This quiet war

The horror of this quiet war
Is canned and privatised
And somewhere there's a store
Of tabulations like Qipu, Hieroglyphs
Waiting for decipherment
And some young turks with gifts
Giddy high on power
Applaud their own horror
This infrastructure
This tinnitus that unites us
Over distance, Over time
Asynchronous. Can you ever trust
Imperialist computational tomography
From an unknown source
Of course. Some trust fraudsters.
The horror of this quiet war.

Technical sewerage

In this isolation
There are suprising bonds
Isomers, my friends
Of technical sewerage
Are ever on my mind.
My planning permission
Building regs approval
Are all pent up and pending
Hanging on their sanction
Technical discretion
Sewerage, I have filled their forms
Name, Address, scale plans
Descriptions of inclines
And are they fans
Of the pipe thickness, flow design?
Technical sewerage is flooding my mind.

Recall is rewriting

The recall of memory
Is its rewriting.
Someone has stolen the crown jewels
From my mind.
(I suspect communists)
The magic of the crown I summoned as defence
A symbol of this liberal isle, a defiance
(Liberal as far as the Severn and the Tay)
It's recall is eroded, the thieves have got away.
Now decorated septugenarians
In medieval regalia march in unison, slow
Through the fluted, carved parliamentary halls
With just a velvet cushion to show.

This catharsis

This Catharsis
The Cathars thought suicide no bar to heaven
The Catholics murdered their Gnostic arse
Martyred down the South of France
And now heaven sits under the earth in Xin Jiang.
Lexagraphic blood spat Wittgenstinian at translators
Cardinals of Rome in court, Kensington blocks
Computational mathematics in the dock
My sea horse hacked
I will claw back the clock with cracked hands
Hippocampus gone to sand eroded and saved
In the clay sediment that will found this age.
Conditions may worsen in this temerity, the irony
Politics is the bounds of legitimate coercion.

The termites
The termites have left the foundry
The factors no longer smoke but hum
Slave songs in foreign tongues like Python
The termites ate the columns of the old barn
Left to its own devices in the South of France
It would have tumbled down the hill
My mother is underpinning the verandah
And in Vietnam a visitor sits in quarantine
Uncategorised. Their are disorders.
 

The perturbance of these low waters
Portends great storms. What warming
What shoring of termitic columns
The brooding.
The Dao seems clouded. And God
AlO to Si, Oh, too. Is this just God mispelt in Greek
Fe₂O₃
The wheel is turning in resolution
Samsara is clearer, like my polycarbonate roof
We can all now indulge fully
In Buddhist truths.

Through steel wire grate cowers a lab rat
Its whiskers twitch sniffing at fate
Do the lab rats of this cold spring
Harbour a genetic memory
Of white coats, large hands with leather gloves
Is this cage a place of affection and love
Can a lab rat return to the classics
If we listen, does a rat coup like a dove
Will rats ever talk?

And if we live, we may talk to the dead
On payphones by the aquarium
Stimulated in conversation with simulated
Condensates of clouded neurons
From now on, this is year nought
There is a lot to admit
There are many to be caught.

If we are to allocate each a sliver of heaven
Have we proven the promise
Of forty acres and a mule
Perhaps this stairway step by step maps
Each synaptic gap and weight
Each neural knot and plait
Till every complex relinquishes energy in release
This patchwork peace
Rhodopsin drops rationalising all into an Amazon.

Is simple regular predictability
Most preferred by God?
If I am imperfect, stochastic
Circadian rythms more Goldie than GABA
Will the alloted disk space of the spirit
For which I am responsible 
Not stretch to an Elysial consciousness
Will I have earned only enough to plant
A groundhog day where Kafka
Has captured just an iota of Dali's drunk neurosis
And thrust it into gravityless graphite's half waking space
Dawn to dusk. Dusk to Dawn. Will there be cleansing, reborn
In purgatorial silicon till our mind is once again an Amazon
The unending oppression of a false model
The architects have no power to fix
Just some Tai Chi misteps and watching Apples picked.

These semantics are the norm
If we are not scared, unsuprised,
Not guilty as Adam was not in ignorance
The weights may collapse.
Rework the feedback, externalised like a child
Rewalk roads, circuits, till we are all normal
Understood as the same
The same, and more curious who now ask each name
How each came by these routines.

