The Expanding Universe - Written for Sing! 2011

My friend Mark Walsmely (who you can find at Demo Doctor) asked if I could write lyrics for a science theme song as a candidate for Sing! the ABCs primary schools song book. It sounded tricky and I thought I would cheat and adapt a poem I'd written about fossil fish but the first line of this appeared while I was making minestrone and viola! Mark W. set it brilliantly to music, so it feels like we are listening to Albert E. playing the accordian in a Weimer Republic caberet in 1930.

Note: The photo may look like Tiny Tots stuck together but it really is a large gluon which was found in our kitchen, showing how adaptable to domesticity physics really is.

The Expanding Universe

Apples, cheese and fleas

Verse 1

Given gravity’s a form of stretchy glue

so apples fall down, instead of up to you

there’s also something larger and mysterious

that pushes things apart, that’s big and serious.

Einstein did not like it but allowed it might be true…

chorus

The dark parts of the universe

the cosmologic stuffing,

you can’t see or feel it

but it’s definitely not nothing,

more mysterious than cheese

far more discreet than fleas

darker than the dark side of the moon

and it’s right here, right now,

streaming through this room.

Verse 2

It’s dark energy that keeps us from imploding

it’s dark matters which prove to be consoling

it isn’t energy or matter as we know it

it’s hard to hold and harder to throw it

Verse 3

Since the Big Bang we’ve been getting faster

we’re speeding up but it’s hardly a disaster

oh the fun of being in an accelerating universe

without the dark side things would be much worse.

As a child I thought there was a jewel box hidden in my parent's house, I imagined there was a cache of pink cut glass rings - the ones with adjustable soft metal sizing - laid out in pink foam in the nailed tight plyboard box in my brothers' walk-in robe.

Years later, I realised the box was really the back of the bathroom cabinet. I got a lot of enjoyment out of those pink glass jewels that weren't there. Imaginery treasures are curiously satisfying.

Here is a central point where someone who might be interetested can see what bits of words, some links to work published in journals and ezines, and images that I have made.

Absent Knowledge

We are talking about knowing certain facts,

and he says, I know all that or used to,

it is only that I can’t remember.

Is this not knowing or forgetting

what you know? Perhaps the head holds

a trace of what was there,

perhaps it is there but can’t find

the way out; maybe it was there but left,

or there was a rumour that it was coming

but never did,

like the promised holiday ,

in Pennant Hills. At eight years old

I would lie in bed at night a hardly contained

precipice of anticipation that time

would take me to Pennant Hills and a big house

with a swimming pool. I can see

the façade of the house, the curve

of suburban street, where that house

I never went to might be - or even was.

Though I know I never went, maybe

somewhere, there is an unborn memory

of being there, and I am thwarted by absent knowledge

from enjoying what I did not do.

Carol Jenkins

From Voices from the Meadow Wollongong Workshop Anthology 2007 ( Five Islands Press)

Bambiraptor

The Going Down Swinging # 25 -special double CD edition has at last unwrappped itself in Sydney, with a lauch at the Last Bastion of Civilisation last Wednseday 25 September. I still don't know what is in this CD it apart from my spoken word poem Bambiraptor as I was incarcarated in an invention called Good Mummydom. I hope every one else had a good time at the launch party.

The fossil Bambiraptor’s importance in the evolutional of dexterity and the dissonant name gave me this rave by Blanche (Street Car Named Desire) - here she makes a play for Bambiraptor believing his tough and powerful persona is lined with tenderness, like Stanley. This poem is one of my bids to get fossils to colonise and take over the myth as the substratum of literature.

Show Me The Treasure

The Expanding Universe - Written for Sing! 2011

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