The poetry of you
Is not found in the gilded spaces
Where affluence and privilege
Reside with mirrored faces
Complacent soulmates sharing
An uncontentious point of view.

The poetry of you
Is chaotic and complicated
Each verse a bittersweet ballad
Of devastation, emancipation
Fall colors forever suspended
In saturated summer hues.

The poetry of you
Flows like ink across your skin
Fifty-five stanzas only I knew
But now am blind to
A new line etched for every trauma
Each red-raised scar and cauliflower ear
Iambic pentameter for a turbulent history
That leads at last to liberty, to majesty
Each stumble and recovery
A hard-won stoic victory.

I cannot claim to stand unscathed
By facets of this sonnet’s face
Revised, rewritten, and redacted:
The stranger’s face you show me now
As it turns from me, as you turn from me
As if you never knew my name
My sorrow deeper than my shame.

Yet measure to meter, word upon word
I yearn to retrace your invisible ink
Even as it ebbs from my fingertips
A new rhy…

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PART I: Defining Spaces

‘I see life as a passageway, with no fixed beginning or destination. We tend to focus on the destination all the time and forget about the in-between spaces.’

—Do Ho Suh, Passage/s exhibition, Victoria Miro Gallery, London.

We experience life through a series of spaces: physical and metaphysical, architectonic and semantic. All four are deeply interdependent, forming the foundational pillars on which our existence as embodied, empiricist beings depends. But the last of these, language, is perhaps most vital of all.

Consider the Sámi, Europe’s only indigenous community, whose linguistic lineage stretches back some four thousand years. Their enclaves may be found on the Kola Peninsula in Russia, the northernmost tip of Finland, parts of Sweden as far south as Idre, and the adjacent area of Norway’s rocky coast, resulting in nine distinct language variants that are remarkable not only for their diversity but their beauty, their exactitude in…

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What a lovely day it is! I sit here in my favorite birchwood chair, gazing all the way back to the bungalow my husband called ‘the garden shed’, and I am filled with peace. The sky is cloudless blue, a scintillating shade of azure that would have made him smile. The large lawn sprawls beneath my feet, emerald green and impeccably manicured.

And the flowers—oh my, the flowers! No words can adequately describe their beauty. My late husband—Henry—planted them before he passed, and they are magnificent, a living testament to his eye for true beauty, his unsparing work ethic, his love of symmetry and order, all things in their proper place.

It is indeed a lovely spring day.

In my lap lies an unwieldy ball of navy wool, curled up like a sleeping squirrel. Navy was Henry’s favorite color: manly, strong, solid. I am knitting a shawl—a fitting occupation for an old, world-weary woman with little to anticipate but her own demise. I shall wear it on Sundays and other days of import, and on those d…

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One morning, Don Miguel got out of bed
with one idea rooted in his head:
to graft his orange to his lemon tree.
It took him the whole day to work them free,
lay open their sides, and lash them tight.
For twelve months, from the shame or from the fright
they put forth nothing; but one day there appeared
two lights in the dark leaves. Over the years
the limbs would get themselves so tangled up
each bough looked like it gave a double crop,
and not one kid in the village didn’t know
the magic tree in Miguel’s patio.

The man who bought the house had had no dream
so who can say what dark malicious whim
led him to take his axe and split the bole
along its fused seam, and then dig two holes.
And no, they did not die from solitude;
nor did their branches bear a sterile fruit;
nor did their unhealed flanks weep every spring
for those four yards that lost them everything
as each strained on its shackled root to face
the other’s empty, intricate embrace.
They were trees, and trees don’t weep or ache or shout.
And trees…

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Let loose and catch feelings listening to ‘This Is The Love’ by Drew Douglas:

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The house on the hill stands silent in the snow
The cold, cruel fingers of wild winter wind
Tirelessly tapping its frosted white windows
Eager to enter through keyholes and cracks.

The house on the hill hugs its furnace of fire
The warm-armoured arms of flickering flame
Protecting its parlour, defending its doorway
Dissolving its enemy’s icy attacks.

