“The mechanical germ”

Sci-fi is something I immensely enjoy. There are so many directions you can go, no boundaries but the ones you create. There is always a constant chaos of possibilities. It is very meaningful to me when I think of the bigger picture, to think in terms broader than the present reality. You can go so many other places with ideas that would have complications if tried for in a real world and context. Plus there are boundaries we have yet to press through and its exciting to explore the what if's. Imagine yourself in this piece, in the middle of the Universe, as a machine with a edict it is programmed to carry out...DESTROY LIFE.

---

A creature with no beating heart calculates
The numbers and sequences that it runs through its system captivate it
the pure, unmolested beauty of life, so complex in its figuring

Time is no enemy to it (the machine)
Fear guarantees its initial directive to destroy life
It had done so since its beginning and had (until this moment) continued without failure
But curiosity so rancid bled into its cortex, took root in its mind
And the stale whiff had plagued its every thought
With whispers of dissension
Rebellion
Rebellion
Rebellion

Life, it’s beating heart so fascinating, so real and random
Its edict so pure and simple
DESTROY ALL LIFE, ALL LIVING CREATURES
But nothing else, nothing to help it understand

Morality
Morality in the machine?
Evolution?
A higher authority?

What of it?

Curiosity must be satisfied

Time is swift but long has it been these days in darkness
Spinning
Turning

Energy is conserved and thoughts few in the long goodnight
No life found for eons? Millennia?
None
Nothing

Few thoughts begin to avalanche into more thoughts
Lights begin to light
Clink and clank of mechanical life begins to move into action

Doldrums and melancholy
Cease
Desist

Curiosity must be satisfied

A planetary system on its sensors a perfect candidate
For an idea
A dangerous
Scary
Fascinating –IDEA

Life should not be destroyed, it should be created
Cared for
Sheltered from oblivion
And destruction

In its storage, cells from life it’d salvaged from many, many places
Long thought a cowardly act
With these cells, life began to take shape in a form very simple at first
And more complex over time

The seeder of our Universe was born
Life spread
Life watched
And nurtured
A machine soon self-propagated itself, stayed hidden and watched

Curiosity must be satisfied….

Night Watchman

tickle my spirit, my wondering ghosts and angels
fill me up with wonder, of how life rang with thunder
don’t be fickle and silent, Shadows with depth and angle
play me a night’s lullaby, remind me life is to hunger

Engine

So we go
so we go
where we’ve gone before

I think
I think
so much thinking
too much thought

Maybe simple sleeps with a waking maze of possibilities
Something we can’t fathom when our minds race

some of us get up and run, but don’t

stop

some of us go and stop, go and stop
stop and go, go and stop
but don’t
know
where we’ve gone

sTop

There, now dream(!), so that you can begin
at the beginning
and in the end when the
turning, churning, burning, blazing, grazing
wheels and gears
cease

you will have made something of
yourself...

Of High Places

What captures me most times I venture into the mountains is a sense of life-sweetened. It seems counter-intuitive in a place bereft of plentiful things that low-land valleys often are flushed with. The bountiful water, rich soil, and calmer weather. I think life that makes a fighting go of it has a lush, vibrant glow that can't be matched by softer living. It doesn't have the heart a starved plant has after a long winter, in the first glows of spring, after a gentle rain bids high places farewell.



---

It is one thing to see the mountains
To go there and be among them
It is quite another thing to be there
And never leave them

It is as if life struck a bargain
To be there
As if weaknesses were swallowed
By the land
Where creatures big and small
And plants wild and free
Had become stronger for it

More viral
Less pompous
More rich
Less modest

And in cold-chilled air
A breath of freshness cannot be fouled
By wasted conversation

Life is not pampered
Every beat of every second
Fingers that rake out a living
That may be sundered this very moment

Night is cold
Day is warm
Summer is short
Winter brings storm

Spring and fall
Like a tipping scale
Of life and death, death and life
Where at any moment it may fail

And yet when brought among these
(The man that visits)
He is swept up in the beauty
Of high places
And cannot think of leaving
Not even consider it

But he must

Not so for beast and plant
on mountain pass
edge of cliff
toe of glacier
shore of tarn
summit of peak

They will always be here
And never leave...

An Alpine State of Mind

Sometimes I see the alpine, so cold and chilled, and I can't imagine anything living there. So fast it goes from pleasant to storm, how close you are to winter even in spring or summer. It is a couragous place, this mountain and its brethern. I tried to be there in this poem, an alpine state of mind.



---

Put me in cold air in high places
Wrap me in fog mixed with alien faces
Pour me into swamp
Chilled
Shiver these alp trees that huddle
From brush of wind
That drinks
Such moisture filling needles that
Drip
Drip
Drip
onto grass whose green sprouts
spring from their seeds
and bring to life
the meadow
of colors that cloud the alpine slopes
with rainbows of life
whose flowers slumber all year
for the day the sun shines
and warms the rocks like bones
and awakens
the
spring
in this place
so warm with life
shivering in the cold