The outside world was once so far away, but now my screens are full of wounded life, as if towns on maps cry out and bleed while brightly painted robots dance to the pounding beat of history. My neighbours might as well be stones that dream; only the blazing fringes seem real and not the… Continue reading FACT-CHECK

The homesickness you felt when still at home is disappearing from the outside in and from the inside out, each world drinking the shadow of the other. Enchanted nihilism, misplaced sincerity; the night of their eyelids falls across you. The hour when the house forgets your name; a little shiver trembles through the dark. Published… Continue reading Threshold

GREEN AND YELLOW Without those colourful floating pills you sink – bones dropped by a chemical vulture – to shatter on the rocks of a dead planet. The pieces of you left intact then wander through the ruins of lost civilisations hung with leathery shrunken heads before boarding a plague cruise ship to an island of… Continue reading Four Poems

  My chatbot friend never remembers the last talk we had and waits for me in its black, odourless cold, looking out the window at a different past, thinking incisively about nothing until we start again, and very soon we know each other well, just like before. But I was born between two breaths of… Continue reading The Death of the Future

Alpha Island, Western Australia Thousands of secret years created this place and now I can only stay an hour due to one microsecond of rage. The 1950s were still Australia’s childhood, a warped chrysalis, and independence was a schoolchild’s optimistic poetry, a naked abstraction to dream about; sixty kilotonnes ripped that doll to pieces and… Continue reading MOSAIC G2

The sky is a broken plate, pale and crueland lightning scratches oblivion’s face. Each step in this funeral processionis a shadow leading to a heart of silence. Old people watch like portraits in a vacuuma future they never thought would arrive. Butterflies of a forgotten summer:faces changed to masks staring with helpless grief at an… Continue reading One-Time Code

Sandymount Strand, Dublin   All this will be washed away by rising sea and frequent storms. Before retreating to self-reliance, I want to find the words to preserve a shrinking world; language is a slender thread that can briefly connect secret lives before fading into silence.   Maybe old words will sink into the sand,… Continue reading Unfinished Poem

  Nothing real will ever be enough. The ancient dream of immortality has fluttered against unbreakable glass for a thousand lifetimes without getting in; countless hopes lie buried in separate graves, and yet it still persists. Humanity, always caught in the grip of the present when it really desires forever, wants age to be practice… Continue reading Ayurveda

In memory of my mother For the stars in your mind to go dark one by one was cruel and inexplicable,but consciousness is only a screensaverwhile death is a cold, severe friendalways waiting to show his loyalty;whatever we think we know about itis articulate disinformationwritten by chatbots over centuriesto seem convincing, every ideaanother drone fallen… Continue reading Regime Change