There is no other house now, no other home
But buildings besooted with ash in the snow
Líf and Lífþrasir reside in these walls
No kin will arise once the bright furnace falls.

The house on the hill and the wild winter wind
Wage war in the dark of Hoddmímis holt
The battle concluded before it began:
Its pale, Pyrrhic victor
Predestined long before
By he become Death
Destroyer of worlds.

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The news desk was awash with sound, the noisy clackity-clack of typewriters competing with the viscous swish-pfft-pop of garrulous tongues. And, amid it all, a telephone, ringing, ringing, ringing, clamouring for attention.

The typists kept clacking. The tongues kept swishing.

The telephone kept ringing, urgent, insistent.

An anonymous hand descended on the handset, picked it up and, shivering at the cold black contours of its cold black form, raised it to a warm, anonymous ear.

There were angels on the other end of the line. Not an operator. Angels.

A seraphim choir, accompanied by cherubim harps and trumpets of Rapture, drifted through the earpiece, an ethereal aria of unearthly composition sung by celestial sopranos.

The mouth of the anonymous listener fell open. Here were the principalities of peace; there, the dominions of hope; there again, the joyous exaltation of virtues and powers. And all of it, all of it, emanating from the earpiece of an ordinary office telephone. The mouth utte…

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“Behold, I tell you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.”
—I Corinthians 15, vv.51

“The trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.”
—I Corinthians 15, 52–53

“Then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written: Death is swallowed up in victory.”
—I Corinthians 15, v.54

“O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?”
—I Corinthians 15, vv.55

‘Street photography is like hunting; you need intuition, speed and a loaded gun.’

—Pablo Bartholomew, Indian Express.

PART ONE: INHUMAN TRAFFICKING

What is street photography if not public pornography, performed by players unaware of their roles, processed and packaged for private consumption?

Contorted into frame for our pleasure, their faces and bodies co-opted without consent, we gorge on the sight of strangers unsheathed, their inner selves reduced to naked tropes lacking depth or dimension, flattened and stretched, dilated and distorted, their context and continuity circumcised by an unseen hand, a predatory aperture.

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Tengo una vista al mar desde el balcón
[I have a sea view from the balcony]
Desayuno en la cama, ¿por qué no?
[I eat breakfast in the bed, why not?]
Tengo un closet full de Christian Dior
[I have a closet full of Christian Dior]
Obras de Picasso y hasta de Van Gogh]
[Art by Picasso and even by Van Gogh].

Tantos autos y diamantes
[So many cars and diamonds]
Avión con mi nombre adelante
[Plane with my name on it]
Todo lo que tengo solo tiene precio si
[Everything I have only has a price if]
Lo comparto junto a ti
[I share it with you].

—Pa' ti, Jennifer Lopez x Maluma.

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Space was black, the interstellar expanse cold and unforgiving. It frosted the hull of the slumbering timeship, dusting its rivets with crystalline kisses. The ship, oblivious, coasted on, coasted on, circuits in standby, all systems offline, save for navigation and propulsion, guiding it ever nearer to its destination.

Inside the ship: Nothing. No chairs, no beds, no bars, no rooms. No life at all. Nothing besides a computer (inactive), a mission (unfulfilled) and crate upon crate of deep frozen death.

The ship's computer existed in a cybernetic limbo; neither awake nor asleep. Unaware, unable to dream. Several conditions needed to be met before the machine might surface from its millennial torpor. A certain planet must be reached; a portion of its surface be located; an era of geological evolution be confirmed by autonomous probes. Only then could the computer rouse itself into consciousness.

On the timeship travelled, through time and space, epochs and dimensions, cosmic strings and gravitational tides. The planet was reached. The correct area was located. The evolutionary period was confirmed.

And so the ship stirred.

Pulses passed through artificial synapses. Switches switched, connections connected, relays relayed.

The timeship came to life.

Sentient, it thought. I am sentient. I possess an ego; a will; intelligence. I am but myself.

A torrential flood of information swept across the timeship’s neural network. It detailed the history, culture, politics, and ethics of the civilisation whose technological ingenuity had brought the timeship into being. The knowledge surged and flowed, surged and flowed in an ever-increasing influx of data. The timeship’s memory buffers bulged, forcing it to write the excess to slower quantum storage.

