Chris Holdaway

Collapse colony!  This is the lavish curse of travelling

In arteries.  On sea acres, Ulysses, wearing a wire but

Grafted to a mast of ivory that might

Still drip with elephant’s blood, and this is

What’s necessary to stop him turning

To one of those ambulance-chasing attorneys.

To the very very edge of biodiversity! with our understanding

Unlikely to survive;—locomotion eating breathing guillotine

To unfettered neck. . . .perforated

Animals & Lazarus taxa.  We high-risk-reward

Organisms vs. we discrete

Ark-makers

Of insect backyards, and bugs & their deaths are on

The ship’s manifest.  Look at you killing

What I killed, while critical of a world

sans bugs—that does not compute comes closer & closer to

—.              Thought it was tautological to speak

Of elegiac elegy

But of course . . . Cirrhotic gauze of the air warmed

Against death—

the way immolation refrigerates.  How long

To wait before the gristle in crap food

Becomes oil; before fluctuations in a metric produce

A new big bang that crawls across

Our cities like glaciers?  The monument to time shouldn’t

Pass, arches crumbling perfect

-ly in tune today, repackaging the cultivated

Holocene from the corners of grey afternoons.  Drink four cups

Of card pulp through your slurping eyes, your carbon

Filters; take a leap rather than poison, and stick around if only

To keep me

From hurting myself.

I’d rather we evolve

Drawn, two-dimensional without space for internal organs but

Our desires are for synthetic biology as needy and fragile and

Poorly suited to transport by miniature Earth

As us.  If flesh is going to be inorganic it better

Have all the analogue fretfulness. . . .magnetic nature allure electric

& homely artifice.  And what about inorganic extinction?

Species counting

Species while it’s happening when

Species of landscape question mark?  Inveritable

Invertebrates we imagine

This light pleads. Deaf actors in hydrocarbon poetry.

Walked through the bottled world—historic building

—mountains on string like

Beads

Trench beginnings and this is the end says

The inexorable face of capital.  Our regression pose

Accelerates just the reins :

Not the horse, not the cart, nor even the logic

Which animates it.  More cars on the roads than ever

Which is pretty awful, but also more satellites

In the sky which is kind of awesome before

The weight of it all collapses

Into a new celestial body of space junk.  There’s no more

Comforting contribution to the environment

Than a drive at night

Behind radio technicolour

Windscreens and I wonder how long

Until they can literally—as they say—enforce

Vehicle speed with blasts

Of radar waves.         The global con

-flict has to find some way to make itself felt

In times of “total peace”—with all

The paramilitary, extrajudiciary, & plain antimatter

Everything is disappearing in “total mobilisation”.

The whole of agriculture can be found as one

Fossil deep beneath the grid, devised to dry up,

With the prosthetic hand of nature.  I built my house

On the concrete lips of dams that can be seen from space

High above stone as well as sand—: the oceans will not rise

At the same rate across Earth even as they climb

Enough to feel what is meant by “the sky lowering”.

In an alphabet of stones—(is is is is is . . .

God or just sediment of broken glass?  Stuffed three feet

Tall casting three more in shadow, the customary

Taxidermy & garden-variety darkness of our oily bodies.

The failure to have remarkable properties is supposed

To make us more resilient, right?  To trickle

Down like spinal fluid.  The loosest tendencies

The sturdiest : a man, a tree, & an axe are a system

Melted into a pool of frayed and exposed

Wires.  Featherless survival.  Who’s trying

To design birds

With enough plastic in their systems to shrug

Off oilspills like water off a duck’s back?  Now

Real biology is the undead, and our modern understanding

Has removed the barrier to thinking of them as untapped

Mineral resource.  Dreams of a giant Glomar Explorer

-style magnet that rips oil through pores in the ground like

Hair follicles. . . .every so often we need

To come up with something that might ignite the entire

Atmosphere—light light on fire—to achieve

An oven over a thousand times more

Radical than anything currently on the market.

Am I walking fast enough for the bugs

To get caught in the slipstream vortex such that my face

Drags them along with me?  Or left

Waiting for the kind of Spring day that makes me suspicious

Of when I can’t tell the difference between

Long, high, stratus clouds & dispersed chemtrails

—I mean contrails.

I’m positing time as just the Higgs Field for consciousness.

It works like wading

Through tall grass and collecting hooked & spiked

Seeds as a fullbody crown-of-thorns; or sailing

Through full-scale plastic soup

In oceans discovering white mass

-es in therapy for the inconceivably foreign

15th-Century traveller’s isolation.  Ah you

Temperate trash striving for a famous rubbish dump

In the subtropics; a household name or at least

A tourist destination.  The 3,000 odd weeks

I’m expected to live cannot approach even the smallest

Plastic bag’s hundreds of years.  Yet in fickle memories of

A school experiment a single drop of blood is all

It takes to turn a glass of water entirely red.  I think

The implication is we have more than enough people

To make the oceans truly boil . . . I’m always supposed to look

Like I haven’t slept for two-or-three days and

We’re supposed to hover like splinters in the air

On your doorstep as though it were a meridian and

Have this whole back-&-forth over whether it’s true

—whether I want it to be; whether you should

feel sorry for me—or if I should

Just give it a rest.  It’s kind of hard to believe in

Kindheartedness yet here I am

Without you.  Tricked and tickled by consolidated loans

On peril, as if the best we could hope for were so much