GREEN AND YELLOW

Without those colourful floating pills you sink –

bones dropped by a chemical vulture –

to shatter on the rocks of a dead planet.

The pieces of you left intact then wander

through the ruins of lost civilisations

hung with leathery shrunken heads

before boarding a plague cruise ship

to an island of abandoned labyrinths.

After that, it’s dinner with fires all around

while cruel regrets appear like species thought extinct

and wait as snipers for the next mass killing

in this permanent opium war.

EXTRADITION

These little white pills photoshop your mind,

taking you beyond facial recognition

to where anxiety is a distant tremor,

then just a dog stirring in its sleep

and into the fog and silence

of peaceful, invisible zodiacs

where you are the only citizen:

a limpet sheltering on a rock

a trilobite calmly cruising forever

a jellyfish drifting free

a dust mite in a desert.  

CLICKBAIT

The most solid thing I remember

of that day is the gleam, the honest face

of life’s dwindling. I could not keep you,

but only suffer alongside for a while

and then confront the geography of pain,

lost as a lighthouse in the sun.

Maybe I am just inventing a dream

that only a digital clone could give,

but I hope you are still really somewhere

in perfect convergent evolution.

INTROVERSION

An endless silent ceremony

before the white ashes of vanity.

Living in a world of your own words

until everything is a mirror.

The cries of a fabulous creature

hovering pitilessly overhead.

Clinging on like weeds around barbed wire

or birds nesting among spikes and syringes.

Fearing an embassy from another planet

or looters profiting from disaster. 

S.C. Flynn was born in a small town in Australia of Irish origin and now lives in Dublin. His collections are “The Colour of Extinction” (Renard Press, October 2024; Observer Poetry Book of the Month) and “An Ocean Called Hope” (Downingfield Press, May 2025).