skonen_blades

I’m convinced time has a slope
and that the future has gravity
We slide downhill regardless
of ‘to be or not to be.’
There is no choice
and the slings and arrows here
are just precipitation.

These arrows lodge,
Take up rooted residence in our chests.
Blind love guiding cupid’s hand,
seeing nothing but bullseyes.
The arrows swell and bloat into anchors
after soaking up time
like forgotten drowned bodies

These slings,
(The stones long gone into rivers for polish)
allergic to Goliaths
lost by now-old Davids
Become hammocks and blankets
for our many past hearts

Shakespeare’s question
turns to unanswered moss
as we persevere
regardless of the choice.
We Theseus through our future
calm and friendly zombies
shocked by haunted after images
of our own ghosts
we can no longer relate to.

We are legion.
Sculpted by errors and trials.
a calm descent of existence
Learning as we go

Go

Gone




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There's an event called A Day at the Races where poets go to the horse races and they each pick a horse name at random from each of the seven races and then use that name as a prompt for a poem. At the end of the day, we read out the 'winning' poem from each race and then whatever other poems we think turned out pretty good. It's a fun day.

This is poem 07 from race 07 and my horse's name was Timeless Shrug.

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Timeless Shrug

Every adolescent
From the beginning of time
From before recorded history
And far into the future
(Until humans are changed into something else
or removed entirely)

Every one of them
Has a timeless shrug

A twitch of indifference

They join every other teen
In an eternal
Timeless shrug continuum

I envy the timeless shrug
The up and down of shoulder bones
That Atlas shrug of clavicles
A dismissal beyond the fifth dimension

As the shoulder hangs at the apex of its motion
Time pauses and stops
Accordioning across millenia
As every young shrugger
Joins in unison and power
An engine of not knowing and not caring
Piston shoulders rising and falling

With the same motion

That angels use to flap their wings




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If you fall in love the same way every time
You might only be falling in love with yourself
Love is an amphibious tiger
That can do an impression of a shark
As easy as it can ambush you with
500 pounds of purring
Plato said that love was insanity
An amplification of reality
That charges every interaction
With the kind of electricity that powers both
Spotlights and electric chairs
Love is a flat unicorn
Able to be letter-slipped under the most locked of doors
It can chameleon into something
Succubus irresistible
Making you laugh as the wax in your wings melts away
It can be of the order Ephemeroptera
Living for less than a day
Or it can pyramid for millennia
Long after the earth has shed you
Maybe a frequency that can only be detected
During a full blue moon during an aurora borealis
On a solstice during an odd-numbered leap year
As rare and as trusting as a Dodo bird
It can flaunt snake-shed skin
And call it evening wear
Some people are painted in targets
Exhausting cupid’s ammunition over and over
Frustrated by the constant experience of it
And some walk radar invisible
Begging to be used
Love is as unique
As the combination of the two people feeling it
Never the same twice
And changing over time
If it isn’t,

It might be a mirror



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It’s time to unwind
To eat the finish line and spit out the seeds
To become one with the warm bath
Melt into the flow of time
To unclench your eyelids
Letting your entire cup empty
Know that you’re rich
That you’ve won
because you’re alive
Take that slow train
It’s time to look out the window
The air reeks of roses in the rain
The clack of wheels over tracks
As slow as your heartbeat
The deep shag carpet of your soul
Snuggles feet into stopping and stretching
Monkey-spreading in sensual luxury
It’s time to sink without struggle
Surrender to the river
Listen passively to your world
Be a camera that doesn’t record
Revisit your mind as a stranger would
A passing anthropologist ghost
A neurosurgeon mime
With fingers that cradle your brain
The weight has always been too heavy
So let it go
Subsume yourself
In being here
By not being here
And let yourself be done





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I can remember them and no one else can. I’m trying very hard to figure out why.

Time travelers. They walk around among us. Lots of them. Weird costumes, strange tech, and all kinds of bizarre customs from the different centuries.

I’m looking at one right now. Huge shoulders and skinny legs, bright orange jumpsuit, one misshapen cybernetic eye. He’s laughing with a friend of mine.

They talk to us and interact with us. They talk to each other and they interact with each other.

But none of them remember. The time travelers remember what they see when they come back here but they forget each other. And none of us remember our interactions with them at all.

Time travelers cause contradictions in the timeline so it seems the universe rewrites our memories. We can talk to a traveler for an hour but the minute we look away, it flees from our mind. Like the rewriting of reality in a dream from one scene to the next. No alarm bells ring in our head because our memories get filled in with something that makes sense, that works with the timeline.

But not me. I talk to them and when I turn away, I remember the conversation clearly.

When I look at footage of Ghandi, I see clusters of travelers in the background. Every famous figure is crowded with these strange, bizarre, creatures from further up the timeline, all drinking in the scenery and forgetting about seeing each other.

I’ve shown this footage to my friends. It’s not hard to find. Just any youtube clip of an icon will do. My friends see the figures, too. We talk about them. Then as soon as they look away or don’t pay attention for a second, they don’t remember what we were talking about. Not in a way that makes them thing anything’s strange. It’s very frightening.

