Valentine for Uplink

Crumpet
I couldn't think of a topping
Jam, honey and cream
Fresh, soft and steaming
The best wake from a dream
Gorgeous gallon waterfall
Of smoothest ice cream
Where you been ?
You must have been close
Cos I see trees looking up
And sprouting all green.

Valentine for S

When I'm at my mum's in France
Where the land still finds some freedom
And chalk oaks twist a living from the hills
There are trees I know
Knot by knot, a braille of youth
All but forgot.
They greet me like the pensioners
Who once were working men
Or the stooping lady with her stick
Who was forever shrinking.
The chalk oaks stand
And grow so slow
They inch unnoticed in decades known
But for branches from the knots
Some freshly grown, some spent and cropped
A path among old and silent friends
Their creviced bark beneath my running hand
Like hope to watch them slowly branch
Constant as the years advance.

The Times offers subscription

The Times offers me subscription
For £2.33 a week
For £2.33 a week
I can digest Murdoch's shit.

Now of course unwittingly
We're all part of this utility
To process new age sewage
Into opiated rage.

But for £2.33 you get a direct pipe
Of distributed shit digestion
Served to you in type.

You can "get educated" for £2.33
Perspective gaslight medicated
Object to facts to hallucinated
Angrily frustrated in hyper-reality.

And sewage turns to compost
Inside the reader's head
Seeded with Murdoch trees
And on this shite they're fed.

Murdoch trees grow Murdoch fruit
That we will never eat
Bloody juice and bitter rind
Pollute the grounds
The roots beneath our feet.

The Times offers me value
Subscription to opinion for £2.33
So I can be a smacked up minion
Of rank plutocracy.

So I can ponder questions
Such as how many foreigners
Sorry terrorists
It would be good to cull
I can have a septic tank
For Murdoch in my skull.

The Times offers me subscription
Education for £2.33
And I say, not me, no thanks
I would rather stay dull
Than set a distributed septic tank
For Murdoch in my skull.

Things not too say on Tinder I.

Sneering, disdain and contempt
Are the road down which lost love is sent
Wind in the sails.
Current for keels.

The attention of some is a blessing
The attention of others a curse
And one love's intention confessing
Can sometimes be roads to the worst.

You should always be sure
When push comes to shove
There is more
More than one kind of love.

Wind haiku

Soft butterfly wings
Cause hurricanes in far realms
What storms a bullet?

Ducks in a line

The big one is down in the rushes
And the little one is up by the pond
The mother is nesting
And another is resting
I don't know where the speckled one's gone.

Sprinkle spring

Sprinkle me some springtime
A tinkling of thimble bells
A twinkling of sunshine.
Burgeon some root fed bud
Some sureptious shoot that scouts
In doubt of curious March frosts.
Warm a nest of noon kissed moss
To catch each wafting cloud that pass
Sprinkle me some springtime
On my breakfast.

Reminder for Randy

If you think Rand is grand
That there's no need for Machiavellli
With a gun in your hand
If this is the plan, you understand
All religion is soppy
Just remember Nietzche
Died young, mad and unhappy.

Recommendation for A

I can recommend A,

As a human being
Of the conscious type.
Considerate and observant
With a minium of fuss.
Guided by unshakeable
Moral compass.
Possessed of deft assurance
Like a shepherd in control
And emotional fibre
Spun of gold.

Elemental

When you looked at her, you couldn't think Tracey.

Fire and ice, Sheffield feisty

In a blue cocktail dress she could be the first lady

In a brown hessian sack this woman was racey

When you looked, you just couldn't think Tracey.

Drunk Note

Oh sexy minx
In slinky keks
Remember sex ain't hard to get
But intimacy, a scarce
A delicate capacity.
The lack of which makes liberty
A wasteland wanting happy.

X for Y

My mate said
I mistook an X for Z
And I
Sometimes in my head
Drunk, when I should be in bed
Mistake an ex for a why.

Sonnet for Berners-lee's Monster

"What is it like to be a bat?"
Nagel

A wobble of flesh wakens and reacts
Tap, tap
Plastic catalyst pressed calls on
Signals from silicon-carbon synapse
Electric charge along copper axon.

Glass dendrite lights, digital bytes echo.
Another road, connection reinforced
Traversed between terminals of macro
Neurons, silicon enriched wobbling flesh.

Fan cooled hippocampus in Finnish wharehouse
Orbito-celebrito lobes cross-linked
With Twitter-form Gyrus and various
Specialist regions on sex, cats. In sync.

