Darwin – poems 2 die for

DARWIN 4

I like
to think of myself
of a Victorian naturalist
shot out
of a cannon
into the future
through
space and time into
distant and
bizarre
Goldilocks Zone

to find
myself
taking a stroll like
Imperial British Gentlemen

walking on the
surface of an
alien planet
they
happened to
name after me

freshly equipped with
all my conversions

retractable legs, compound
eyes, downloaded intelligence
and full
hover capabilities
carrying me across the
needle-spine badlands,
the acid seas and lakes
of mercury

looking for
the planet’s raw nerve,
scouring every niche
for signs of
life, impending
intelligence,
hints of the biological

foundations of
new civilizations and
their
inevitable cities
of deep, incandescent pain.

IF THE OCEAN

if the ocean
is anything to go by

abundance
of life forms can
be no garden
of Eden

that sincere English gentleman
categorizing beaks, making
all the measurements

seeing a big picture no one
had previously seen
purpose working
across a timescale unimaginable

dead on lucid
the mind evolved to see this
peering into the inexorable
mind and
heart of life

throwing all those arbitrary
constellations into an
extremity of quandry

playing havoc with all our
tales and fables, deepest
metaphors of design

MR DARWIN

MR DARWIN

the observation
became conjecture,
became hypothesis, became
theory, became
scientific truth
(most
assured of
truths)

but it was
when it became
metaphor that the world burned
burned
in the interests
of survival of the fittest

when extended into our
realm of analogy

a monstrous fitness
giving itself license to brutally contrive
rewrite the world

slaughter half
the species

in name of room to maneuver
space to
be

fresh habitat to colonize
build that new fantastic civilization

some of us always dreamt of
the rest, our worst
nightmare fear

this on the supreme strength
of the
shape of a scale
length of a
feather