by Mark Pirie
meet the beings that tomorrow is built on
here you are now in person reading every word
16
Alan Brunton
F/S
All of the sun’s radiant debris passes through us
and neutrinos on a voyage through the universe
that lasts millions of years smash through us
and we don’t even blink, it takes all our time
to live our lives. It’s over.
The intergalactic beings talked about everywhere,
the reps of Planet X, have rendezvoused
with Earth to prepare us for the trip to Nowhere.
Not for the fi rst time. They came before on
such a night as this, before the zero-zero era,
to meet the priests of a fungal cult
with whom they had been exchanging
inter-planetary emissions. That meeting
with those Homos in their cold catacomb
35,000 years ago was the birth of the sacred.
After that hot night, weird old ant-men
fanned out among the population in their rags,
lighting lamps of mammoth fat
that fl uttered like matches do
when you take a shortcut through the gloom
and in the fuzzy beams drank blood
in their fury straight from the hearts
of wild animals; they ascended to galaxies
you can only see from ladders,
other worlds with fragrant pastures.
Survivors of the cult contacted me personally
in September, 1987. They clutched me
though we were strangers – You have come back,
they wept, for another night of mushrooms!
Somewhere between Bordeaux and Paris.
There will be fragrant pastures, they cried,
and nights with you
on the journey to the Fourth Age.
17
Harvey Molloy
Nanosphere
The Enemy of the World
watery eyed, unkempt,
fi nally captured after months in a hole.
A lab coat prods his back dentures
with a disposable spatula. How
slow and compliant the prisoner moves
like a rest home inmate.
In this cosmos his capture
shall be eclipsed by news
of the accidental discovery of the end of time
as weightless above this earth
from the station console
Irina checks the Doppler shifts
from the Sombrero, Andromeda, closer Tau Ceti.
Aware of the pressure of the moment
she pauses to gaze at the withered fi ngers
of a passing river delta
then tells Control her fi nal confi rmation:
the expansion is over and the big crunch has begun
the slow seven billion year retrenchment
from universe to nanosphere.
Her news crosses the twittering
of the only known radio intelligence:
18
0800 chatline numbers
psychic advice lines
impending Serbian elections
weather updates
body counts
Chinese operas
Marilyn’s slow turn in a hall of mirrors
Chico & the Man.
The day’s journeying calls roll out
within the bounded horizon of a vast contracting dot.
There is only so much time. And time is running back.
The children watch television in the dark.
19
Meliors Simms
Two Kinds of Time
In some universes
time is experienced as linear.
Individuals move through their lives
cutting a track into their possibilities
and paving it into permanence behind them.
Aware only of the winding road they have chosen,
looking backwards down the line from now to birth
looking forward into the obscure thicket of the future
sometimes, peripherally aware of a bare hint
of what if’s as what isn’t.
In some universes
time is experienced as a plane.
Beings move around their existence
as an intimate landscape
treading and retreading every possibility.
Learning their lives as a farmer learns her land,
choosing every choice
exploring every opening,
until through preference
a rut is worn in the familiar
a dwelling in just one favourite moment or cycle of moments a resting place from their endless wanderings.
When you sleep
these universes meet in your dreams.
Time leaks across the boundaries
so you can know a little
of the strange ways of linearity or planearity;
whichever is most unfamiliar to you.
20
Jack Perkins
Out of Time
A long time ago
in another dimension,
there wasn’t enough time
to let the future happen
at normal speed.
So everything kept happening
faster and faster until all
the future was nearly
happening at once.
Imagine living a lifetime
in a split second
no wonder there was a big
BANG
When everything did happen at once.
In no time, the future exploded
creating our universe
and it’s taking time
to space things out,
14 billion years so far.
Trouble is,
my birthdays
keep getting
closer together.
21
Jacqueline Crompton Ottaway
Black Hole
Massive objects distort
space and time
weighty problems obscure
the present moment
time coordinate t is infi nity
wind rustles the trees
She hovers on the brink
of a frozen star
horizons are sitting still
the singularity lies in her
future
there’s no way she can
avoid it
22
Tim Jones
Good Solid Work
We’ll laugh at this world one day.
It was all a simulation, we’ll say –
nodding our virtual heads
smiling our virtual smiles –
why didn’t we spot it before?
Nature could never
have come up with the emu
and the hammerhead shark was clearly a clue.
