(i) Spacetime
The rate of decay of his cells was a clock.

A sub-atomic timepiece that measured his

lifespan & how fast his body was dying. People

are so many small mechanisms all ticking away.

His heart was a carriage clock & had the loudest

chime. His thoughts were Roman numerals that

gave time its logic. His tongue was a pendulum

that beat out the rhythm of his hours. A tumour

grew on his father’s bowel & accelerated his cells

past his body’s limit, slowing the aging process by

entropy. Death was a grandfather clock that fell

over & could not climb back up. In that moment,

the light-clock he carried in his head stopped.

In dying he travelled faster than light.
(ii) Subtopia
If she feared for his future, she didn’t show it.

She spoke in platitudes when she heard the news

of his separation; what will happen will happen. Their

relationship stalled by cliché’s ubiquitous codex.

His mother had become fatalistic in her old age,

as the ten year old curtains shredded in the washing

machine. She blamed the sun. Her coastal woodland

was being chopped back, but she didn’t comment on

the loss of the delicate balance. Palm trees used their

physicality to intimidate. There wasn’t a weed anywhere.

That night, the front door’s automatic light triggered.

Dogs? Roos? Only his mother checking the locks again.

As he pulled up, a fresh lace drape fell back into place.

Oddly she said to him, her door was always open.
(iii) Subtopia
The dogs disturbed the early morning air molecules

with their fear. A muzzle combed under a wooden

fence sensing him for threats; a mirror under a car.

The American Staffordshire kept on looking back

as if he was out of place here. His owners had spray-

painted a gothic crypt scene on their shed wall; a

Vampira to frighten off the self-funded retirees.

Coiled dragons guarded their front steps. Street

names mocked the demolished bush. On Heathland

Avenue a concrete slab, Dead Sea flat, waited to be

raised. It was Christmas. Cicadas simmered on frayed

tea-trees as the sun’s pan heated up. They wanted sex

before their paperbark bordello was torn down. The

staffy licked its crotch; indicated it would be alright.
(iv) Cosmic Speed Limit
It’s a waste of time, the middle-aged man bawled

squeezing water particles over his parched lawn.

There’s a natural poetry to mathematics. He was

ruled by equations he would never solve. Choice,

theoretical until he experimented with it. Weeds

relative to the distance from his grass. He saw an

absolute universe of green matter beset by chaos.

A teacher orbited his daughter with a blow up Earth.

Four seasons were punctuated by raised arms, every

calendar month radiated from a classmate’s mouth.

Then her teacher spun the planet on a fingertip like

a basketball trick, turning night into day; the future

fast forwarded like pages in a mutoscope. After school,

she cartwheeled across her father’s dying turf.
(v) Higgs Boson
There was a particle so small that it was

unaware of its own existence. It was a sleeper

cell in his marriage’s back country. It awaited

activation. Its awakening needed an equation

that would give it instructions, then disappear.

It had a cold war operation that required the

passports of several powerful emotions. It was

a parasitic wasp’s egg that hatches in a tarantula’s

back & devours the body of scientific knowledge.

His flesh was its exoskeleton. It was the cause of

his fall, insubstantial in its substance. It was born

nanoseconds after the Big Bang, erupting like snot

thrown out from a sneeze. It didn’t have a name

until he came along. It succeeded in its mission.
(vi) Hydrogen Cell
She revealed she created one in her spare time,

this female variant of Tesla, in her garage, in

a titanium case filled with water, inside another

titanium case filled with sand. EBay is great for

resources she said. All of her friends had built

their own using CNC machines; she didn’t want

to be left out. She wanted to be off the grid. To

be self-sufficient in her needs, no longer rely on

any man. This was just her hobby after all. She

dealt with cells that no longer supplied energy to

their bodies. These she eased gently into the sand

inside their wooden boxes, to be the fuel for new

revenant colonies. It’s so simple she texted:

Energy goes in, energy goes out & we are between.
(vii) The Surface of Last Scattering
She was a beautiful theory that had to be discounted.

What was translucent had returned to being opaque.

The signals in their faces were too strong for the receiver.

Now she was coming in faint, a pulse from a far galaxy.

He strained to detect what was left of their violent birth.

As the gases cooled, their cheeks grew hot with plasma.

There was an old light in their background that radiated.

There was no darkness between their points, only haze.

They were subject to new feelings of forgotten gravity.

One of them would slow, the other would bounce along.

He failed to think in four dimensions, that much was true.

And he only acted in two. He was pierced by time’s arrow.

After years of looking, they were their greatest discovery.

Yet distances were too far from the surface of last scattering.