Fighting chance

Not good.

Diet in a bottle

Ship optional.

vi

a bib is a place i save my food
something tasty, something good
a piece of toast for later, some vegetables too
and let's not forget my pud-

ding goes the microwave, wonder what i'll have
pop goes the kettle, sizzle goes the stove
something's cooking for me
where's my bib, i'm hungry

(repeat)

v

soft toy, spoil me
see if i can squeak
hard toy, chew me
i'll help you with your teeth

iv

egg custard, you're busted
with blisters on your face
with peanuts, i'll go nuts
and swell up every place

iii

one egg for you, baby blue
two eggs from mum, currant bun
three eggs for me, surrounded by love
four eggs for an omelette, breakfast enough

ii

caramel tastes sweetest
chocolate's sweeter still
vanilla's nice
but so is rice
with sugar, cream and milk

i

it's okay to idolize
have a dream and fantasize
but what's important: use your eyes
to save the earth and seize the skies

Father and son

30 years apart

Notes from a dream, part one

The beginning of a story:

A phone conversation.
"Any fool with a disregard for his life and liberty can kill someone. If you care about keeping both, and I do, you must exercise control: control of the time, control of the place, control of the people. The Israeli assassination in Dubai used 18 agents to kill one man: to control the approach to the hotel, to keep the corridor outside the room he was killed in clear, to drug and overpower him, and to get away, and they were still caught on camera, identified entering the country, and warrants issued for their arrest which will dog them the rest of their lives.

"That's why the itinerary of the worlds most powerful people are so important secrets: President of the United States, the most wealthy men and women in the world. The men who defend these people will not let you have control of the situation or the surroundings because they know this is how you kill them. The man you have described... his head of security is with him 24 hours a day, sleeps in the same room if he sleeps at all, is both his chief food taster, as well as his brother. This man will be hard to kill."

The end of the story:

A beautiful tropical beach at night. A Hawaiian band plays, while three men sitting barefoot in the sand eat and drink. One stands up and starts pacing, gesticulating. He briefly places his hand on the head of the second, and the third leaps up and clutches him by the throat. The middle man jumps to the defense of the first, grabbing his brother by the arms and the two men end up rolling in the sand, fighting like they fought as children many years ago.
The older brother ends up on top, snarling: "Forgive him. He is a genius."
Two, silenced gunshots.
The first man: "I am a genius. A genius at killing."
The waiter cleans down and throws the gun into the surf, the band drops their instruments, and pre-recorded music echos out across the bay to the waiting yacht.

Exotic Spheres

HP Lovecraft was right.

The Heat Death of New York

The first day, it rained talking frogs.

He was out, walking his ape in Central Park when it happened - the sky grayed over, there was a thunderclap, and the hairs on his arms and his ape stood on ends for a brief moment, and then, frogs fell - in singletons, pairs, sets and then great groups pouring from the sky, each babbling as it fell: mathematical proofs, formal logic, partial differential equations, and as they tumbled and inevitably squelched into the soft loamy earth, medical texts, anatomical charts, sexual innuendoes, and the few fortunate survivors hopping around discussing philosophical issues with particular attention to Latour's Actor-Network-Theory and meditations on death and mortality as their broken backed colleagues lay dying in their thousands.

The second day, as he sipped a cappuccino in a downtown cafe, it was fish-and-chips, falling packets of soggy battered cod and shark and tuna tempura, and heaped handfuls of crinkled cut potatoes and kumara wedges and frittered yams, wrapped in broadsheets, tabloids, periodicals and scandal rags from the last five hundred years, and occasionally the future. Enterprising residents flung out nets, blankets, awnings, dresses, anything they could find to capture this unexpected bounty, since it had been many decades since the anything except jellyfish had been seen in the acidic seas around them.

That evening, as he watched the world markets crashing on the vortexes of time paradox, his ape looked up from cross-stitching and remarked 'It's kinetic pollution. All the solar power we generate gets stored in fly wheels at night, this great band of velocity chasing the sunset, spinning tensors out of control. We should have stayed the course with global warming. The universe has an inordinate fondness for heat death.'

He folded his napkin neatly. 'So it seems. Gelato?'

Radio contrast allergy

Sadly less interesting than it sounds.