We talk without moving our lips, mind to mind.
Quantum theory’s the clincher.
Don’t sweat the small stuff, so those in charge
left the edges fuzzy
let the smallest particles
roam where they may.
Still, they did some things well –
the roots that riddled the ground
the rush of wind in the pines
the pressure of our children’s hands.
Good work, we’ll say, good solid work
nodding our virtual heads
smiling our virtual smiles
turning our eager faces to the soft electron rain.
23
Apocalypse Now
John Dolan
The Siege of Dunedin
Katyushka volley from a launcher on the Hocken
Arcs out toward their lines
On the black slope of Cargill.
They always answer
Promptly. Fireworks tonight –
Anoth
er free performance of interactive,
Monumental art.
The city lives for these late shows,
Red and green tracers lacing
Christmas stitches on the slopes. Every
Random horror makes Dunedin
More beautiful – the black djinns of smoke
Rising from what was once Barnett’s,
Hit last week, still burning. Somewhere
On the back slope of Roslyn, a villa
Has become this fi ne black scarf
Tossed over the city’s shoulder.
And love, love has come at last
To the dank alleys of Dunedin.
Love is everywhere: the big clouds
Sink gently like a penguin female
To meet the pillars of smoke. Birth-rates rise
To meet the casualty climb; we sing more
And drink less. Lonely crones smile
Every time a shell seeks them.
Couples fi lling sandbags on the Brighton trenches
Mate and marry
Overnight. The gulls hurry
Along like couriers, urged
By the warming wind. It gets so hot
In a city besieged! Dunedin
27
Was cold – we struggle to remember
That now. Everyone inside the perimeter
Is warm and quick, roaring out
‘Stand by Me,’ that song the All Blacks sang
In Gore’s last desperate week.
No one needs beer or rugby now;
Enough for us the songs, the coupling
In rubble, and the pillars of smoke –
So beautiful! Half-mile-high
Battlefl ags, billowed in the wind!
28
David Eggleton
Overseasia
The soldiers of fortune now gathering
at Tropical Motel, President Drive, Boot Hill,
have been denounced as war criminals
by the new manager of the Buddhist
Ice Cream Parlour, whose FRO-ZEN
is a bestseller amongst steroid dealers.
Seizing on Inuit intuition,
venture capitalists, phoning in the performance,
invest aggressively in a fi scal epic
of titanic whale blubber futures, primed to go ape
and eating away at global nose cartilage,
on a journey to a satellite in meltdown.
El Niño’s swoosh mark caresses islands,
squeezes Scud missiles out of Africa,
vaporises a trillionaire,
before coming to rest on internet’s home-page
for fertility drug octuplets and fetal abuse survivors,
The Spermicide Girls: Posy Rash and friends.
In the City of the Plastic Tits,
in the Suburb of Golden Pompadours,
as fl uorocarbons mist the atmosphere,
Joggers of the Apocalypse don’t turn a hair,
when a bulging breastduct drips
on shimmering haystacks of milkshake straws.
29
Beneath Milan Station’s vaulting cupola,
with glossy endorsement by the blushing parquetry,
Ebola models a straitjacket by Versace,
lately ascended to Heaven, a beatifi c surf Nazi,
pursued by a fl ying wedge of paparazzi,
who, falling, splinter the fi ne inlaid marquetry.
Fruitbat terrorist CHE Guava’s bloody fi st-print,
glue-fumed, laser-fi xed, bar-coded, is logo’d
onto the collectable plastic carrier bags
of all respectable blood banks,
as, while splatter fests fl ex their can’t-resist muscle,
Healthcares greet the new Lord of the Corpuscle.
30
Alistair Te Ariki Campbell
Looking at Kapiti
Sleep, Leviathan, shouldering the Asian
Night sombre with fear, kindled by one star
Smouldering through fog, while the goaded ocean
Recalls the fury of Te Rauparaha.
Massive, remote, familiar, hung with spray,
You seem to guard our coast, sanctuary
To our lost faith, as if against the day
Invisible danger drifts across the sea.
And yet in the growing darkness you lose
Your friendly contours, taking on the shape
Of the destroyer – dread Moby Dick whose
Domain is the mind, uncharted, without hope.
