RANDOM NUMBERS

      Christchurch, where I live, on

the last rock until Antarctica, New Zealand,

             Ring of Fire, has in six years

endured eleven-thousand shudders

from minor palsies to full-blown seizures.

             I’ve undergone most of them

including the infamous Big Ones nearly

a year apart, that tangled the roads

into Gordian knots (we’re still short

on Alexanders),

                             erased office blocks

and Neo-gothic churches, one hundred

             and eighty-five dead, leaving

gap-toothed lacunae that the city-brain

           must reconnect around, fill in

with fragments even as they fall to dust.

I begin every morning’s pain-points

with an anxiety attack to remind myself

I’m still alive.

One hundred and two miles south

my mother,

     sits in her chair.

                                    A mother

is a careless thing to lose, much like a city.

I miss her so much even though I can

still pick up the phone and dial,

                                         her memories

ablating quick-time in dog years

peeling off like onion skins, leaving

          yawning lacunae,

                                but she isn’t a city.

It’s more like she’s on a raft

drifting incrementally further into

a distant fogbank and it’s constantly

          becoming harder

to shout loud enough for either of us

                                     to hear the other.

The fear that one day she might not know me

                         is orders of magnitude

       greater than any existential dread

of being felled by a falling chimney

                                           or the ground

          swallowing me up like Curtius in the Forum.

All of us are being hunted down by

            arbitrary happenstance

                                           whether it’s

tucked up in a fault line, hunkered up

       in a clock tower ticking down or

some genomic Schrödinger’s Cat that

   may or may not be lurking in your

             Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid

       waiting to ambush.

                                    Being is the ultimate

    Faustian bargain, a crap shoot with

dice loaded in the other bastards favour

but bloody hell we love it

more than the alternative.