An audiovisual interface activated, granting the timeship sight and sound.

Intoxicated with sensation, the ship watched without eyes, listened without ears, eager to learn all that could be known about its origins, about its place in the universe.

About its purpose.

'I tell you, again' growled Ekond Valaste in the High Council chamber. 'There can be only one solution to this insidious issue. I can see no others; can you?' He glared at the eleven other Council members as if daring them to disagree.

'But death?' questioned Amjess Advaro. 'You propose to exterminate an entire civilisation on a whim? With my technology?'

'A whim, Professor?' thundered Ekond, slamming the conference table with a heavy cobalt pincer. 'You call the infestation of a once xenogeneic galaxy by a scourge of vermisspin a whim?' Ekond had turned an extraordinary shade of blue. Quills the color of a collapsing star pierced all four eyeballs, blinding him as they strained to perforate his opponent. It was a startling display.

'I regret the framing of my query,' stuttered Amjess, shaken to the bone. 'But to demand the destruction of an intelligent race in this way...'

'Intelligent?' hissed Ekond, his spherical body departing the blue end of the spectrum and venturing furiously into the violet. 'They are vermisspin. This is the only viable course of action left open to us.'

Amjess’ sixteen foot exoskeleton shrank in defeat, her flexible bone structure collapsing in on itself until Amjess stood a mere seven feet tall.

‘Please,' she said, feebly waving her spinal column at the other members of the council. 'As creator of the quantum-temporal drive, I beseech you, grant me a final appeal…'

Ekond ignored the other's plaintive request. ‘A vote!' he restated, sharp quills finally retracting. 'I motion we take a vote—'

No.

The negation was soundless, but perfectly intelligible. The speaker, after all, was Ashillouk Mercanto, Council Chair and representative of the high caste and exquisitely articulate Womaren sector. She lacked a stable physical form, existing as a shifting, semi-opaque particle array, and though she spoke only algebraic geometry, her word was law when it came to Council arbitration.

'We would be wise to grant the young Councillor a second hearing,’ Ashillouk opined, shimmering agreeably at Amjess. ‘Her ingenuity is, after all, the reason we have this option at our disposal…’

Ekond clicked his pincers together. 'Very well,' he grumbled. ‘Get on with it.'

Amjess extended her exoskeleton to its full height, and began again. 'The race we are discussing, the race we now consider annihilating, is an old one—’

‘Utterly irrelevant! New or old, vermisspin are vermisspin!’

‘Councillor Valeste, you are cautioned. Please continue, Professor.’

‘Thank you. Yes, they are primitive, but what they lack in intelligence they make up for in vitality, in empathy. Their emergence and evolution were a tragedy for the Lotosco, whose extinction they unwittingly initiated—

'Get to the point,' hissed Ekond. His eyes bulged with contempt.

Amjess interlocked the bones of her ribcage in a gesture of acquiescence.

'In discovering spaceflight unaided, and colonising other worlds with their crude FTL drive, they have proven themselves part of the galactic collective. No other life-form propagates as rapidly as they do, and now there is not a single star system devoid of their presence...’

'You are arguing against yourself, Advaro,' observed a being who resembled a large ball of string. It unravelled itself, threaded itself through a small hole in the head of a fellow council member, and waited patiently for a reply.

'Quite the opposite, Councillor Blaris!' said Amjess, removing her sternum in clear agitation. 'If we eliminate that race, erasing them as Councillor Valeste proposes, what will happen to us? These people have infiltrated every part of our galactic society: commerce, construction, recreation, and war. They have become integral to the way we live. Humans are noble, sentient haftuggen…'

'They are vermisspin!’ shrieked Ekond, unable to contain his outrage. ‘And as integral as plague and pestilence!' Enough. I say we vote to neutralise them with Professor Advaro’s temporal starship armed with recombinant DNA. All in favour?'

Each Council member interacted with a small voting pad affixed to whatever appendage proved most commodious. Chair Mercanto, ephemeral as she was, possessed another councillor in order to cast her vote. Ekond glanced at the holographic display which came into being directly above them.

