Here's another short piece from our initial meeting, by Ian Badcoe, who decided to take on the subject of mass extinction:
There have been mass extinctions before, they're not even that rare: moments in the fossil record when everything disappears, early one Friday afternoon, and never comes back. And yet here we are. Life may not be that easy to kill, it may not even lie within our power; not a thing we can do will crash the world so hard that not even the bacteria buried in the bedrock survive. Which is not to say we can't lose everything we care about: elephants and parrots and squid; not to say it cannot only be in one billion years, when the bedrock bacteria finally invent paleontology, that they look at one particular stratum and say "Bloody hell! That was a harsh one..."
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Ian Badcoe has been a scientist and engineer. His poetry explores themes of humanism, geekhood, gender, mental health, science, art, technology and literary genres such as SciFi and Crime. He has a long-term collaboration with German alternative rock musician Hallam London and they are working hard on releasing an album. More recently, he has been co-writing a song with an American Filk singer, Mary Crowell.