Shrapnel No. 47

The sun on my pen makes it a beak
Swilling krill through the bright lake
In swirls, across the ledge, shadows
Edge in drifts as curtains think of England.
They're talking about the parking space again
Outside,
More politely now in tones that hide
The squabble over territory
And then sirens like a paint bucket thrown
And someone thinks they funk
Then just soft growls and the siren
Comfortingly distant.

Shrapnel no.65

They take spring lambs too young

Buds touched by frost grow flowers with a twist

The caged bird sings a cruder song

Chicks fall to hawks ere they fly the nest.

For there are men of force

Who so desire beauty

But fear its addiction more.

How the fear and the power felt

The spoiled reward of shame and guilt

Four pillars that, great St. Peter's built.

Fired like this, what warmth would melt?

For among us all

There are those who so desire love

But fear its addiction more.

Epistle to addicted pussle

Cat, puss, wustle, woodly woodly wuss

Whatever be your name

What is it you wish

That makes your tail swish

That makes you cupboards brush

That makes you whine and fuss

What is it you wish?

Not this dish of fish? Not beef

Or lamb or bread in milky mush

All left untouched

And yet you fuss and swish

Come over from the neighbours house

I'm only guessing which

What is it you wish for?

Whiskas

Whiskas crack biscuits? Ah yes

What's in this? Nip?

Cat smack that racks your naps

With thoughts of crunchy rock.

Ah wuss, Ah wuss

You wish a dish of fix

What war on drugs.

I wonder what's in this?

The Socialist Revolution

Let me tell you something about the socialist revolution

It happened. While you were sleeping

It happened when workplace terminals came creeping

It happened when the computer came home

It's happened. That's why you check your phone.

It happened with satellites and fibre optics

Computer chips, when the internet replaced television

It happened with the collapse of communism

It happened when stocks stopped being about dividends

When you no longer had to make things

To get rich, just three guys with an app and a pitch

Capital factories high and dry as they put it online

And you pay for bandwidth to reproduce all that.

It happened with SourceForge, Linux, Apache

When geeks united across time and space

According to their ability, to write software

According to your need. Indeed

It happened with the advent of cyrpto-currency.

It happened. But maybe not quite as envisioned.

While you were sleeping.

It happened when you became valued for your data

When they started giving 99% free

To sell you 1% later.

Are you're awake now?

When with a big bang the banks flopped

You woke up, and saw there was a problem

Went to the cook-book and called it

Capitalism, Nationalism, Liberalism

But the revolution had happened

And all the mud you slung got no traction.

As you cried “Burn capitalists”

But capitalists had turned to taxes

And burning cash in Silicon fire pits.

As you cried “Worker's rights”

But workers are nowhere in sight

And electric power runs robots all night.

Tank remix II.III

In the low ceiling crypt

Where they chose to gather

The etched and rounded brick

Thows a mesh of shadows

With candlelit plot soup thick

She waxes again, like sips

Of hot coffee, water.

Energy courses as tips

In spring force through dark earth

Bulb to light, flip state switch

Kite born over the sea

She feels free for sprouting

Throughout the estuary

She still carrying her

Physical memory

And will not be waylayed

On road to them, she found

A way, there are others

And dozens of others

Who will be a band in

Waves and light, uncovered

Chorus of voices unite.

Fight gave purpose afresh

They were not the usual

Superfluous flesh.

I won't explain

I won't explain

And you won't ask

Cracked vase in the aftermath

The over watered pot

The mucus covered calving

Sentences. Things I just forgot.

I won't explain

When paint runs

The current flow

At surface and at depth

Split.

I didn't think that fag was lit

Didn't pour that drink.

I won't explain

A whisper's touch.

Spray breaking upon bare rock

Bamboo shaken in a gust

Gravity lost in rolling surf.

I won't explain.

Tanks remix

I.IV

 

It was after the funeral

The tears and the drone. After

She'd gone up the hill. Near her

Home.