I don’t know why I’m immune.

If it was going to have a huge impact in the future, you’d think I’d be the person mobbed with travelers. But I’m not.

But I figure if I’m the only person that remembers conversations with the future, I can use that to my advantage. Not just with getting sports scores and placing bets. But with actually brokering information between travelers. They remember what I say but they don’t remember what each other says. I can be a broker of information. A biological e-mail server for time travelers.

For the first time, I’ll telling one now about my abilities.

He’s telling me a message to pass on to someone named Harakina from two hundred years earlier that him.

When he pops out of this timeline back to his with a wave and a nod, I brace myself for forgetfulness or cosmic punishment.

Nothing happens. I remember the message perfectly.
I’m waiting for Harakina right now. I really hope this isn’t a bad idea.




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It was a different time.

Small mouths were all the rage.
People drank coca-cola openly on golf courses.
The army had just gotten into the remix business
Gene splicing was making a comeback
And deep in Nevada, a teenage was thinking about his future in his father’s sequin factory.
And revolution.

Cadbury had just release their Sunset bar
Bladed frisbees were banned
Bananas had been legalized for six months
The ‘non-joke’ was all the rage
The ‘perfume challenge’ had yet to claim any lives
And deep in Grover’s Bend Arizona, a grandfather had an idea for a new currency.
It would shatter the building blocks of wealth.

The first glow-in-the-dark frog rolled off the assembly line
Frank Sinatra tattoos were just getting underway
The half-skirt had just debuted in Milan
Car Crash Symphonies were starting tour number one
And deep in North Compton, a five-year-old ballerina was about to alter the course of human history. With the power of dance.

The three-marriage-max law had just been passed in California
Dangling participles were now fineable offences in the Midwest
The young-adult genre Climate Punk was only at volume one
The poles were still white
And deep in Moncton, New Brunswick, Jacob Bronwen made a startling discovery through the university telescope.
A discovery that would redefine what it meant to be human.

Viral possession was about to hit the club scene hard
Gym births were the second most popular form of midwifery
Bicameral Mind was the number-one hit for the second week in a row
Skiing deaths were at an all-time low
And deep in Fort Wadalai in Northern Uganda, Akello Kizza has just thought of a new form of government.
One that would unite the world.



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I walk into the room and see myself there on the bed.
Dead or sleeping, I can’t tell.
I’m scared.
I hear a footstep behind me.
I look behind me and see myself walking up to the room.
We make eye contact and I quickly look away.
I look back at the bed.
The body in the bed opens its eyes and frantically gestures for me to get under the covers.
I dive into the bed with him.
As I do, he scurries under the blankets to hide.
He hides very well because when I look down at myself, it looks like I’m the only person in the bed.
I take his place just as the other me comes into the room.
I close my eyes and pretend to be asleep.
It occurs to me that the me in the doorway might actually think I’m dead if I do this.
I open my eyes just in time to see that doorway me is scared of something behind him.
I motion quickly and quietly with my hands, telling him to get into bed with me.
He does.
I dive under the covers just as I hear the third me get to the doorway and
I open my eyes and I’m in a hallway.
At the end of the hallway, I can see the door to my bedroom.
There’s someone standing in the doorway.
It’s hard to tell from behind but it really looks like me.
He’s wearing the same clothes as I am.
As I start to walk towards him, he turns and sees me.
Shocked, he turns back, staring into the bedroom.
He leaps away from the door into the bed.
I can’t see him anymore but I hear some tussling of bedcovers.
I walk up to the doorway of the room.

I walk into the room and see myself there on the bed.



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It was a beautiful night to watch the stars go out.

The grass rustled softly in the wind. Small waves scudded across the pond as other families unpacked night time picnics. The clouds had been removed for the viewing so we could see the beautiful night sky in all its milky, glittering glory.

The man beside me is over 700 years old. He has two friends here that are the same age but they all look like they’re about thirty. I call him grandfather but I’m told there are a whole lot of ‘greats’ in there. He is a war hero. He is the reason we’re here. He speaks to me in ancient English. My mind translates.

“When humans discovered FTL travel, we came up on a lot of people’s radar. We had unknowingly joined a club and that club had enemies. Immediately, we were contacted and drafted into the conflict that raged across the stars.

We proved instrumental. In a strange twist of fate, our bodies were more resilient than most and our minds were able to withstand the chaotic dimensional tortures of n-space without the need for anesthetic. All the other races needed to go blind through the wormholes. Not us. We could pilot a course.

The shattering of reality outside the jumpships doesn’t squeeze the human brain. Being all meat and being stupid works to our advantage. When we see something we don’t understand outside the portholes and viewscreens, we can just shrug and go about our business. We can turn our inquisitiveness on and off. That is rare, apparently. Even automated ships can’t adjust properly in n-space.

So we were asked to pilot ships with sunkiller weapons to end the war once and for all. The good half of the galaxy depended on it, we were told.

We bent reality, folded space, and hopped in and out of the fabric of spacetime with technology customized especially for us. Zipping in and out of our dimensional plane, we supernovaed 23 suns and genocided 800 enemy races. We were successful. If there had been surviving enemies, we would be infamous.

