NaPoWriMo - 2021 - I - Across the Universe

 Across the Universe

"Even light, which travels so fast that it takes most races thousands of years to realise that it travels at all, takes time to journey between the stars."  -- Douglas Adams

And you should take the time
to travel, really travel I mean
not just down the road to the chemist
but look at the light,
the light!  Tunnelling

through the black, so fast
that it has no time in which to travel
no time to experience the journey
no time at all
as it hurtles through the frozen universe
because the speed of light
which can be considered the rate of propagation of events
the rate at which the Universe Itself (tm)
carries information from place to place
the rate of recalculation
underpinning everything
but look at the light
watch it set off on a journey of a billion years
not fearing the reaper
or anything at all
light
born at the wall
at the edge of what is possible.

We singing the body eclectic

Hallam has released videos for three of our songs now, so I think it is past time for me to start curating a playlist of them...

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In here we already have:

Walking to Alpha Centauri - in which our hero, having given up their humanity in the cause of an epic mission, begins to doubt...

On End Times Boulevard - being a rumination on the end of the Universe and the possibility of running into an old flame there...

Soap Bubble - a poem about climate change and other economic-style bubbles we have built our fragile civilisation on...

Reflections in the kitchen sink

Reflections in the kitchen sink

I fail to grip the knife
with any sort of skill
so it is left stuck out,
awkward, from the fist
of ill-assorted cutlery.
Have you ever kept shrimp?

Swiss-army invertebrates,
with a limb for every purpose --
one for sewing sails and another
that could pull used fuel rods
from a nuclear reactor.
Ready for anything

and reminiscent
of my hand with the knives
and forks projecting,
including that one
at the awkward angle.
But I twist my wrist and manage

to scrape the waste potato
from plate to bin, proving
I have a motor cortex.
Which, on a smaller scale,
is also true for shrimps
although more driven

by instinct, less by learning,
and maybe not at all by thought
of the sentient type.
They never do the washing up
and if they did, would never
think of me.