Without hope, I watch the dark envelop
You and like a light on a foundering ship’s
Masthead the star go out, while shoreward gallop
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
31
Bill Sewell
The World Catastrophe
when the clouds began to
gather on the seventh day
the people knew a tremendous
thunderstorm was on the way
so they hurried (and why not?)
under cover till it was over
when the water edged up
to their necks on the tops
of the highest mountains
they knew there was a future
for aquatic creatures only –
all this came to pass
in the days before rainbows:
but what signs to expect
when fever sweeps the world
swollen glands & putrid boils
corpses heaped on wagons
rats slithering everywhere
and a muffl ed bell tolling?
when huge metallic spiders
stride across the land
over pub & church & corner-shop
incinerating in an instant
all that’s organic & in motion?
32
when the trees revolt at last
pull themselves up by the roots
and advance (a camoufl aged army)
out of their parks & squares
to hoist us up with their branches?
and the self-infl icted wound:
a cowboy astride a falling drum
the possibility so long sustained
that men can even bear it:
on the vast illuminated map
the moving dots move closer:
no rainbow but a monstrous cloud
accumulating into space
the fountains of the deep
and the windows of heaven
fouled & dusted forever –
(yet even now a ball of fi re
may be quietly altering course
to cut across earth’s orbit).
33
Rachel McAlpine
Satellites
I’ve been thinking about the migraine
as a game of Space Invaders,
or something jazzier, say Phoenix or Galaxians.
Mission: destroy all aliens, no matter how cute.
Those lights on the angular move
through tunnel vision,
that droop in the energy level and that sense
of stumbling, and all that jagged prettiness
lasering in on you alone,
a social worry in a secret club.
And nothing beats the migraine psyche
when your fi nger’s on the button:
you push and push for a better score
and when you hit the top, you’re so
ashamed, it’s just not good enough.
Four thousand four hundred
satellites
are slung around the earth.
It’s now offi cial: over the rainbow
there’s a lot of military stuff.
Now wouldn’t that give you a headache?
The city’s electric profi le waits
for bombs to turn into birds
who will bomb the beautiful skyline.
We’re all set up to invade
ourselves from space.
&n
bsp; 34
We who suffer love the drama.
We wouldn’t give it up for health or peace.
And think what we’ve achieved –
how nearly perfect we’ve become
before the twenty-cent bits run out
and the game is over.
35
David Eggleton
60-Second Warning
The President pops one off
and the Pacifi c goes nuclear,
you cannot sound the all-clear,
you must obey this nightmare.
Hot fl ash, cold sweat, no, no, not yet.
The hottest holiday you’ve ever had.
Executives execute their orders,
a cryptic message from a birth controller.
No time for a funeral director,
no time for a quality coffi n,
vaporised as you walk the dog,
incinerated as you saw that log.
Quick exit for a tormented teenager,
fi nal curtain for a Frank Sinatra impersonator.
Red Alert. Reject. Danger. Danger.
King Kong is pounding on his tits
as the world gets blown to bits.
The Girl From Ipanema meets the Man From Rio
for one last samba beneath the sun.
It cost a bomb for that plutonium blonde.
Televise that face, watch this space.
Scrape the skin off the walls.
Phenomenal! Phenomenal!
Radioactive Tahitian miss,
on the face of it she’s hit, she’s hit.
Moruroa you evil genius,
your hell’s teeth mouth spews fried fl uorescent fi sh.
A love song turns to a hate story,
all God’s children in the car park are bound for Glory.
Go-getter grannies shoot up an atomic brew.
36
Chain-smoking, chain-reaction existentialists cease to exist.
A home computer terminal spells zeros;
there are no nuclear holocaust heroes.
On another planet,
across a universe of voids,
are the megaton ruins of the Aucklandoids.
O, it is I, Neutronhead.
O, it is they, the dehumanised dead.
Major Accident and General Emergency,
like some mistake of the brain,
dance on the graves of the Kids from Fame
in a South Island Landscape Still Life with Acid Rain.
Angels turn to angel dust,
baby rainbows burst.
Close to home and closing in,
the impossible dream is doing its worst.
37
Meg Campbell
The End of the World
The shining cuckoo sings,
‘It will surely be like this.
Just an ordinary day
suddenly turned nasty.
Grey sky and an oily sea.
The sun will suddenly move
in a crazy fashion.
You
won’t
believe your eyes. But, then,
free falling you’ll die
without a murmur.
The end
of the world is brief, ’ sings