Genesis

Adam was given dominion. Adam didn't realise he'd

be enforcing an old paradigm in trying

to lead a better life.

Adam thought about everyone and everything to come.

Racial profiling, the extinction of species,

races, racists.

It was overwhelming.

He blamed god and he blamed himself.

Adam had trouble sleeping. Once,

after 900 years of restlessness,

he tried sleeping in the day so that the light might

take the existential crisis. But there

wasn't much satisfaction in the rest.

Adam disliked particle physics. If he were honest,

he didn't understand it. He liked to think

it took too long at either end. Sometimes he

laughed at the crassness of this.

Adam wanted to be a mouthpiece for mankind.

Later he would remember that he meant humankind

but as a mouthpiece, all he could say was that

it was too late.

As far back as he could remember

Adam was a creationist. He was one before

it was even a word.

He would wander around from bar to bar

telling anyone who would listen. Sometimes

he was met with derision or disdain. Others

had a sympathetic ear.

More often people would let him say speak,

wait till he'd move on, then

smile knowingly at each other

and get back to drinking.

Adam went for a walk after the fire swept

through. There, in a clearing of charred

undergrowth and burnt ground he came across

the bodies of a family of rodents.

He couldn't stop feeling their fear, seeing them

huddle up together, knowing

the end was coming. Whenever

he felt abject he would think of that.

He would want to give the image,

and more, to others, but

all he could say was abject, despair,

hopelessness, really down.

If he tried to describe the burnt

clearing, it made him feel more and more

like he had that day.

He hadn't had sex in so long that he

couldn't remember what it was like. Then

he remembered that no one had ever had sex

and he felt a bit better about the whole thing.

Adam crawled through the mud

hoping it might give him something.

He was tired of trying; he was tired

of giving up. And of giving: alms, time, a boost

to someone’s self-esteem.

He had the vague thought of the mud

as God’s vagina. The word sacrilege floated

into his mind.

Adam wondered how offensive it was to think

of something as being offensive. He

thought of his favourite line from that Eliot

Smith song: she appears composed

so she is, I suppose.

It pushed him closer to the tiredness.

Adam wondered if he was dreaming. He

wondered if he was the first person

to think this.

Adam became aware of destruction. In doing so,

he reasoned, he must be aware of construction.

That got him going on deconstruction - and the whole thing

turned into a mess, as though someone had

sharpened a stone down to a blade and then taken it

to one of the bullocks in the field and deconstructed

every wet part of it out to the open air before

walking away. Then the word purpose intruded

itself over the whole slippery image.

He pictured sewing salt into the fields of defeated enemies

that would inevitably come. An idiom came to him -

the first one that ever was.

And he imagined them writhing on the

ground as he took salt and rubbed it into their wounds.

Immediately he knew how to make

pork crackling.

Adam found himself having to dumb it down

When he said that the pitch and the yaw of

being

in love was more extravagant than the restitution

required to society’s oppressed groups. He knew that he

would

be so flat from their failure to acknowledge

what he was saying, that he would curl his nails

deep

into his palms, and

he would

bleed.

Adam wrote the first love song.

Then the cracks appeared as he realised it was

the worst love song. And there,

within the cracks, he caught a glimpse that all was

cracking in this same way and

he lay down for a few millennia in the widening gaps,

unsure of what to do.

Adam meditated. He tried Yoga.

Adam didn't find You. He called and called. Adam

sat down in a fever as the snake’s venom

took him, and he wrote the history of the world.

Then he cried because the future was over. He scattered

every possession over the encampment and lay face down,

declaring that the stars had come from this. He

almost didn't feel lonely.