Dry, Mainly Sunny

For those of us left behind 

on Earth, autumn has devolved into 

scrap-heaps; the ocean has mostly 

transpired. No one remembers exactly 

when dry ice began to fall on this 

no man’s land where sleep is

barren, geography redundant, 

history blotted out, where

huge insects and deep-sea creatures 

wage war in surround sound, 

bombarding each other with black  

holes and white dwarves  

while we mutate below — 

our haven a heaving underworld 

from which the lucrative few take off 

in their pleasure craft, their hyperbole,

in search of greener planets. What we know 

’s contrived — channelled, naturally, down 

thru the digital feed, with the marketing 

snuff, hoodwinking anyone 

cranked up on dark matter, or hooked 

on live bulletins — terrorism as 

prime-time sport, talking

heads popping each other off —

schrapnel and tits the memorabilia for sale

on a website designed to look like

a crumbling art museum. One click links you

to a pornsite of the gods where Zeus, 

the Minotaur and Madonna coexist and love 

lingers as a computer virus,

a glitch in the mainframe that you, 

babe, with your trigger finger 

glued to the gaming console, drift off with 

into cloud-fracking cuckoo land, free

radicals running amok, your dreams in 

bits and pieces, in compromising positions, 

emulating the projections of our divine

plasmas that dance, ecstatic,

on the cave walls around us. Look! —

Our children’s children, stick-figure monsters, 

are throwing shapes and grinning like roadkill. 

They flicker, they rally in vain, for who

-ever’s held at ransom in these pixelated 

shade-haunted, red-carpeted jaws of 

hell-bending doublespeak. A wag’s tongue

somewhere is tickling the multi-coloured 

drips of fat, the blips and bleeps, and 

the coffee-stained corpse in the fridge

is getting nostalgic for what that glitch

in the system felt like, or for some other

feel-good story. Such divinations 

are loony tunes to the beaming prophets

who’ve evolved into our puppets —

their gravitas is ancient string 

theory, bankrolled by the gods

for spoon-feeding the not-knowing

what they’re saying when they say 

we are resuming normal programming:  

your forecast for today is dry, mainly 

sunny, but tomorrow will bring a spell 

of rain coming in from the east, 

and the west, which will continue 

at least until the weekend.