Sample poem from "The Tin Men"

A collaboration with Kendall Evans.


DYSON SPHERES


Detailed maps of heat signatures
showed millions of them
Dyson spheres radiating at
no more than 30° kelvin
shells of stabilized neutronium
skeined force fields
Möbius fabrics
things whose composition
eluded our analysis

At first the only one we could enter
was broken, long abandoned
a cinder at its core
nothing we recognized as habitations
on the inner surface
save, possibly, a field of geometric figures
covering three orders of magnitude in size
and a few trillion acres

Abandoned structure/ lost civilizations
Where had they gone?

Then, when we did figure out
how to open them
it was like cracking geodes

Dead stars in their Dyson shells
All-In-A-Row

Each Dyson interior the equivalent
In surface area
Of thousands of planets
All structures empty
No evidence of corpses
A mystery of scope beyond
That of the Anasasi
The Marie Celeste
The Flying Dutchman
Mad-tea-party-service
Inexplicably abandoned

Radiometric dating indicated
they were at least
10 billion years old
which meant the builders had achieved
this kind of technology
in the amount of time we'd
evolved and learned enough
to open their front doors

When their suns died
was there anybody left inside the spheres
did they move on to something new
did devolved descendents freeze to death
or starve?
(If so, what happened to the corpses?)

Perhaps they have moved on
or no longer exist
except as a myriad scattered atoms--
yet they may await our arrival

somewhere beyond Time and Thought


the end


Another example, and how to order http://dreamsandnightmaresmagazine.blogspot.com/2011/10/poem-from-tin-men_06.html