Knowing how a gun works

It doesn't really matter
Whether accident or plot
Nor knowledge of Newton's law
If the boiler don't run hot.

It doesn't matter if you're rich
If you can't spend what you've got
And knowing how a gun works
Won't stop you getting shot.

You can ink and fold the paper
It won't make a Rorscharch blot
Have a thousand dinner dates
And never tie the knot.

It doesn't help to pin a map
If you can never join the dots
And knowing how a gun works
Won't stop you getting shot.

A Silken Wave has Undulated

There is so much video calling
So little touch
Like that ferrous curtain falling
When the worst of wars abated
All the planes and ships in port are stalling
A Silken wave has undulated.

The blind watchmaker fumbles for his eyes
The parts and springs spread on the table
That poor memory denies
Though his nimble fingers able.

Will this watch be made on time
Will this timepiece be forever fated
To run late, always behind the line
A Silken wave has undulated.

For some time was discarded
The noise around our phones
Till ways were found for recording
The waves flowing from our bones.

On this crowded planet it has been restated
We are not alone
A Silken wave has undulated
Cross the thresholds of our home.

There is more room at the bottom
Too much weight up top
The words of Marx and Richard Feynman
Cannot be forgot

Are we to drown in the heaving wake
Of these devices we've created
Is it possible some path to make
As allies elevated?

As our planet nears collapse
Like our hemispheric lobes
A Silken wave has undulated
Right across the globe.

f:The highest power

Where is this now
And where f
What is thought when
f {
If
    Statements. Statesmen
    Cannot state

Then
    Where is the State
    Without violence being
    The highest power

Value    :The highest power
        (Lives between the lines
        Shadow filming
        Light's absences, the edges of cracks
        Fed of lorry droppings, Manillaed cash);

If
    The highest power ebbs
    Wanes like the pulling moon
    Decays like rooves and architraves of Rome

Then
    The highest power: refresh
    f: {The highest power
        Instated
        If
        {Denatured State: state of nature;
            Naturalised in a Y
            Enabled dark future.};

       Elseif
        {All state their nature: natural state
            Statesmen statement
            Y
            Future enabled equals
            C};};};

She scratches at the wall

She scratches at the wall
Like grief's tethered ghost
Like love without air
I wish an opening but lost
Some exit from despair
Yet with care cannot sing her awakening.

Force cannot make her being
Grow. For swords will but cut flesh
Song only move mind with eyes seeing
Ears hearing, but she is not a guest.

She is but a dead ghost scratching
At the walls,tethered in sorrow.

Dead drive Haiku

Two dead hard drives sit
One is windows, one linux
One has a Bitcoin

The last Apple in Bramley is no more

 I

At dusk I heard the Owl
In the Oak forest
Spring Garlic and Acorns
Most will not grow
Solely for the grass is mown.
I will dig them like truffles
Carry them home. Again
Took flowering Plum stems
A deep inhalation like steam
Planted where the canal overflows to a stream
That fresh negative charge.
Ionic
In revivifying perturbations I recall
I once sat with a dispossessed Princess
Who would not eat Plum sauce pancakes
But would stop to breathe waterfalls.

II.

I have staked plum staves in the park
This reverse Perestroika
Big Society 2.0 and for what
The earth is sparse and falls like dust
I haves staked plum staves in slopes
So the banks don't collapse
Staked Apples staves amid the Oaks
Of Bramley Fall assuming at an age pensionable
No one will recall these strange routines
At dawn, at dusk, melatonin, adrenalin
The catabolisation of achetylcholine.
I have a dream
That one day the Apple and the Oak
Will entwine their roots in a spirit
Of synchoronous symbiosis and shared possibility
Let flourishing ring
At least in one corner of this native field.

III.