A young man came across tilled field

Covered in sulphur from head to toe

Gave her physical memory, will

And said to her, “You are not so

Alone.

These are their addresses and history

Their branching and probable destinies.”

There in the files the man had names

Important names, hers, others

His. History, chains, more. Their

Curse.

Foot snaps a branch and paths fork, part

From then on whatever occurs

She'd kiss an obituary. Walk

To the field where she first heard

Worse.

The window

In the rain, walled in by clay shades

And the scattered brick that repeats in rooves

Breaking spumes of green, this framed scene

Is the stuff of epics, snow blind boredom

Of escapes and flights. Yoked madness

And demons beaten like sled dogs till they drag

Some words, from the whisper of car wheels

In spray, from the soft pat of footsteps

Kissed by moist concrete. With this

Turbulent pot of spider stocked molten soup

Thick with all that's caught between Colombia

Canaria, East India, flies swarm, drawn

To the sweet rot, scent of piled corpse and sacrifice

The old headstones stacked like index cards

Against the moss stippled yard wall

Of St. Someone's church by the flats,

That sits locked like it or god forgot;

To the sediment of the anthropocene

The rich alluvial deposits of longitude

Of law, the first thawings of power's grasp

And what jungles grew, what jungles of souls

Where cut, chainsawn to planks

By the strong arms of freedom, shipping rope

And sails stretched like spider silk past sunset

And the clay shaded walls left

As testament, as embers and magnets

This horizon of stacked brick and rain

Is the stuff of epics. It's plain.

Blueprint for the revolution I and II

It has to be leaderless

As we understand the risks. Power corrupts

Dopamine makes fiends of Kings and Queens

Makes schooled folly and bullies

Makes a mass, a forest from trees and the rest of us.

The attraction of hierarchy, addiction

Of our institutions,

Manacled to mammalian mating patterns

As natural as they are arbitrary.

Did the enlightenment ever happen?

This great hubris of humanity.

We ape gods.

It has to be leaderless

Poly-centric, poly-archy, poly-anna

Democratically selected technocrats and planners

In a structure of proper etiquette and manners.

That is, checks, gibbets and balance.

Connected and injected with

All affecting the manor.

It has to be leaderless

A network that gets the best work

Tests first, then iterates

Builds and communicates all that is great.

It has to be leaderless.

II.

It has to be transparent

Infinitely perspicacious

Clearer than water

Clearer than glass

It has to be like optics and maps

Like microscopes, telescopes

Stethoscopes for every bloke

To slice and dice

Comb out vices, ticks and lice.

It has to be so transparent

That the path of every penny

Is crystal clearly apparent.

Every signatory and functionary

Every spreadsheet and file

Every phone number dialed

It has to be transparent.

Blueprint. Pyramids

We stand before Pyramids

We stand beneath pyramids built of wires

Built of cargo ships and computation

Built of our venerated law and custom.

That heave from deserts, where the band plays on

Upon the wreckage of old certainties

Upon famished, unwashed, terrified pleas

On legal instruments, players play on.

Watching seasons of reflected sun

On the gold crowned apex, as at Cheops

When the Nile flooded with slave bodies

When the mind budded with new found signs

When Egyptians learned how to split one

Into fractions and built pyramids.

There is no gold atop the pyramids at Cheops.

Their gods long since submerged by grains of sand

Their temples swept by grains of sand and lost

Their dead tongued edicts shorn of old meaning

The broken bodies of their carved idols

Like the scattered jigsaw of a crime scene

We could not begin to know

How to worship Pharaohs now.

We stand before our Pyramids, gold crowned

The gold cap atop Cheops long torn down.

Blue print for the revolution. Intro

Let's get it on, stop pretending
That we're stuck in the days
Of typewriters and pens
Bookends and postmen.
Just stop pretending.

Stop offering wooden soles not rubber treads
Stop offering fruit picking instead of bread.
Stop saying pigs can't fly.
We've a dozen ways to make pigs fly.