It is anyone's guess
If it's conscious.
Anyone's guess
What its consciousness is.

Crowded world

This city is a crowded world
How to stand or move, push
Be pushed against, what lengths
Of stride for pigeon steps
What weight to pull
Be pulled upon
What tug to move you on.
It is a crowded world.

To be heard
Above the turning motors
The shepherd roads
To shout is hard
To harmonise, sing
Bring instruments
For few have ears close enough
One will hear a whisper
This is a crowded world.

To be seen
Amidst the herd
The sea of hair and hats
The brick facades, lift your hand
They'll think you drown
Step a box, a stage, on siege engines
Climb the pyramid of men
Scale
Don't look down
This is a crowded world.

New year sonnet

What work's this, the past to rest
We can but drag shipping threads
The rope of life's woof and weft
To shuttle days, blindly lead

By weather and dreams of youth
Weave the lines from every root
Bind the findings of your truth
To all selves you can recruit.

Eastern light will make the past
Less real than the rising dust
First palour of the year toast
And strike to smith the year's musts.

Spin all beams that fall upon thee
To threads of richest tapestry.

New year haiku

Clock ticks thick leg steps
Calendar leaf by leaf flies
Rearriving home.

Streets at lunch

White low sun in lunchtime sky
Paves and shods the City silver
And all the tarmac roads
Show their other face in this
False spring.
The crocus will rise
Before the year's done
There's a cherry
At the junction in full blossom
I have construction worries
Like builders
And London roads are silver.

Collateral love

They say all is fair 
But sometimes the battle gets rough 
And you're so buff 
You're causing collateral love.

I say you're beautiful, poised, powerful 
Others want all the above 
You're so buff 
You're causing collateral love.

And so many want to hear it 
But they just don't bring enough 
But you're so buff you're causing 
Collateral love.

So beautiful is this world

So beautiful is this world
It calls me like a siren
And I am bidden to gambol
Like a spring lamb
Stumbling as if drunk
Among it's wonders.

So beautiful is this world
That every noise is music
And all becomes a serenade
The joyous song of everyday
Makes me fizz like lemonade.

Extended reply to a superior and errant muse

Who claims someone else said it all

I'll accept your apologies
Not for me, but for you
We both know you never have need
And always a smile will do.

But I'll accept your apologies
Because we both know that it's true
You couldn't open without saying sorry
The respect just wouldn't come through.

I know it can't be a habit
That with men you must never have to
But I'll accept your apologies
Not for me, but for you.

II.

When I first drank Absinthe
Upstairs on the corner in Brixton
It was giddy, peripheral vision
Lost to my recollection
Hungover like fire
Brain in a tumbledryer
But I sobered up
I don't have the mind
To sip wormwood in the forest
Till blind.

III.

If you ask what am I to you
Not as much of what you need
Of what I've got it's true.
But please, give that no heed.

IV.

Well after I'd left home
I would get offended
By people's pretences and stratagems
Sulk insulted and think
Do they not understand
What I can understand in them
But then one instant understood
That they didn't, they couldn't
With all the will, they never would
Because they didn't, they couldn't
And I became more forgiving
And meet it now with quiet shepherding
Chevere, Chevere

V.

Streetlights brighten the drunken Odyssey
For all, even from afar, you can gaze
And see that this is what makes cities
Warm amber takes the doubt away
But streetlights are not free
Can't stop dogs pissing,
Or leave broken things unseen
You might look and see lovers kissing
I see a realised dream.

Streetlights are a public good.

VI.
Your smallest attention
A concentrated dose
The electrifying inspiration
Of having you close
Like pharmaceuticals
It makes me selfish, truth be told
Like it's stealable
I guess it's a hard struggle to toil
Walking around like a Tesla coil

VII.

You must have won many a battle of wills
With trophies to litter your mantle and sill
You could get me drunk and suggest
In a simple low cost conquest
And I'm sure you can smell them
The prey that offers less fight then Belgium.
It's not a field where I could challenge your might
You know I don't pick that type of fight.

VIII.

When I gazed into your eyes
For the first minute, I was just amazed
By their size
I guess most don't survive that first blaze
Fall prey to disguise and leave dazed.

I saw your need for vengenace
On the selfish, the inspired, that stole
The moments of Tartarus romance
Deep in the founds of your soul.

But you can apologise one of these days
Self sensitise and let struggle give way

IX.

Though you might try
There are things you can't fake
From forty yards your eyes
Said that you made a mistake

But you can apologise
I'll accept it
Though we both know a message will do

You can apologise
I'll accept it
Not for me, but for you.