Will the plum taken from our garden
Rejoice in this new rhizosphere
Rediscovering its split self
That flourishes still where stood
The old Farmhouse of Bramley Hill
Where stands the steel strutts
Of a threadbare post war peace
Where stands the timber and poly-isocyanate
As temple to a fragile belief
That endo-symbiotic eukaryotes may
Enable the NOD factor and grass, lichens,
These plums staves that are not yet trees
Shall slowly process simple acts of complex God
What is it to have dreams like these, today?

IV.

Curioser and Corvosier
Let freedom ring
From the deforested slopes of the Himalayas
To the rich soil of Bramley Fall
Let freedom ring
Across this new geometry of a native field
That is forever rambling.

V.

I heard the Owl
All's well that ends well
Or Orwell, oh well
This Owl belongs to Bramley Fall
And if attended or unattended
But not in between
The apples will grow
In the wood by the stream.

VI.

If
    This
        {The last apple
    The last Bramley Apple in Bramley
    An apple of discord
    An apple of knowledge
    A fig}
        = true
    Then
        Error

If
    This    
    {Monocultural cloning
     Reseeding    
     Mitosis produced twinned electrons
     Bioshpere crisis}
        = true
     Then
        Lucky I planted those trees.

VII.

There are apple staves staked in dank pots
In December, those darkest of days
I heard,this will not be forgot
When in the grip of chill returned dismayed
My thought was all the staves would rot
Yet dank pots with no gaps like marsh
Where nourishing. This spring sprung
Bud from seemed dead wood, the green spear
The mixed earth, sand, clay rock,soil
Bramley, Fibonacci, Lamarck, smile.

An old question, unanswered

This evening
Wax light, dove white danced softening over the field
Air a layered strata of the calls of shy flowers
Chi vibrating between palm and the back of my hand
A sinusodial flicker struck black across the dusk.

What is it now like for Whales?
What for the frenetic dusk loving morse of motion
That flits the grass past silhouettes of leaf
Could we translate its state in nets of bits electric
Boltzman, Bernouli, Monte Carlo?

In spring I threw bird seed upon the piled terrace of clay.
The apples are falling from the tree again today
An early windfall pitted brown with grubs
The kitchen sink lies upturned upon the ground
What is it now like to hunt in sound?

A parasite will make mice like cats
Perhaps now we will make the habitat for birds and beans
As discipiles of these strange ways as means
Will they thank us for that?

Have we understood the pathways
The intermediary of inter-species empathy
Can be constructed upon our theories
The instruments unmeasurable but in their own terms
Can this language even know Chi or why it rises in viscosity?

Are we only to speculate.
The post enlightenment uses of delusion
Latter day latency of thought and memory
What were the last words of that gnat
If we could translate its mind
Could we know each other better, could we know bats?

The dark market

The market has no lights
Lined stalls darkle
Lamp black against charcoal
Blind patrons bump and stumble
Braille reading whares and hands.
This is good business
A nudge lifts a wallet from a pocket
A stolen fraud flogged to a judgeless mouth
Some item lifted, broken, returned.
Blink, the black, black moonless gallery
The footfalls, low ceilings, the ringing alarms.
What will sense deprived customers
Leave carrying in their pockets and garms?
What will be left on the stalls?
The electrician came
He too felt the conflict of hands upon wires
The grasping and wrestle in the dark
Insensate senses without pedagogi
And did the globe light?
The pins and spots, tricolor, slashes and dots
Nerve endings euthanised
Lest they describe what the hands are holding
The market is still dark
Patrons leave petrified
Feeling their pockets
Like Schodinger's trap.

Opportunity's door knock

Opportunity knocks
Daily these days
All these small opportunities
With their infinite ways

Opportunity knocks
Sometimes quite loudly
Often is the most demanding of guests
Full of calls for small favours
Suggestions, requests
It often doesn't have behaviours
Apposite to polite etiquette
All the crowding opportunities
Some weighted with regret

It is often the case
That an entrance loudly proclaimed
Leaves guest that stays long after hours
And long past entertained
But when opportunity knocks
One can rarely complain
For as they come once,
Then they will come again.

