aliens have sky-crashed, bruised on land and friendless water.

Wyrd
“Many winters, creepers. That [he points to the ruins] is the work
of Giants. We tender heirs might bear their memory, chuckle.”

the hollowed out Gothic architecture is a carcass sunk in the jungle
around like a begging ship

Wyrd
“We needs others to satisfy our rebel fantasies, do we not?” It mocks
them, intellectually. They are stoned dry in a haze of contaminated
shame, all east due toward biophysical catastrophes. Wyrd’s tongue
occasionally clicks with gusto. His theatrics are lost on them. One
by one, they have been picked off by fantasy and despair. Reactive
oxygen species lead them to have no remembrance of what was,
what could be or will be. The missing aspects of future studies are
the gap where the heroes of this story have fallen into. What
random text can be reassembled from the Archive of Myth lost
gurgle?

Europa
“We shall seek to regroup in laboratory studies and manna dew
will fall, we will make sweet flowers distilled from this air. We’ll
storm out of this planet like glass clouds full of thunder, filled with
ice vehicles and rain forbidden usury on the empire’s summer.”

Arion
“We have a mission.” He laughs.

Steve
“We should seek shelter and food, forget this salt marsh nonsense.”

Kyniska nods, but she falls asleep, her eyes still of crystal.

The soldier wanders off, much like the long-lost Taoist before he
disappeared in his mind’s eye. Microbial activities in the walls
of water around them, Arion recalls the poisoning of their souls
which was perpetrated on them by what they thought was a
survivor of an earlier crash but had turned out to be an emissary
of the emperor, disguised as platinum beauty and influencer beast.
She had come to offer terms. But his warning against her had
fallen on deaf ears, so they had become liquid prisoners to this
energy sapping estuarine photosynthetic ambience, where, on them
photosystem II microtowers were heaping such murderous shame.

“They do not know how hate can burn in hearts once changed from soft to stern. Studying this planet’s ocean, I tend to encounter my own deep-down wells.”

The Taoist walks the streets of a ruined city. He reflects on the company of rebels, the empire, and his ability to control destiny. Except, of course, he wouldn’t want to.

“I induce a sense of disbelief, I deduce the inclinations of the stars. From the angle of this shadow, I can calculate the multi-verse’s circumference. The ecology student was a student of mine, and now he is someone else’s. We are a company of such Panglossery. Anguish, prayer, the lord of Love. We fight for nothing. Not fate. You, my love, were there. And now you are not.”

He talks to himself, muttering under his breath. The strange undergrowth of the grassland they are traversing is mutating into a marsh, but his thoughts are locked onto the ocean. He has strayed far off from earshot, blind to the needs of others.

“The desecration of tombs, all the novelty of the multi-verse technology logged onto your hands, the screaming advertisement, drunk teenagers wave-split their minds open, alcohol in hand, the dead rising. I have seen their desperation at dusk, cursed with the shining of enjoying every moment, seeking the True Romance, unaware of the zombie landscape of unworkers and slaves assorted. Past Karma lingers, history burdens. But this place has no history, so I carry all history in my entrails, hidden massacres and all. In the last days of Troy, the sun was brightest.”

Blue eyes in the marsh weird him out, and he cowers. There comes a little creature ambling forth, unearthly and especially creepy.

My name is “Wyrd”, it says. An alienating silence. Eyes of reptile, body amphibian, perfect speech. Head disproportionate, hand-like paws with numerous fingers, twitching.

The Taoist feels at ease: he commands attention, at last. God, breathlessness. “I wonder where the others are”, he stumbles forth, unsure of his fate. In days archaic, a person’s destiny was a noun. Now it is just a label. Now is the future; little old creature creeps out of the marshes and lets forth tremendous wit, and the Taoist is charmed. What a conversation; though you shan’t hear it. The Taoist indulges in past memories, and the creature cozies up to him, cat-like and lizard-averse. The days of amphibians are yet to come.

Meanwhile, separated from nobody’s spiritual leader, the other rebels are enduring the marshes, on an unknown planet, in a hostile multi-verse. A multi-screen would come in handy, but those are controlled by the empire.

Without a sense of direction, the scientific and the mythical have merged. The Joyride is so far removed from this place. The reed rotting, the water-lapping papyrus, an alkaline flood. Salinity unchanged, aerenchyma breathing, the rhizosphere as anaerobic as their minds. Air-filled cavities dictate their thinking, adventurous though they may have been, their spiritual effort now is seeking alternative electron acceptors.

Kyniska forgets her love, Arion forgets his anger. Xin forgets his new identity, the man of rubbish forgets his tolerance. Europa is no longer a goddess, the engineer is no longer thinking, the soldier is no longer cursing. The student finds himself buoyant, quite the botanist he is. He understand that the manganese precipitates are affecting their minds, and the low oxygen is stimulating their eventual enlightenment.

the nun’s tale

She was a short, angry woman with a leaky voice. High morals were seeping through her constructed sentences, and a sense of resentment was evident in everything she did. At the table, she was sitting directly across me and her patience seemed to boil over when the astronomer began speaking. Shortly after our land-crash, we set out toward the moors, arriving early at the foot of the hill. It is said that Richard the Second had stayed at the castle on the hill, now in ruins. The wind was blazing strong, and this band of rebels was defeated, but not defiant. Only Arion seemed to want to put up a fight. Most of us had already given up.

The nun had something grandiose in her. Her short, fidgety fingers always seemed to linger as if on a button for Truth. It seemed, in youth, she had had a romantic relationship with the astronomer. It seemed ancient Egyptian history from that vantage point.

The evening was coming in, and the multiple stars in the sky seemed to burn a little less intensely, and the empty space above us was suddenly flooded with the most diverse range of hues. Murmuring softly, the wind was calling us to a rest. We wanted to reach the coast, but as we arrived at the hill’s foot everything seemed to make sense and we camped up. There was deep sadness in each and everyone of us. We were in mourning. We felt wronged by fate, and those of us that did not believe in fate felt wronged by the empire. I believed in fate, then.

The nun began talking, and we all went hush. She had been a beautiful petite child, but somehow she had stopped growing, she informed us. Digging deep into pockets of the soul, she was pouring forth years of resentment, and was letting go the image she had of herself. She had visited a monastery in her youth, and then she had been taken in by nuns, and then she had been constantly psychologically abused by them. Life had had to move on. We listened, without pity or any particular feeling, half bored with our own lives. There was not much else to do entertainment-wise.

Suddenly, she broke off, and almost in tears, she began reciting a poem, and she revealed to us that all of the young women she had been in charge of had been killed in a raid. I didn’t feel anything. I just looked at her, I could see her wrinkles wrinkling up evermore.

I stopped listening, because I had been reminded of my own life events,. It is odd how at times, when sharing life experiences, the flow of energy momentarily bursts through, and we are alive for a short moment, and all the meaningful moments in our existence become presently interconnected, and we are all-aware for that one short moment. And for a brief candle the soul feels light, and then it feels the chain anew. All those moments are inter-linked, and I like to think that somehow they constitute a hidden layer to the multiverse, and they give us purpose. Somehow, looking back, looking forward, it all makes sense, this ruse of a story, this poetic narrative with no end. Not a linear story, not a hyperbole, not a circular ploy.

The nun had been a steady force in our ranks, and her death marked a heavy loss on our side in the war. We did not know it then, but she would become quite the hero. We all thought better of her after the event, but even then we could sense that there was something special in that resentment, in that sense of injured, broken justice. Not the broken love of the astronomer’s selfishness, but the broken dream of a young child, who had seen God and had genuinely tried.