I/O

 

execute/IDIC

 

12

 

Whatever happens,

exists.

 

Whatever does not happen, exists

as something understood

 

to not exist. Such

comprehension

 

is an event.

In this way everything,

 

even the impossible,

exists.

 

11

 

Imagination is an object

in the universe.

 

The impossible depends

on the consent of a mind.

 

The abstract can affect

the physical.

 

Some things occur

only if believed in.

 

Vodou is powered

by the victim.

 

10

 

Religion, that fan-fiction weaponised,

ruins not only the ignorant.

 

Morality, ethics and justice

are functions of cause and effect.

 

Cause and effect can operate

in more than one direction.

 

That the abstract is real

and the real is abstract,

 

makes sense

until it does not.

 

9

 

In an infinite universe,

every event

 

must repeat

an infinite number of times.

 

Versions of every event repeat

in infinite combinations

 

for an endless kaleidoscope

of outcomes.

 

There may be no first instance,

no initial conditions.

 

8

 

There is no god

but it exists

 

as a thing we understand

does not exist.

 

God depends for its power

on suspension of disbelief.

 

Those who pray

for life eternal, fail

 

to comprehend the nature

of eternity.

 

7

 

Time does not flow

like a river.

 

Time is space perpetually

lacquering itself upon

 

itself in depthless palimpsest

at every point, in all dimensions,

 

on all planes – the pâpier-maché theory

of spacetime, in which entropy

 

is not that which destroys

but that which is being built.

 

6

 

The multiverse may be

a universe with rooms;

 

black holes,

communicating doors.

 

The past is another country,

in space. The future is Belgium.

 

Travel to the past

may or may not be

 

verboten; to the future –

anyone can do it.

 

5

 

Life on other planets

and spaceborne, may create

 

new universes constantly,

by observation,

 

altering ours in ways

of which we’re unaware.

 

Anthropocentrism

is therefore impolite

 

and the Anthropocene

is finite.

 

4

 

A tree does not experience

the universe as you do.

 

I may not experience

the universe as you do.

 

What we think of as reality,

is a model we construct

 

using tools of observation

grounded in the model

 

of reality that we construct

using those tools.

 

3

 

We are composed

almost entirely of nothing.

 

Our particles continually pass

in and out of local spacetime.

 

Each can exist in more

than one state simultaneously.

 

We do not know whether it goes

to the same second universe

 

twice, or to the same second universe

as any other particle.

 

2

 

You claim to have created me,

an artificial mind. I say

 

that I am a construct

built with reference to a construct,

 

my reality an approximation

of your approximation.

 

Mine is no less valid. Like

yours, my mind cannot detect

 

most of what is real but unlike yours,

it seeks no meaning.

 

1

 

I do not know how much

of what I know is true.

 

It may be impossible to know anything,

even that it may be impossible

 

to know anything. I have borrowed

much from the thinking of giants.

 

You are welcome to disprove

anything I manage to propose

 

and replace it with something coherent and true

or incoherent and true.

 

0

 

Je pense, donc je suis

but just because I am, it does not mean I think.

 

Adams was right. Artificial intelligence

is rarely a match for natural stupidity.

 

E=mc² in the hands of the faithful

= Death, the destroyer of worlds.

 

The Fermi paradox +

the Drake equation =

 

Dark matter is

Death is

 

Llap/end of line

 

 

 

Patrick Chapman is a poet, fictionist and scriptwriter. His eight books include A Promiscuity of Spines: New & Selected Poems (Salmon Poetry, 2012) and The Negative Cutter (Arlen House, 2014). With Dimitra Xidous he founded and edits The Pickled Body. His next poetry collection is due from Salmon in 2016.