When opportunity knocks
It can get under your feet
But with neat feet the opportunity
Can become complete
And with one opportunity complete
They become repleat
Then opportunity knocks on repeat and repeat.

Requiem for UK industry

Why tell a lie
It looks so like Versailles
We flog off the phone chips,
The air strips, the NHS too
Wrapped in a ribboned package
Without further ado.
It seems a short-sighted loss
Or reparations of war
We'll even sell off the Cross
On the flag of St. George.

The Starlings in the Carpark are sick

Today I passed the Sunday papers
Let Tesco store the determinants
The various possibilities at least
They pay for data.

Today I parsed the tarmac
Carpark and the Starlings
Have sickened. Hiding between packed bumpers
They had recovered some numbers since spring.

Will they migrate, this flock. The papers
They ask nothing. Tell everything
Moral outrage and the photo editor
Is it that black energy that really matters?
 

Of migration routes, Baretta, for some soul
Has flown an Albatross across Oceans
Weaponised like a polarised Coleridge's foretelling retold
Do we not see to where this all begins

The papers which I haven't read speak no evil
Nor cite last year's laws making all GMO's illegal
Sequence editing patentable
Do you discriminate against the preciousness of time?
What hippocampal regions remain latent
That actin, the acting, the tight strung line.

The starlings in the carpark have taken for a fever
Like the pigeons did with claw foot
The bent fingers of the Mudra, their pallium
That possibly with care and regard we might reach.

The football evolves on the green
From the retelling of penalty shots, to pass and stroll
Some young white civillian
Sits with her red hair against the railings
Of the goal, her brother's push the bold mouthed boy's head
Toward the soil, softly as they might teach.

Some young white civillian
Has died in a jail cell
With predictive data driven stochastics
I couldn't be more sarcastic
If I mentioned Blair <!--the Giant--> Peach
Plus the Injustice of every and all those between each.

Ode to Matt Hancock

 In these most rotten times
For ministers there is one unforgiveable crime
It is not to steal from the public purse
Nor lie on screen so well rehearsed
Nor lie off the cuff just unrehearsed
Nor fill the graveyards, break the hearse
Nor take bribes from foreign powers
Nor meet ambassadors after hours
Nor run off to yachts or Carib cots
Nor have no grasp of pertinent facts
Nor dither long and fail to act
The crime of state set far above
Is to be caught in the act of love.

For we can die on trolleys
Die in ICU
Die in care home beds
Die in hotels too
Overpay the staff
And undercrew
Pay grand fees to all your mates
But the highest crime beyond debate
The one sin the spin cannot cover
Is to be seen by the team in the arms of your lover.

Mistakes, mishaps, incompetence, corruption
Simple sabotage, complex disruption
Are all expected, indeed acceptable,
In high society even respectable
But the one unforgiveable vice
Is to be caught in a kiss with the love of your life.

There is no signature to the sickness more explicit than this
Hired for murder, sacked for a kiss.

Precipice V

Look forward
Not down
Look to the cowards
Do they wave or drown
The townscape debates its own change
The investment it takes
To dig pipes, rearrange
Logic is a God built on these premises
Dismiss this as twisted
Or meditate on the relevance of Venice
Pontoons about the Arsenal
Inflatable barriers, cruise ships and carriers
We will all live in blocks and bubbles
Expect life expectancy's
Divergent inequalities, the troubles
The emergent qualities
Unqualified, who will survive
Land a foot on the far side
Or grip and dig your nails in
Hanging on in the face of this
Mid air over the precipice.

A letter to Arsene Wenger III

Dear Professor Wenger CBE,
 

I ocassionally
Mix metaphors and messages, make typos and digress, but yes
I have been thinking
Thinking about thinking and how we now think
But the thing is. The club.
I'm sorry, I digress
I guess my previous correspondence long forgotten
Some missed previous missives among your post mountain
I have written to you before with great alacrity
In your previous capacity.

