Life's Too Short

Deus Ex Insomnia

Orbital Decay
By Mark Cantrell

We orbit,
Far away, but with each turn
We spiral ever closer
To the terminal point of doom.
Behold it, in space-time
Like the Reaper, cowled
By the shattered remains
Of matter & thought,
Tumbling slow into the dark space
Within.
Closer now, we spin,
Each of us in turn
Tumbling towards that Dark Abyss
At the end of our life's time:
The Event Horizon
Where Mind & Soul
Is torn asunder,
Ripped from fleshly remains,
By the gravitational forces
Of Death's Black Hole.
There, within that super-dense
Singularity
Is the junk yard of the Mind;
Our thoughts and feelings
From the beginning to the end
All the pain and the tears,
All the laughter and the joy,
All the things we did and yet
Could have done,
Crushed into one.
Trapped,
Lost,
Forever,
In that singular singularity
We call the Past.


Mark Cantrell,
Bradford, 7 January 2003


If I remember right, this poem (and many others!) appears in my collection Deus Ex Insomnia, available in paperback from Amazon and in a variety of digital formats at Smashwords.

Copyright (c) January 2003. All Rights Reserved.


Category: POETRY

Read More

Screw The King

In the republic of the word

By Mark Cantrell

ONE of these days I’m going to start blogging.

Hang on, though, isn’t this a blog? Well, no. Sure, it’s a blogging platform, but I started this site as a place to post my writing work rather than to actually blog per se.

That’s why it’s filled with poems and fiction, newsy bits (the ones that catch my eye – a hangover from a writers’ newsletter I once edited, but that’s another blog), comment pieces and essays, not to mention the odd feature article, and plenty of stuff plugging my writing elsewhere.

Read More

Was Tebbitt A Spaceman?

Visionary spaceman?

Sign On To The Stars 

There's a fine line between visionary and madman, but in this 2005 article, Mark Cantrell wondered if Lord Tebbitt hadn't actually been beckoning us to a future among the stars when he famously declared 'on yer bike' 

Read More