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.

Eyeing up birds

When I go out I eye up birds
In the slow billious sky

Like cerebral cortex

A flash, twist,

Monochrome anomalys 

Black capped gulls, in a squall
A pair, a gust,
A solitary seeker of storms

Beats wings in firm wind

The Corvids take turns on the chimney pots

A brace of magpies, a heavy crow

A parliament on the tiles, along the gutters 

The pigeons like frightened aerobatic fish

A swinging escher print in vain escape

Synchronised round poplar trees race

A frantic school or flock, flayed against the evening sky

A red kite hovers

Eyes tight to some verge

Scrap of grass on a side street

Not languid like thermal 

Sitting sentinels of Delhi's sky

But a fierce menacing grace

I think of the red fort and youth

Against a blue white sky.

The birds are bipeds

With an L-shaped larynx

Like us. All they lack is

Thumbs and grammar

All we lack is warm feathers and wings.

Sheep

If it was just a nudge I would not begrudge one bit But if it shoves, caustic caterwauls and whips If it is a shilling for a life on ships There is only pain in the achievement It may be that I don't believe yet Or it maybe like enclosure That I sit a sheep on a high hilltop And remember the soft human hands They so wish that I forgot. And if this mirror were to crack Would the replica be more exact Would rafters make a better roof If riven. Would it be better home for ravens This freedom of the citadel Behind high walls, free from Falling in love, with no shame And no society to judge.

When the dam broke

So when the dam broke
I watched from high on the mountainside
How soft water plumed like smoke
Lifted, spun and tossed
Pharaonic blocks with ease
Smashing the tall thick gates
To shards, gravel that scoured
Sedge from the valleyside,
Sent trees wheeling in the torrent
Waves clambering on waves, shaking
Where once was the pent
Controlled stillness, manicured
Lawns and matchbox houses
Crescendoed a torrent, spewing
From the cleft gash, an explosion
Of nature, untameable till its own
Stillness returned and birdsong
I, shaken watched, from the mountainside
The flat, free river below.

Cocoa for breakfast

Cocoa for breakfast
Promotes neural plasticity
Then fast
Then faster, but
More haste, less speed
That's my advice
Funny how Einstein erred
And God plays dice.

The complex dance
The weather
Yes my friends
We are all in this together
I gather

Small flecks of gold
Like a placer mine panner.

If we think 
Therefore we are
Uncork the stoppered bottle
Lift the bell jar.

For which grain of sand
Will end up on top?
There's no way of telling
No matter
What calculator you've got.

This was spring

When
Escape became a watermarked flight
Beyond the speed of winged feet
When all I felt from your breath was fright
I became. The bridge of my moat frozen
So breaches to my isolation, inevitably
Felt like cold ghosts, such a stranger
To intimacy and company unknown.
I need new horoscopes.
This was spring
Some great revenge, against other wrongs
My mind cast through catalogues 

Seeking traditional songs. Not for nostalgia
But guides in my hideaway, gurus
To tell me, when water has eroded all
Memories, what traditions were.
This was spring.

Watching the clock

Catching the drops on a clock hand

Is hard
My knuckles failing, I feel
Pulling the belt buckle tight
Helps my gut
But that space is black. 
The space where the sheets creased
Scent. Is all spent, a finger trace, 
Reminiscence, I wish this
Was making love
Not war, not hornets sent in the post
The closeness of soft skin
Ends, that first crease begins
The topographics, in relief
Become a map of kingdoms lost
Of things I trust.
The second hand does not
Hold the round salt drip
The long hand, minutes,
Are not a spoon, hold no moon
Apple, nor star
The short hand drips errors
Airbrushes maps, as creases slip.
Its hard catching tear drops
On an old wrist watch.