Hiatus.

I'm doing a lot of work at the moment, and this has already caused me to minimise my activity on here. That's going to continue for the foreseeable future, so I thought I'd better raise my head above the parapet, admit the continuing absence (to myself as much as to anyone else), and tie up a couple of loose ends. 

First of all, I think I have twice promised to post some new poems up here, and on both occasions failed. A bit of serendipity now compels me to make good on that promise. My poem 'Time and The Sea' won second prize in the Rhyme and Reason poetry competition run by the Iain Rennie Hospice. It's only a small competition, but I like the work of the judge, Gerard Benson, very much, and entries are accepted from across the country, so I feel entitled to experience a teensy tiny iota of validation.

However, it also served to clarify a few things in my head. The fact is, I don't really see poetry as being the area I want to explore. As a reader, I love it to bits. But as my love of poetry has increased over the years, my sense of my own suitability to write it has diminished proportionately. I am convinced that writing good poetry demands an obsessional, microscopic devotion which I don't naturally have and which it would run against the grain of my nature to contrive. My temperament is too superficial. So, while I love poetry, and am massively pleased that someone somewhere whose opinion I respect thinks I've done something which is sort of alright-ish, I know in my heart that this is only the first step on a path up the near-vertical, slipshod shale of the Parnassian foothills - and it is a path which I probably shouldn't take. 

So, yes, I'm delighted, and I remain incapable of not writing poetry. But I am happy for it to be a private occupation, a dirty and secretive habit which I nonetheless take very seriously and from which I derive much (naughty) pleasure. It is in this spirit that I offer the poems 'Pulse', 'Vanishing Point', 'Opposable Thumb', 'Mobile', 'God', 'Mirror Stage', 'Hunter's Moon' and 'The Clouds'. 

The other thing to mention is that this competition also had a section for prose entries . I didn't place in this, while my wife (talented sort that she is) placed third. Despite losing, however, I still quite like my entry, so I've put that up in the prose section.

It's called Red Shift, and it probably requires some explanation. The overall theme of the competition was time, so I devised a massively over-complicated, possibly incomprehensible hypothetical conceit about an observation post at the farthest edge of the known universe at the end of time.

My preliminary supposition, for which I have absolutely no basis in fact and which I would love to have corrected by someone who knows about this sort of thing, is that when entropy (i.e. heat death of the universe, itself a contentious theory) sets in, time would break down from the outside-in. Hence this guy, as the human being farthest out from the centre (far out might have been a good title, actually), would be the first person to experience all the weirdness arising from time collapsing.

That's how the idea started. Then, however, I got all excited by my reading, and particularly by the principle of redshift, in which time and gravity are thought to dilate as they approach an event horizon such as a black hole. Light emitted from beyond the event horizon can never reach the people on the other side, so I postulated that, if the observer could not communicate out then his superiors wouldn't be able to communicate in, effectively isolating him in a discrete envelope of space-time. I also presupposed that shit would be pretty messed up even before the 'event', what with being so far out from the centre - hence the bit about supernovae recurring (which is meant to imply that time is jumping back and forth).

Of course, all of this science is implicit in the story, as there's simply no room for exposition of that kind (there was a 500 word limit and, besides, it would have been boring). Finally a message arrives but, doh, it's a message that has fallen through a convenient worm hole from another era which is not intended for the protagonist and therefore merely confronts him with the futility of everything, ever.

Well, there you have it. It's far too complicated, I pulled most of my hair out trying to balance expository needs with dramatic ones, and no one liked it. Enjoy!