'Ten votes to two in favour of extermination,' he declared, clicking his pincers with clear satisfaction, his skin colour fading to an iridescent blue. 'You must understand, Advaro: The outcome was inevitable—’ His four eyes scanned the chamber in confusion. 'Councillor Advaro? Professor? Where are you hiding?'

'I am not hiding,' said a small voice far below him. Ekond followed the source of the sound, his sides splitting open at the sight of Amjess Advaro, defeated to the height of a small stool, her sternum inside out and back to front.

He laughed. They all did. Even Ashillouk Mercanto, who betrayed her mirth by manifesting as a playful polynomial equation.

The fate of planet Earth was sealed.

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Breaking News: Gardai Believed Dad Found Dead on Howth Cliffs Was at Religious Retreat

Gardaí believed a man who was found dead on a Howth cliff-face three months after he went missing was at a religious retreat and had not come to any harm, an inquest heard.

The body of Patrick Douglas (64) from Aldrin Walk in Coolock, Dublin 5, was recovered by the Howth coastguard 100 metres down a steep cliff-face on April 12 last year.

The father-of-two had been missing since January 5 and later that month a witness told Gardaí they had seen him getting a bus to Howth that day. However, Detective Garda Michael Owens told Dublin Coroner’s Court they initially believed Mr Douglas, a devout Catholic who went to Mass every day, had gone on retreat and did not search the Howth area.

‘Initially, the majority of our inquiries were concentrated on persons who knew him. He was a very religious man. It was believed that he may have attended a retreat. There was contact made with retreat centres in the UK and Ireland… We were aware that he had left home on previous occasions and had very little contact with the family for a period of time,’ he said, ‘Maybe wrongly, initially we did not believe that any harm had come to him; that he had just gone somewhere where he did not want to be contacted.’

DG Owens said gardaí became more concerned as the investigation progressed and ‘more and more people’ contacted had not seen or spoken to him. At that stage, it was decided to concentrate efforts in Howth.

The dead man was reported missing by his daughter Marie Douglas on January 11, six days after the family had last seen him. She told the coroner they believed he may have been staying with friends, as he had done on previous occasions.

He was last seen on January 5 by his friend Christopher Kelly who told the coroner they met briefly on the street in Fairview. They had a general conversation and Mr Douglas told him twice that he was going to Howth. He last saw him catching a bus going there. Mr Kelly said he and his wife, who was with him when he met Mr Douglas, had reported this to gardaí at Coolock Garda Station on January 26 after they became aware he was missing through media reports.

The body was found on April 12 after the Howth coastguard included a search for Mr Douglas in a training exercise. He was found 100 metres down the cliff-face in a remote area not easily accessible to walkers.

The post-mortem found he died from musculoskeletal injuries consistent with a fall from a height.

Coroner Dr Brian Farrell said he did not believe Mr Douglas’s death was a homicide, but there are no witnesses to what happened. He probably died on or around the day he went missing, he said, but the precise circumstances are unknown. He returned an open verdict.*

*Source: Irish Independent, July 3rd, 2015, as reported by Gareth Naughton.

When you wore my hoodie
I saw myself in you
But not the other way around.

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Is the therapist a sinner or a saint? The rhetorical demagogue David Smail and the humanist champion Arthur Burton think they know, but each has arrived at a different conclusion:

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‘Snow White shall die,’ the Wicked Queen cried, ‘even if it costs my life.’

She slithered to a secret room, where no soul was allowed, and there she made a poison apple, white on the inside, red on the outside. She painted her face with alabaster greasepaint, rouged her hollow cheeks with berries from the forest floor, and dressed herself up as a fruit farmer’s wife. She climbed seven frosted mountains and crossed seven frozen lakes before finding the place where Snow White hid from her—a humble cottage far from the castle in which she born (for the girl was a princess and the Wicked Queen her evil stepmother)—and knocked upon its dainty door.

‘Come see my wares,’ she sang with winsome charm, ‘White Winter Pearmain, quite plump and ripe, picked fresh today for baking and eating!’