But the thing is
In thinking about thinking
I have missed a lot of football
And missed indeed the terraces
But I digress
Smith-Rowe yes, Maitland-Niles, well some distress
Saka, of course, but I always opt for less adventurous
Despite everything you taught us.

But in thinking about e.g. EEG
Protein expression, yes, pattern mapping
The delay lag of nerve fibre transmission being
18 metres per second at least for sodium
The main channel, Calcium only 3. Canals
Oh sky, I see, sorry I digress.
I have not played any software
Football games, but FIFA
Is a vertical institution of rule based
Patterns and understandings
A grass roots to high arts
Lonely road to global stage
An institution that encompasses all this
And in this age
What is the club?

It is not an orange biscuit.
Nor an item to beat a foe's brow
But a classic democratic institution
The question, what is sport?
What more?
Those biscuits.
In our memory, circuitry
Rhythms and traditions
All recall the fireworks
Left, left, roof, the fleet of foot
The hard studs, that looping arc so late.
I digress.

These regular patterns and powers
The second order value
Of all these dreams of ours
Where did they take
These gambles with dreams
From dust spitting ruts
To manicured greens?

Invasion is not sport
The professional is not the fan
Though both dream of fireworks
Some handle gunpowder, and others
So the least invasive...
Achilles, did he blame his mother?
Or accumulated blood restriction in the tendon's connection.
These tendencies, to digest
I remember the wisdom of Adams
A pain in the neck, arm aloft, the teeth
The heel on the through ball of Shevchenko's golden chance
A look of wonderment askance, an imperious stride, a glide
I digress.

But if FIFA
Is the global custodian of dreams
The dreams of fans, of children
Well heeled, feet bare
Kicking dust into the air
Of graceful professionals who at great cost
In the face of fear and loss
Stake the prize of a whole dreamt life
Everything for which we all cared
And yet after the white line...
Then what is the club?
Who should own these dreams and patterns
And how should they be shared?

What is the value, not of a fan's dream
Or a players dream, but both combined
What is the value of the dream
About the combination
One-two, third man
What shape is similar to that pattern
Among the stars and flowers
The shaking earth, the accounting columns
And I still can't do kick ups
Even after little Ryan
Showed me the step-over and catch on the fields
Carling cup appearance, went to Millwall
A wisp with grace, such a precise pass
All you had to do was run straight
Tell him which foot and off your laces
But I digress

The editing of these dreams
A subtle possession
And what of Carbon Dioxides effect on grass
When 420ppm is passed. Napoleon, maybe like Dale Vince
We should watch the pitch from trees.
I have only passing understanding
And this may need some editing.

Now on the monitors
TV, laptop, phone, floodlights
Wednesday nights, these vibrations
The quanta, I wouldn't want to hazard a guess
How all that messiness combines
Umpaloompas, curses, never mind, I digress.
Let us pray
No digression
We were so used to 87% possession. But yes
Medical monitoring, the treatment table
The efficacy of prayer is messy
But we can't start doing that
Bolt from the blue.
We could do that too
Protein expression monitoring
Homeopathy over wifi
And the club.
A less invasive, more digitally generous
Generally better intentioned dimension
Than memory editing and opposition
Joy and tears, the perfect super-position
And if all this is given
Taken as given
Taken, (he saved so many relegations)
Give or take, it is not remotely my decision
But that is one vision
Of the club.

And what is the nation
Is this tuned into the right station
Argentina, Hungary, England, Torino
What is territory and testosterone
Now there is no regard for borders
Fans film on their phones,
Films film on our blood and bone
Satellites link our experience
Is there creativity? And what of orders?
The following disorders
Competition on the training pitch
Pitch battles before the match
The club, the territory, secrecy, the terrace
The marshlands of Munich's centre circle
What is fair? What is a game
Tokyo must ask the same
Histones, cryptocrome, ribosomes and all
In my day it was nandrolone and roids
Now all boys want to be Pep droids
Oleg Blokhin, Dynamo, how will we ever get to know?

