In benthic valleys where cetaceans wail
half hidden by the veils of filtered sight
with gonyaulax polluting every scale
and vesicle inherent in the bight
of sonic blasters, one scene outshines
the rest: the green of hot reactor light
illuminating hagfish hung with slime
that cordon off this region of the night.

Enraged belugas race, their melons pulse
but can't disrupt the smaragdine display
while Davy Jones and Neptune, draped with dulse
contend with ghosts that didn't come to play.
Two submarines, colliding in their sleep,
release their freight of spirits to the deep.


Satan is a Mathematician
for Ambrose Bierce

The tattoo demon laughed.
"I shall inscribe you with pi -
a pi whose digits are fractal glyphs
of transcendental agony, whose serifs
are inflorescent with infinities.
And I shall render it all
with the panache of a pointillist
creating continua from the discrete.
But where to begin? The anus
or the omphalos? The alpha or the omega?"

"Hey, wait a minute!", cried
the mathematician, and the demon
raised an eyebrow. "Pi's an irrational number
with a nonrepeating decimal.
Such a task would take an eternity!"

"Imagine that," said the demon,
and smiling smugly, it poised a talon
tapering to a single atom, plucked lint
from the navel of its flinching victim.

Playing his last card the mathematician
rose up on his elbow. "Have you really
thought about this? When the flesh
of one man emblazoned subsumes the infinite,
you will have modeled God from numbers
and I will destroy you!"

The other eyebrow twitched. "Well, then,
I shall adorn you with the closest
rational approximation of pi.
Over and over again."

"Shit!", said the mathematician.

"As you wish," replied the demon,
and began with the anus.


Seals^*

And when He broke the seventh seal,
there was silence in heaven for half an hour.

-- Revelation 8:1

Their phocine eyes weep not
because they're crushed,
imperfect in the perfect
stretch of skin.
Cruel insights come
foudroyant with the club,
the red on white
of certain countries' flags,
and screaming things
that never should have screamed.
To calculate the value of a life
is easy when the gain
outweighs the loss,
and profit never shrinks
from easy kills
But life goes on
as always even when
the Godforsaken break
the seven-thousandth seal.

^*Seals: marine mammals of the family Phocidae

Keith Allen Daniels



Keith Allen Daniels, a member of the Science Fiction Poetry Association since 1979, has been writing poetry and publishing poetry since 1967. He has been called "one of the foremost science fiction poets of our time" by David Kopaska-Merkel, editor of Dreams & Nightmares. He has won the National Association of Independent Publishers Fallot Literary Award and the 1995 Rhysling Award. He is the author of several books of poetry. Daniels works by day as a materials engineering manager in Palo Alto, CA, but his soul belongs to the night.