Artificial intelligence

To prove
you
are not
a robot
tick
the box.

As if
any intelligent
artificial intelligence
would fall
for that trick.

Dare
say
more
humans
would
be
stuck.

Click.

Click.

Click.

Dumb

Every day,
calls to save
the world.

A moist sphere,
transiently
flying
through space.

Supposedly,
dying,
yet

facing
a much greater threat.

A giant red sun.

The world
will
succumb.

All that conservation
undone.

Calls to save
the world

seem...

Future Ape

Crash!
Bang!
Wallop!

The tidal wave of an asteroid splash

Drowns the rainforest we’ve finally learned to conserve

And we glance up to the pale red dot.

Humanity’s last chance,

Vanished in an armageddon,

Long since the last breath escaped Bruce Willis.

We die hard.

Driftwood from the Amazon sea

Becomes the coal of a future generation

Of amphibious octopuses,

Who’ll learn to combust it all the same,

Eventually.

The humans drift among the stars,

Existing on synthetically-derived products,

Yearning to return to a pale blue dot

Of balmy seas and infinite infinities.

Life on Mars,

Dubai was the practise run -

When the baking sands

Become too inhospitable,

The oil long since gone,

The caliphate will fly.

Beyond Burj Khalifa,

A million miles and more,

High on the sands

Of a cold, red planet

Barely insulated by

The distant sun.

But no matter how far we run,

We can’t escape the light.

On the Run,

From the Dark Side of the Moon,

No wormhole will take us beyond the bounds

Of the finite universe we traverse.

Mars,

Just a stepping stone to oblivion,

Perhaps a few centuries later than was forecast.

By the time we reach Andromeda,

Everything we knew will have passed.

The end of the world.

A hot sphere blazing red,

Searing flesh and melting roads,

Blocked as the exodus

In vain tries to reach

The dark side of the globe.

The end of the road.

At the speed of light,

Ages crumble into ages past.

The Super Ape expires, at last.

Dreams

I want life to be half
like the Matrix.
At night,
after abundant cheese
I'd plug my head
into the pillow
and dream.
Those best sellers,
quickly forgotten,
would instead be
downloaded,
ready to be lived,
once more.

The birth of the Super Ape

A glorious, technicolour bundle of life,

Abundant in ores christened within a fiery core.

Blazing a dizzy path around a glistening star;

Flying through infinite, atomless space, and time.

Each passing day a mere revolution among the trillions,

Among the trillions, evolution unto Gaia.

A pale blue dot, of balmy blue seas,

An infinity pool of infinite infinites -

The origin of species,

Bubbling forth from the alkaline froth,

Convection currents in a hydrothermal vent,

Circulating through a primordial broth.

Four billion years from nucleic chance

To the mossy fur of a slovenly sloth.

What were the chances?

Before the watchmaker’s eyes

Were even there to go blind,

The mysterious chemistry of a land

Before an uncontemplated time.

If only we could delve

Into those first three minutes,

The quantum minutiae

Of two big bangs.

Two singularities, of two

Disparate but not dissimilar sorts.

Life, the universe,

And two beginnings of time

Brought forth

To all we see today.

From the eyes of the beholder, the eyes

Of the Super Ape.

Left and right

Who’s right, who’s wrong?

Left and right,

North and South.

The two poles

of the magnet

repel each other

such that we’ve lost

the centre

which lies, trapped,

crushed

by opposing forces.

Who’s right?

Who’s wrong?

Left.

Right.

Hold on tight.

What do we know?

We should write what we know, and what do we know?

What we learn through the lens of our experience,

Unique, for any one of us, what seems to be true.

But not the most reasoned of scholars nor chaste of priests,

Can ever really know, or understand, that truth.

The nearest is what we should reasonably do.

What is right, or even wrong, within reason?

As long as we do what we know we ought,

It might be that we come reasonably close.

As far as we are true, within the rights and the wrongs,

Then that, surely, is what we ought to.

Big bang

Crash!

Bang!

Wallop!

Something forged out of a massive nothing,

An infinite density,

The beginning of time.

A universe, at once infinitesimally small

And infinitely dense,

Foretelling our seemingly thin grip on reality.

As far as the eye can see,

Beyond even light,

The eternal expansion of a septillion stars,

Spells the story of how we came to be,

From the mist of nebulae long since scattered,

The shattered corpse of a rising solar sea.

Who can foresee where we are going,

In a universe of infinite complexity?

Is our goal to explain all at once what we see?

And what does it all mean?

What we see, obscured by notions of a creator,

Unlikely as they seem, in a universe

That lacks any arbitrary order.

And what does it all mean?