I'm not calling for a bit more for the poor
For men to do house chores
Or to let live and ignore.
I'm calling for all these old walls to fall.

For the cathedrals and palaces
To be redecorated, reconsecrated
For the entire architecture to be updated
I am not the only one frustrated.

Each election is an  affront
A front of rubber stamps and shackled tyranny
It's obvious when you understand it
Parliamentary democracy
Is premised on poor bandwidth.

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.

Haggerston bridge

London Plane, trunk like old skin, lamp clad and bluing

Is portal guard like Cerebus to dark water in warm dusk

This is not the Styx, this yoked conduit of memory

Slow freight path of archaeology

Is again thinking new sediment.

Where once were dreams rise modular units

Poorly edited, I remember this manuscript

When the blocks of type had no roofs

Shards and boards, pigeons and purple budlea.

The new brick is unetched by traffic

Unwashed by soot, standing as if

It is something, the red faced facade

And underneath steel webbed core.

There is no thought of empire here no more

Thoughts are elsewhere, interest and consideration

Elsewhere, decorations, elsewhere

Stucco and arches, long ago squared

No proud punctuation of co-operative endeavor,

No ornamentation

Just railings, iron, 4x10 or whatever.

This manuscript is seen from distance

Where pride is in different things

Different interest and considerations

Whoever made this wash

Does not know this place

And what it has to be proud of.

Dusk stretches into lost distance like this

Dark artery, spun into glasses, footsteps, kisses

By a million lights, it is hard to know

When the sun sets.

But there is no thought of empire

Where innovation is a different shape of box

Frosted glass steps monotonous, myopic space

They believe in these cube units.

Cubists,

But value just one angle

There is no thought of empire here

Only conquest.

It's a donkey

We're getting sold a donkey

They said it was a Ferrari, classic

The finest engineering, cutting edge

But it's a donkey.

A donkey with bling stirrups and ergonomic saddle

Go faster stripes sprayed on for modern appeal

We're getting sold a donkey, named Ferrari.

It's the best of 800 year old donkeys

But it's not a Ferrari

It doesn't send performance data to track side

To tweak and adjust input and exhaust, real time

It ain't clocking 200k on the straight

You can't change it's shoes in 1.2 seconds

Trade descriptions, this not a Ferrari.

Cross in a box every five years

Deary, deary, dear

It's a donkey.

The mother of all parliaments

Needs to look to the grandkids

Or we will all feel plate tectonics.

They say earthquakes happen

When two adjacent pieces of crust

Move at different rates, one gets stuck

The resulting friction builds up

Until it erupts in violent shock.

The revolution will not be televised

It will not be bought to you by mail train

Or pigeon carrier on velum parchment orginals

But if we don't fix these plate tectonics

It might just come in smoke signals.

I think we've been fooled

They say it's donkey called Ferrari

I think it's really a mule.

Say that again

The things that you say
Say to others
Say them to me.
I want to hear them from your lips.
Hear your lips whisper
Hear your lips
Without words.

No plot left

In the beds that face the sun

I have grown roses

And now they are gone.

The first was yellow

Unlike any other one

An African, yes, long done.

The second, to the West

Was a classic red

Pungent, rosette blooms

That marched determined on

Through the year from June

And I never should have left

The hips on it, unprunned.

The third, to the East

Was delicate white

Fleeting, with scent so sweet

Geraniums and snapdragons

Mark the grave of each.

And now in the bed

That faces the sun

I see no plot for a new rose

Only Borrage and Geranium.

Strong and stable

Strong and stable,

Like a hairpin on a bomb

At the negotiating table

What could possibly go wrong.

Strong and stable

Like dominoes

Once willing and able

To tread on their toes.

Strong and stable

Like Terry Waite

As she sits among enemies

With her new found mates.

Strong and stable,

Like a hairpin on a bomb

At the negotiating table

What could possibly go wrong.