Cherry groves

In these high days the fruit trees bow so low

The cherry spreads its sweep to brush soft pates

Of shrouded idlers slumbered through the grove

Above hand's rest hang all the jewels to sate

Any appetite.

                     Why scale the smooth ringed trunk

When there is fruit to hand to make you sick

Ripe fruit to hand to get you giddy drunk

And baskets brim from catch of beaten sticks.

Would it be greed to leave this tussock

Reach like apes, curious amongst the branch

To push and pull the lush sweet summer luck

Or derelict to spurn these gifts, this chance.

What paths to muse, lain prone in cherry groves

With windfall presents, these sweet merry odes.

Power to the people

When they cried 'power to the people'
They didn't mean it.
Just a them and us confrontation
Against power's concentration.
But it was people that had power.

Now they mean it. Increasingly
We will say it and mean it
Against the unceasing creep of invisible webs
Networks and algorithms in people's stead.

Computers are blind to the streets
Blind to banners,  deaf to demos and chants
Algorithms do not have to face
Their children, their uncles and aunts.

When we cry power to the people
We will mean it.

We, myself and I

So this guy, who I've never met

But connect with over digi shit

From keyboard skirmish in some debate

Pops up on messenger to ask

Who are you?

And I'm like, wait.....?

I am at least 43% bacteria

Who are not me, who do not share my DNA

Governed by linked Eukaryotes

That hold at least some sway.

So who are we, this team

Bounded in a lipid skin

That processes all this data

From without, within?

A nested complex system

Fractal departure in fractal set

A mobile arc for DNA

Electro-chemical and wet.

An optic set of stories

And culture that I've sponged

A city built on many towns

Foundations, deep, unknown.

I am all those I know

And how I know them too

The other teams of storied cells

A node in the Ubuntu.

The Greeks will tell I'm an immortal soul

Ever true like maths

That there is one unchanging me

If I mill through all the chaff.

But if I'm an equation

Then it is one non-linear

The answer made each moment new

With situation and parameter.

For I am not that three year old

Or that young man of twenty

To go chasing after some true self

Is just a quest that's empty.

I am not me ten years back

Or even yesterday

And I am not who I will be

Even later on today.

I am we, is what we find

The more sciene probes

For there is at least one self

In each temporal lobe.

There are neurons

In my heart and gut

Not just in my head

And chemicals that change

With every book I 've read.

Chemicals that change

If on my head they place a crown

Or bind me in shackles chained

In prison, beaten down.

Chemicals that change

If love holds me for a time

Or I run a marathon

Or live on nout but limes.

I have understandings

From animals extinct and dead

And understandings from unique genius

Like Einstein, in my head.

I'm a complex adaptive system

That mills meanings as I be

And even by this evening

I'll be a different form of we.

She is a survivor

Be kind to her

Even if she has grown to wear the crown

Be kind.

Soon after birth she broke

Murdering family, self-harm

Long before the uncle appeared

Be kind to her.

Acount the infant trauma

Questions and pictures of hurt youth

Frozen at heart to know no path

Away from these vexed complexes

Rooted in past and tangled in her hair.

Treat her with kindness and care.

She still walks with stars in her eyes

Still dreams, still streams with tears

And screams, still finds the same faults

Can't stitch the torn seams

Still fights the guilt, clings to toys

Pulls up the quilt. Still cannot help

But see the pictures of those young eyes.

Still caught in recriminations and hate

Asking the same questions she asked then

Young questions from a long held crown.

Confounded in the same debates

From the 1860s

Darwin, Melanin, Socialism or Liberalism

Like she'll never move on, be kind to her

America, her civil war

Survivor of childhood trauma.