i) The title. ”Strange energies”? This is not an altogether tranquil post-human arcadia; strange things are afoot in it: “there are different elements” - “Unknown radiations screech through the atmosphere” - “different clouds gather here”.

ii) Formal repetition and recombination: disaster has a grammar. You can extend the text indefinitely at your leisure: the desk has been completely devoured, my partner is smashed beyond recognition, my glasses are twisted miles from here, the christmas tree lies empty and beadless, my sweater had decayed and its frame rusted. The text presented here already has some slightly “wrong”-sounding or mismatched combinations, which indicate that the grammar operates independently of sense (“colorless green ideas sleep furiously”), autonomously, perhaps endlessly. The language itself, like the things

it names, is both rotting away, becoming senseless, and persisting, metastasizing. Things have strange energies, language has strange energies; both are released when words and things start to drift apart.

iii) In the process, affecting images are thrown up, saddening ones. The poem constructs a world-picture, an image of a terminal world (what I call the “cold world”). It seems desolate, vacated; all the life has gone out of it. But the cold world, the disfigured or

disenchanted world, has a strange beauty. It’s not a matter of being one with Nature; the cold world is a disnatured world, an alien landscape, not a restored pastoral idyll.

iv) Strange energies of the terminal world, as if what appeared with minimal intensity in the familiar world, whatever was “inexistent” within it, could only begin to circulate once the light of that world had gone out. The poem is not primarily a poem about death and

destruction, or the tranquility of its aftermath; it is about the occluded and forgotten energies of this world, the forces that its life obscures, estranges and denigrates.

v) Another possible title would be “telepathic with the deceased”.