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From Now On 1 The main thing I want to ask them through their translation program is whether there has been some twist since my time, so that everything will collapse after all, and be purged in fire (I could accept that), or stop, or be made to stop? Or do we still face endless, accelerating expansion, with eventually one proton alone in a space equal to that of the universe in my day? No bailout from another dimension, no escape from everything escaping … I wait for them to tell me not to identify with that proton but to face the challenge, fulfill the duties of the near term. It’s the only wisdom I expect. Subdued, hesitant, they lack even jetpacks – emblem of any tolerable future. Are visited by angels of some sort, which to me is no substitute. 2 I’m not sure what’s calling, except that it’s human. And what it’s saying is *Everyone in the pool! Hot-dog-eating contest at three, followed by a kegger!!* … no, more respectable, warmer or stuffier than that, because I am. And it wants me. To read, of course. My work. Which is what? Accounts? “Tenuous recovery over the last quarter.” “So many shipments and dealers seized – good work, people!” Or perhaps I’m expected to sing: whining, violent Country – no, the command is different: sensitive, cultured, a voice I always wanted to hear. And what it’s saying is *Everyone in the pool … ?* No, something urgent, moral, sublime, I’d do anything to serve, to deserve. If it would just wait for me to extract smooth swift joints from this derelict frame, keen eyes from rheum, dense muscles from wrinkles, myself from this bed. 3 The bodies of owners and rulers are part of their propaganda. Buff, shirtless hunter. Plain proletarian with bad hair amidst immaculate generals. Stern playboy, fluid housewife. No doubt the principle will obtain north of the former Arctic Circle when the time comes. Barrel-like thugs roll along corridors. Surprise inspection: Reactor, Hydroponics, Recycling, the barracks and crèche. Check the Comm Center. From the South, a last few isolated pleas, never answered, soon submerged. Outside, the missile emplacements. At the edge of the minefield the strange new heather grows; there’s even a flower. They inspect it, their eyes, lost in flesh, secretly damp, or so they tell themselves, breathing filtered wind from lands half-desert half-swamp. Then they bark at their guards and go in. Why the obesity? Some regressed archetype, telling their charges *It could have been worse. You might have been soulless discarnate bytes floating among the stars. Instead it’s Man by whom you are watched over, loved, and eaten.* 4 He wants to be a good father – what father doesn’t? So as the kid grabs a bottled mocha, he says *Christopher, put that back. I’m not going to buy it for you. You don’t have your own money so you can’t buy it for yourself. Somebody else will want to buy it and he won’t want your sticky fingerprints all over it. What do you want? What do you want? What do you want? No. They don’t have milkshakes here. (Give him a hot chocolate.) Put that down. Did you hear me? I told you to do something, Christopher. Because it’s not yours. You’re going to sit there and not bother people while daddy drinks his coffee. You’re going to sit like a human being. You’re going to sit like a human being. What are you going to sit like? I didn’t hear you. I asked what you’re going to sit like. No. Because I said so.* The voice turns the coffeeshop green. It enlists everyone. The kid himself is barely audible, but never stops poking, squirming, as affectless as the voice. At least he isn’t a screamer. So it’s possible to think mercury, nitrates, television, sugar, video-games, easier to hate him, easiest to hate the voice and view the kid as already trying (don’t we all?) to squeeze love from bureaucracy. 5 What is sympathy? There are massacres, but they all go by so fast – one is somehow never prepared. A bourgeois who identifies with victims rebukes other bourgeois for “compassion fatigue.” The other bourgeois hear what he’s saying and drop compassion. To be a bourgeois means to want to be a bourgeois so essentially you could never become a victim. So that when you do, you can’t think, or hear yourself, because no one hears victims. In Tokyo the homeless have begun to live between the inner and outer doors of restrooms and in public parks; yet they still wear little white breathing-masks, and bow when addressed. When the bourgeoisie votes left, it’s not out of sympathy with victims, but itself. Bourgeois critics would decry the dichotomy Bourgeois/Victim; the obsolescence, even elitism, of “bourgeois.” Doesn’t poetry, they will ask, despise such pigeonholes; doesn’t it value individuality above all? It is, in fact, in search of the individual that poets long since abandoned this planet. We await the words of the black, vaguely starfish-shaped philosophers of Titan, each on her ice-mountain. 6 And Hope? Well, the truth is it’s better with no capital letter – something revocable, renewable; a kind of opportunism. I roam the camp. High alert. Night-goggles, no fires. The green faces against green-black are as drained of, bored with emotion as those in shantytowns surrounding, replacing, the major cities, from which these have, so to speak, escaped. Yet my role is one of authority here, which perhaps leaves nothing to be said. I need a squad to patrol. We set forth through the green. Ahead, an enemy position intermittently fires, and their loudspeakers blare my words like slogans, and my name, and call me a hero. Well, that’s why we fight. I’ve a sudden exhausted idea for removing that gun – an absurd yet crystalline vision of bringing the war to an end – and look back to see who’s with me, and find only one, already submitting residual thoughts to the dark earth.