The World Outside

It looked all right through the windows of

Our cosy sitting room,

The day was light and the sun was bright

But the house was like a tomb,

The other rooms were as cold as hell

With their stalactites of ice,

That dripped from the bedroom ceiling down

To meet the stalagmites.

 

I’d settled Eve on the couch and spread

A blanket round her arms,

I didn’t think I should tell her, just

In case she became alarmed,

She’d spent a week in the sitting room

For she wasn’t feeling well,

How do you say, ‘We’ve fallen into

The Seventh Circle of Hell!’

 

They taught us the laws of physics were

Impossible to change,

Gravity, mass, and basic math

Had a certain, definite range,

But men of science had interfered

With the particle known as ‘God’,

They’d built the Hadron Collider and

The results, they said, were odd.

 

I could have told them how odd they were

When I went outside to see,

My car was covered in mushrooms

And a train sat up in the tree.

A whale was floating beneath the Moon

And a porpoise lay in the park,

The light was bright in the sitting room

But outside, it was dark.

 

Nothing remained the way it was

For all the colours had changed,

The lawn, the colour of strawberry jam

And the sky was rearranged,

The stars were falling like sequins in

A cluster of drops like rain,

And ice was forming up on the eaves

That tasted like champagne.

 

I went inside and I slammed the door,

I turned on the News at 6,

They said there’d been an apology

But it wouldn’t be hard to fix,

They’d run the Collider backwards to

The way that they’d done before,

And hopefully, the ‘particle God’

Would be as he’d been once more.

 

I sat with Eve as the sun went down

And I tried to keep her still,

Away from the hallway mirror so

She wouldn’t scream or squeal,

The lines were deepening on her face

As our lease on life had lapsed,

I hoped she wouldn’t go out today

With the world outside, collapsed.

 

The sun rose up in the morning as

It had for a million years,

And everything was familiar,

They’d run the thing in reverse.

The News went back to the good old things

We were used to, from before,

Stabbings, murders, infanticide

And that good old standby, war!

 

David Lewis Paget

Reviews

[Delmar Cooper]

Say, for the speculative pleasure of saying, Isaac Azimov and Lewis Carroll sat down to tea and on a napkin settled the nature of things. Might it be a poem like Mr. Paget's ? Might not Dr. Azimov and Rev.Dodgson settle things nicely? Almost as nicely as Mr. Paget perhaps.

[Avinash]

An ordinary day described in a very extra ordinary manner with words which leave long lasting imprint on your mind.
It is great pleasure to go through your writings. Every writer has its own planet and yours deserves frequent visits.
Thanks for sharing.

[Leigh]

I enjoyed this flight of fantasy and horror and the way you encapsulated it in normality.