1, poem, poetry, – Page 67

OCEAN

we put

our heads
together

the outside of my brain
pooling its content

with the
outside of yours

so much outside
so much inside

beginnings

of an ocean

OH, PLEASE BOT ANOTHER 3I ATLAS POEM

OH PLEASE, NOT ANOTHER 3I ATLAS POEM

how big is this cosmos?

how meaningful?
how much information

Professors Shannon and Weaver
holding up speaking tubes
and ear trumpets
to catch
the galactic drift

no feedback
unless no rock bands anywhere
amongst the intelligent planets

maybe
the folk up there
like country

all all too Puritan
when it comes to
musical censorship
lack catholic taste
everything to
be pure
as original song
of the spheres

so where must
we turn
to get the soundtrack
to fit
that digital snapshot
they gave us

of something
from beyond our dimensions
to
override
time itself

we simple souls, thickies
of the thick disk
Milky Way
sector

too
startled and alarmed
to milk this strange visitor
for all
the truth
we can get

blasted by thoughts of distance
we hardly have
the mathematics for

when suddenly
it might just dawn

all this time
we have
been lodged between
walls

stuck in a tunnel

.
(

AT A FAST FOOD OUTLET

we thought

the Universe

would
notice us

but it flew
straight past

straight past

didn”t stop
for fries
sodas
anything

no interest
in food
reading the menu
making a purchase
paying
for a meal

blitzed through
the drive through

no standing
on ceremony
waiting for anyone

this we all
saw
at the fast food outlet

the Universe screaming by
must have
thought us unreal

a crazy
hallucination

SPECIES

maybe

as they

deepen

these divides
and dichotomies
are

not going to plunge the world
into civil war
upon civil war

no
   we could
find ourselves
            saved from self-
annihilation by the advent
of the
    simple, planet-saving,
evolutionary solution

allowing us
to species-split along
all seams,
do the most natural thing

become
as many kinds of hominid
as there are stars
in the firmament

since it seems impossible
that such an
outcome

will scarcely allow
us to
treat each other worse
than we
do now

or as
unequally, unjustly, and, yes,
genocidally

THANK YOU

thank you

I got your unsolicited
take on
global affairs and
current geopolitics

brilliant!
beautiful!

a masterstroke: who
would have thought
it was
all so simple, just
so obvious

and to think all this
from one
without a brain, who
never
opened a book

defies the limit
of the human imagination

BALLROOM

we Brits (was once Brit)
two centuries ago
torched
your White House

but now
the special relationship
all is forgiven
all is
forgotten

and now, anyway, you
hard at work
knocking it down
(Donald confesses to
loving that sound)

but soon
to be revised, restored,
resurrected
into a glorious ballroom,
divinely beautiful
fit not
just for a King
but for a god

a people’s palace, open
to all
and sundry just
so long
as they be corporate, so
long as they bank billions

fantastic fever dream structure
that simply
pulls out all the stops

promises to give you
space to
express yourself to
trip the light
fantastic
waltz, tango, whiskey, Charlie,
delta

enough floor to
park your wings on
(returning from
street
ICE sortie)
enough
to put the
Enterprise
to shame

help
fix the
Governance of America

that no one
will
dance
out of step
play
different tune,

mess
with the waltz

rewrite
the text of this sacred script

that gave
us the blueprint for
this insatiable dream

RECKONING

they thought
it was
a stone

they thought
it was a ball
of ice
and dust

and now the word
whispered under breath
is Van
Neumann probe

skulking
behind the Sun
artificial
minded
self
replicating
millions of years old
millions
of years
ahead of us

perhaps on
collision course about
to join us
in our orbit

following
dead reckoning

here
for a reckoning

wish we
had come up with
that dark forest theory

decades
ago

THE 3I ATLAS POEMS

NEIGHBOUR

my neighbour
is sitting on his verandah

hoping, waiting
for a personal visit
from 3I ATLAS

imagining it will help
him crush
his enemy, me
in our current
yard-border war

he wonders
how advanced it be
whether it be
alien
artificial intelligence
or beyond conception

and whether
after they have disposed of
with contemptuous ease
and outlandish cruelty

they will
load him up for guided
trip to
the stars

explaining everything
exhaustively in
at least
one of
our eleven
official languages

whilst he
sinks brandies and coke
through
wormhole after
wormhole

as his mind
and territorial ambitions

in parallel expand

to landholding planet-
size
if not entire galaxy itself

****

piece of
space rock
encroaching

if that be the correct verb
for thing absolutely
shunting it

fastest of the insanely fast
top of its class

which
speed and
basically everything else

our state of the art
Maths and Physics
can
say nothing about

every thesis and
theorem instantly
black holed

pure nickel
pure nickel
not even conceivable unless
metallurgy manufactured

Nature
caught us napping
never told us
how much out
there is
left field

things like that
keen to just fly by
take
a good luck at us
(though
without brain, without
eyes

probabilistic freak out
presumably most certainly)

****

WOW!

The “Wow” signal was a strong, narrowband radio signal detected in 1977 by Ohio State University’s Big Ear radio telescope. It lasted 72 seconds and was notable for its intensity and frequency, matching that of neutral hydrogen. Initially, many thought it could be a transmission from extraterrestrial life, but recent research suggests it was likely caused by a natural phenomenon. Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb claims that the point of origin of the Wow sign coincides with the trajectory of interstellar comet/visitor CI ATLAS, arguing that there is a 99% likelihood that CI ATLAS was the source of this signal.

wow!
so much to talk about
so
little to see

thanks to the space
agencies shutdown
thanks to
information control

a silence like
in deep space (remember
the Alien film tagline?)
in space you
cannot here
the flustered physicists
fumble their screams

when they release
the pictures they are
hiding,
hoarding
(not wishing for paradigms
to crack wide open)

going to have to
rewrite the text book
take a serious inventory
of our
own anomalies

3I listening, observing,
as we
are the ones that sublimate

sad to see
    the possible end of
so much fantasy,
speculative fiction

this
whatever it is
come to
enquire what
is wrong with
our wiring
what in our engineering
could have
    gone so haywire
become so
   utterly shame-faced

the year of the snake (my
year) sending its
biggest anaconda
possibly about to
unravel its coils
decelerate to our speed
sling-shooting by
the Sun
at perihelion (superconjunction)

time to
play chicken, say hello
head-on

then feel free to ask it
why such odd outgassing
what
it did with its tail

before
    (following the cliche
enshrined
in the convention)
it ask
   to be taken
to our leader (assuming
they could
not possibly
     mean Trump)

and now you tell me
Professor Avi
that
this be the author
of the WOW! radio message
that
earth-shattering cosmic howl
there back in
the silver
jubilee anarchy punk era

thing from
Sagittarius here
playing a guitar riff
(fuzz-pedal)
upon
our cognitive dissonance

coming to cast aspersions on
our back
tracking sense
of trajectory

or so
they do tell us
those channeling its wave-length
if not
fuse us into
single starchild, over-
populate the galaxy
with
over eight billion

give us
the Kubrick monkey reset
(shred
all nuclear pathways)

make us
look
cosmically stupid

(got to
be demonic anything
threatening to
re-shape us blockhead)

all our
PR teams working
flat out to
stymie
that eventuality

on
maximum alert
brand consumer capitalist
Earth to
be saved at all costs

Stairway
to Heaven?

wow!

Xclosest we are ever
going to get to
angelic
music of the spheres