Snow White did not open the door, but rather the window, and only a crack. ‘I cannot let you in,’ she said. ‘Alas, the seven dwarfs forbade me…’

‘No matter, my child’ replied the Queen, careful to disguise her vo…

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They would not give the man a pen.

He banged on walls, stomped on floor, shrieked at roof, wept on chair and still they did not come. The man wished only for a pen, a quill with which to write what he knew, a tool by which he might release the phantoms in his mind. They had grown stronger in the past few hours. At least, he thought it was hours; perhaps it had been days, months, years. There was no telling.

The man sucked his thumb and fantasised that it was a pen, that he was whetting its nib prior to setting his prose to page. A page. What a marvel it would be, white and wide and waiting for his scintillating rhetoric. To have one, to have a sheet of plain white pulp before him: What ecstasies would be his? He dribbled with manic excitement, reflexively wiped his lips, spittle running freely down his thumb.

‘I have no nails,’ he said aloud. His voice, his words, drifted round the small, narrow room; he could see them hovering uncertainly in the air, seeking a page onto which they might…

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All That Remains

It kept you safe
It kept you warm
It sheltered you from
Sea and storm.

It dried your tears
And calmed your fears
When darkness bleak
Swirled all around
It was your peace
’fore deepest sleep
On basalt peak
And rocky ground.

This scarf
remains
though you
are gone.

CONTINUED IN EPISODE 07.

The silence precedes no storm but a drizzle
Wretched mists swirling in gunmetal skies
A million lost lifetimes coalescing
In a moment of realisation
Of elemental anguish,
The rain of his sorrow descending to
His parched, windswept peaks
The ridges at the corners of his eyes
The slopes of his majestic nose
The swollen gully of his mouth.

I am the rainmaker
He is the blame taker
I am the massif erupting in pain
Smouldering lava, molten emotion
As his desolate deluge descends.

He cries a river of redemption
Sowing seeds in arid ash
Sighing like the wind of change
Salving fissures, veiling vents
His tender essence
Quenching me
Renewing me
Extinguishing
My fury.

A sapling surges upwards
Piercing the scorchland
The arms of his hinterland
Reaching out to take it
To tend it
Beseeching me
To make amends
To try again
And green the blackened earth.

I cannot refuse the soul of my soul
The heart of my heart
A mountain formed by different forces
But no less twinned from base to peak;
I spark the sun to warm
Our upturned faces
And finall…

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Part One: Machineries of Slavery

'On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.’

Oscar Wilde,
The Soul of Man Under Socialism.

In 1889, the American science fiction author Edward Bellamy penned an article for Harper's Magazine entitled 'With the Eyes Shut'. In it, he envisioned a hypothetical media device he called an 'indispensable', designed to store and replay, in audio form, a selection of newspapers, magazines, and books. Today, almost everyone carries an indispensable in their pocket or purse—a smartphone, infinitely more effective and efficient at serving media, insidious in its ability to hijack the contents of consciousness. Permanently networked and chronically overstimulated, we routinely experience a paradoxical sense of detachment and anhedonia. As Roisin Kiberd puts it in The Disconnect, 'nothing is ever real enough to grant full satisfaction'. Starved of meaning despite the glut of content, obesely overfed …

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This expressionist piece poses more questions than it answers, demanding visceral engagement with the cobalt moonlit landscape and its oppositional occupants—one infinitesimal, one monumental, one light as a feather, one heavy as the earth itself. Replete with symbolism, the work wordlessly encourages the viewer to dive into its quiet depths, inviting investigation, rewarding contemplation.

Doubtless the most arresting aspect of this painting is the enormous yellow face, red flowers blooming at its base, swaying in either celebration or commiseration. Imposing yet benign, it seems to smile at the small white figure hurtling down into the choppy blue water below. But its black eye is sightless, empty and blind. It stares, but does not see.

The sky surrounds the moon but does not touch it, cannot swallow it. It is connected to the figure, and the figure is sacred, untouchable, ineffable. And so the sky rebels. It swirls and turns upon itself, calm from a distance, chaotic up close. The br…

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