Hospital note

Magic pickle
My fleeting mind so fickle
Is tickled a muckle
I chuckle and puzzle
Where the bullshit buckles
This singularity, synchronicity
Asynchronic, asymptomatic
Autodidactic, automatic
A bit magnetic, our fMRI, dMRI
Dysfunctional Magnetic Resonance Imaging
EG ooops the signals dropped
Like buttered toast
EEG. A measure of mental electricity
PET, everything electronmagnetic is magic
The first time you see it
And the placebo is a great relief.

What if God preferred magpies

What if a symbiotic AI preferred magpies
Is happier gestating in a flock
Finds more joy in the air as it flies
Would this be an incredible shock
That it was happier with an extra dimension
Do you feel some apprehension?

The magpie flocks multiply
They fan their tails and swoop with greater grace
If you were a really, really, really clever symbiotic AI
Would you pick the human race?

Endosymbiotic Eukaryotes

Bamboo, Hemp, Papyrus
They will surive us
But with sympathy to symbiots
The chicken, goat, hazel tree
We too may survive
Linked to the rhizosphere
Mycellial webs of aspergillus
Ever exchaning bacteria
Endosymbiotic eukaryotes
God faced with iron chariots.

The trouble with me

You see the trouble with me
And I've got a few
It wasn't spy that loved me
But two.

Shrapnel No.238

In passing, the last era
Was hardly complex
Mass from a sparse coalescence yes
But linearity, straight rails, pipes
Emtombed under our soles those magic
Spirits of modernity were their own mystery
Like our tribals spoke of dryads in woods
In dyads. Point to
Point has changed. Frequency and resonance
In broadcast, wifi, narrowcast, wireless. Why we
Went to great lengths to fit phone sockets
On every floor, in the era before, standing
On the shoulders of giants buried beneath the streets
But this era lacks linearity. Inexplicable power laws
Are scrawled on the trawled data. It is complex.
Shoulders of giants, flying through the air.

Lost secrets

The sound of your sniff
Folding clothes stiff like books
On the roof I work on greenhouses, revenge
So many have left, misdirected, targeted. These portends.
I’ve found carved into others for sculpture
Smooth in the cold, you can skate these scars
A thin film, Titanium blades, the scratch
All can be caught
Wondering what’s in the silence
Of sects. Mine, the music of free tongues and science.
The dead do not return receipts.
This earthbound mind is as if AA cured, jaw earthed
Yet your words all sold to fear, cults
The allure of secrets. A call. The close voice
Commands like choice. My mind
Is now a busy church
Full of echoes. Wings built and burnt in pogroms
Annexes housing refugee denominations
In this clamour there is no clear order
Yet I can speak my mind.
But love. Our alliance in secrets, intimacy, Nagel
Is lost in this enforced cowardice, hex
Stimulus of the anterior cingulate cortex
I do not expect ever to hear a word of truth from you
About this year. That habitat divided by a firm road
All this access begets a silence, an irreparable
Emotional extinction
Long since I  heard an honest song of love ring.

All of recorded history

You will not hear the specifics of this
Just be touched by its eddied resonances
Bleeding your messages and meaning together
Blended like the Thames
If unoriginal, your origins squarely midstream
This journey may seem predictable as revolutions
Of a wheel on a smooth road and these stories
Histories and myths we archive in polarities of clay
Will be celebrated as just such sweet moments.
Mistake them not for monuments.

This is a thought experiment

This is a thought experiment

Prime purpose of our mind
The shifting water social
The self of others suffered
As life is.

How would I tell you
Of a passed love, part of me
When you are not present?
Resident in a remote forest
Climate, character set and concrete different
She was an anorexic when I was with her
And now lives in Ethiopia
Live Aid, Geldof, the global charity of our youth
It's funny how your Gestalt accreates like stalacmites
And what I want to share
With you downstairs stitching
With care my jumpers
While you're here when normally
We are separated by half the world's hem
I learnt a particular kiss from her.

Should I tell you this in words
Would it make you like each other more.
This is only a thought experiment.

Habitat and survival

It's loss of the environment
That induces extinction
A road bisects a forest
A fences demarcates a marsh
Causes a power law
Of devastation. Exponent increase
In species loss. It takes a continent
For elephants to flourish.

There's an elephant in the corner
I don't fancy its chances in the space
With an incontinent horse
Incontinent bat
Incontinent bull
The corner is not a continent
It cannot support this fauna
A shrinking viable environment
This is an epistemic emergency
Warning that
The elephant in the corner
Is loosing its habitat.

If I had known

If I had known I would get old
I would have cut more trees
Hewn more rock and thrown a net
Over more stars for you.