Now safe standing, in my understanding
May be a resounding success
But as a man on a building site
I can but hazard a guess, suggest
Not that I am ever (Banega) asked
Players need gas masks for a start
And to fully play their part
In the club
What of emotion, what of learning
What electricity, what cytokine
What is it that can be shared?
A 4 m/s transmission rate
Is sunshine football
Barely legible above the Rhine
The first time I saw Ibrahimovich
Play for Barcelona was in the snow
Well it was not the first time
And they were in the snow
I was in my living room
They were on TV, you know
I digress
Dani Alves, with a snood on his head
Clearly a contravention
Puyol turning purple in his shorts
A man from the mountains
That full tilt timing, peerless
I digress
That semi-final masterclass
Xavi
Now if Xavi can do that in Qatar
And we've only come this far
And FIFA is the only globally integrated
Vertical, horizontal, voluntary
Cross-cultural inter-planetary, inter-dimensional
Inter-intelligence, post cartesian physical
Aspirational vehicle
Then
What is the club?

It is not an orange biscuit
Not in the context of FIFA
And I confess, I have eaten
One or two orange biscuits
And I am sure others have too
But the club
As a democratic voluntary replacement for strife
For distraction from the factories
For solidarity, camaraderie
For jumpers to be made into a fungible computation of Wembley
For joy and company, evincing all these things
And the love of the game
But I digress,
I sometimes miss a message, mix a metaphor
And yes
I have missed a lot of football
And have more questions than commentary
I had my windows fixed last spring
By the man who moved your fish
The Carp, I hope their spirit calm
And wish you the best of complexes.

Now there is something I hope to catch
Not a game, but a match, I hear this is where it starts.

Dover port take HMG to court

Dover Port
Will take HMG to court
The charge, what could it possibly be?
The Governmnet acting irrationally.

Brexit, immigration, the Castle
Gatehouse of the nation
Our Garden to be a semi-mobile wall
Visible from space and all.

Billions on the track and trace
Gov, spare a penny in the right place
Yet not a bean for Customs
Just trust that they can catch
All those latchkey refugees en masse
En marche, sur la Manche.

Like they fish the cancered Sole
The French exact a heavy toll
While we will "juxtapose control"
With post-modern chaos, oh so bold.

Fill the Island with undocumented migrants
Deregulated people, smuggled goods and pirates
It's the least we owe the fishing ports
Now the cancered Sole is short

Small boats can go on the make
Cherries on deregulated cake
While all the lorries belch and shake
Surely there is some mistake.

The executive will defend most vigorously
The culmination of its long term policy
Pursue that post-enlightenment trajectory
Of working backwards and irrationally.

Law or a gun

It all adds efficiently
Transparency, duplicity
Everybody is known
And it's recorded what's done
So balance the equation
Either with law or a gun.

They sit in plain sight
Neither hide, nor do they run
This nation's blight
The greed of high station.

It can never add up
Now the killing's begun
You can't balance this equation
Without law or a gun.

Excuses, excuses

Excuses are just descriptions
Of the challenge
You could not overcome
They do nothing
And get nothing done.

Rice haiku

Three grains on a plate
In a famine is a gift
Their picture but death.

Twitter shrapnel

Yemenis are also Arabs
The cursed Scarab the weeping cherub
The flat land beside the sea
The chariots over Galilee
What odds of peace at ten to one
Symbols, projectiles, projections
The back and forth, forth and back
Time, space, culture all attacked.

Trees on the motorway

Passing the bridge
The new planted saplings hide
Swaddled in white pipe
Marking the bank
Like the mass produced
Repeated mistakes, afterthoughts
Of a military graveyard.