But there weren’t.

The good guys won, kid. That’s why you’re here. And your mother and everyone on this planet and thousands of others.

Now look up.”

I looked up into the night sky.

“We jumped around an awful lot during our mission, kid. We bent a lot of light. For me, it happened a few weeks ago but those lights up there,” he motioned with his hand to one part of the sky, “Y’see, they’re 700 light years away. The light from our battle is just reaching your planet now. That’s how I’m 700 years old by your clocks. Now watch.”

My grandfather looked at an ancient chronometer on his wrist and then raised his eyes up to the sky. Everyone around us did the same.

It took an hour but I could see some of the stars up in the sky grow and fade, blooming and folding away into nothing. Constellations losing teeth and limbs.

It’s been peaceful for us humans and the other races in the coalition since the slaughter. Seven centuries of peace.

My grandfather and his fellow soldiers cheered and drank smelly liquids that came from their ship. I was told we don’t have any of what they were drinking here on our planet.

The rest of us just watched the stars go out like a reverse fireworks show, feeling sadness instead of joy.

My grandfather and his friends are laughing and crying at the same time.




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I never want to come back but here I am again, watching the massacre of my ancestors.

Back in these times, they used what was at hand to execute a mass of people. There were no guns yet, no chemists yet to produce a lethal gas and there were no buildings in the village big enough that my people could be locked into and burnt.

The attackers were merely using spears, torches, pitchforks and pointed sticks to corral my ancestors up to the edge of a very high cliff outside of town. Soon, they will force them off the cliff on a long trip to the rocks tearing through the violent, cold waves below.

I invented the world’s first time machine. I have found that it’s quite easy to change history.

Once.

I went back in time, intending to help my ancestors become rich. I gave them patented ideas years before they should have been invented. I explained myself as a traveling businessman bringing them ideas from the mainland. My ancestors lived in a village outside of Ireland.

They talked openly about their inventions, confident that they could sell them to their fellow villages or at least barter for passage to the mainland to set up shop at some of the larger markets.

There were suspected of being in league with the devil and sentenced to death. There was also not a lot of due process back then.

My ancestors were treated like diseased blood cells. They were surrounded and driven to messy end.

Do you understand? Everyone with my last name was herded to a sharp drop. They all died. I know it. I’ve watched it fifty-six times now.

And here I am. I still exist. I’m hovering near the cliff edge and I cannot control my machine.

Every time I try to leap back to the present, I am brought back to this moment in time. When I try to go back further to right my wrongs, the same thing happens. I can’t leave my craft to change what happens and no one appears to be able to see me or my machine floating in the air.

It’s as if I’m doing penance for my crime on some universal space-time level.

And there they go. Nudged off the edge of the cliff like so many reluctant lemmings. Men, women, and children screaming their way down to the unforgiving ocean.

Soon enough, the villages go back home, satisfied at a job well done and a crisis averted. The bodies of my people lie dead and broken in the undulating surface of the cold atlantic.

The cliffs are silent. And I disappear go back and see it all again.


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It’s like the universe was shattered once and then badly glued back together. The place is filled with cracks. At below-light speeds, it doesn’t really matter. The cracks are dimensional so anything sublight can’t detect or interact with them. Earth itself even passed right through one in 1987 and no one even noticed. It was until we got ourselves detection technology that we realized what had happened by tracking it back through the decades. Just a humourous curiousity for scientists, really. A story to tell the populace to prove how safe they were and not to panic.

But anything supralight? That’s a different story.

They can be detected and avoided but they move. Ask the Titanic, right? You have to be on it. You have to be hyper vigilant. The computer takes care of a lot but you have to keep goosing the arrays, always pinging the void just to be sure.

The cracks have tributaries. They make the cracks fuzzy with hair-line spline, like lightning bolts with fur and they’re the length of universes in some cases.

One theory is that the entire universe is always breaking down and then rebuilding. Like a giant heart beating with impossibly-long heartbeats. Except that errors have crept into the system and they’re getting worse. Either that or our universe is the only one that’s ever existed but it’s been damaged from the start.

Our ship is caught in a crack now. We were going 10c. We should have known better and been paying more attention but we didn’t realize that the crack had turned. Just a little but it was enough to flypaper us in. We nicked a tributary and it pulled us into the main shaft of the canyon. We’re stuck in a pocket of subtime.

It’s called the Hall Effect.

We are removed from the time stream. Or rather, we brought some of our time with us into the crack. It’ll dwindle and we’ll start to slow down. We’ll never come to a complete stop but we’ll get slower and slower and slower until our time half-lifes itself to something close to infinity. The horrible part of it is that we ourselves won’t perceive it.

To us, time will look like it’s going along normally while around us, the universe will trickle down into the heat death that’s always been predicted.

We’ll get to see if it’s true. We’re trapped here until the universe ends. Luckily, it’ll only take a few hours by our perception while trillions of years pass by outside the crack.

Pilots and crews like us are big believers in reincarnation.




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