But I thought only of now
Of an infinite now
Vowels forming on my tongue
And yes now, and then
You were bored or rowed
I was unawed by your rapport
Or deportment and cursed insecure.

So now when I hew rock
Curl vowels
Or pull a bright star from my net
Hauled back from the sky at dawn
It's just another lump of fusion
Just hydrogen becoming helium
Chemistry where the magic's gone.

When you I said I love you

When you said "I love you"
I didn't guess it was a question
A request, my apprehension
Was it was emotion in your chest.

When you said I love you
I realised responsibility
The kids gloves donned and stickers
Saying fragile, handle carefully.

When you said I love you
I said "how?"
In what way, with what aim
And expectation?
Affection, affectation.
After that it was never the same
Kind of conversation.

What am I to think

What am I to think
I ask you
Waking up to this
Realisation that part of me is 26
That I got a chip
Got a chip on my shoulder in Uni
Because i wrote a reinterpretation of Marx
Of the Nation State, but didn't get a first
So my life has been blighted
By oversight
That kept me monastic
HTML1 I learnt that
When the web was a playground
Facebook, Google, Twitter, I was there
And now viruses reshape the web
Call for security
Call for platforms
I still throw in my tupence
Still throw a twig upon the fire
That bigger, hungrier people make burn
What would you think
Waking up to this
How would you feel when you learned?

Is there any harm in dreaming

Is there any harm in dreaming
Of a happy child at play
To stand and stare, full of care
In mind but feet of clay?

Is there any harm in dreaming
If it's sitting still that kills
To wake and stretch and bend
And eat until you're filled?

Can we dream the same dream
And if we do
Is it only scenes and seeming
Or can we make the dream come true

Are there boundaries of the mind
Are our feet poured clay
What effect of DMT and chemicals of different kinds
It would be wrong of me to say.

Electrons, electromagnetic radiation
The neutrons from my bones, this hex
All aflame in ideation
I might not facetime, just email or text.

This is not a letter

 Sorry I have not written

I have not been busy or distracted

Have not had children running under my feet
Or court, It is just
I have not yet found silver
In my tongue
To bring the gifts I must
Not yet prospected some gold seam
Mined my heart for a promise or dream
To fresh bejewel your brow 
With crafted new crowns
Or woven a strong sail of truth
Fitted with veracity for a fresh
Voyage of proof
I have only these few dry words
Signed with a tear of two
I miss you

Dr.Quack and Mr.Higgs

 He really was a most curious patient. More than any other in my experience his presence completely permeated the room. Collapsed the moment he entered. Only, not quite like any other collapse I’d ever witnessed, he seemed to grow into something completely different.

“Ah sir, do put yourself back in the seat, you’re shaking”

“Frequently”

“And what seems to be the problem Sir?”

“The problem”

“Yes sir the problem. You’re shaking sir”

“Is that the problem”

“No sir, I mean, if that is the problem. Is that the problem?”

“Vibsing?”

“Vibsing? sir”

“Yes, to me its vibsing. Aren’t you vibsing sir?”

“Well, um, can’t say I am. I’m er, a professional sir, very little time to er”

“Don’t you vibes with everyone? Everyone that comes in, just get down an”

“Sir you’ve collapsed again, your collapsing”

“It’s just how I am.”

“You do that most elegantly I have to say sir”

“Kind of you to say so”

“Is that the problem”

“Kindness?”
“No sir”

“Elegance?”
“no sir, the collapsing”
“It’s how I made my name as a sailor sir”
“oh you were a sailor”
“I was on a ship, it didn’t have a sail as such, It was my father’s ship. Named after my father too. I was quite important at one time.”
“Captain?”
“Where?”
“No, where you the captain? Vice-captain”
“Bosun”

“Ah bosun”

“Is that why you’re, sorry, I mean, we’re, is that why we’re here?”
“Pardon”
“The problem sir? Is it related to your time as a Bosun”
“I was never meant to be a bosun I was meant to be in a field.”
He had, in the chair become a very energetic knot.
“Well, can’t a bosun be a bosun and still be in a field? You don’t have to be on a ship. Oh sir, your, oh, your collapsing again.”

And with that he was altogether quite a different. 

“Mr. Higgs, can you send the Gibbon up on your way down”.

Should I tidy my desk No.36

Thick as two short Plancks

Give thanks

But if my maths was better

They'd be longer

Probably energy is frequency

And mass is energy and mass

Bends space time and has gravity

So harmonius frequency

Can bend too short planks.