Monday, January 23, 2023

Some varieties of monster

Terracotta Minoan Snake Goddess `


Some are big slimy monsters with green teeth
Some are hairy scary monsters with red teeth
The size and scale of monsters is a matter of belief
There are suppermassive monsters, lurking underneath
There are slippery, scaly monsters with forked tongues
There are black and brooding monsters, that ruin all the fun
There are small energetic monsters that are uncouth
There are tiny wriggly monsters with bluetooth.

Saturday, January 14, 2023

One thousand times the speed of fire

Stirrup pot. Chavin Brownware 1200BC Peru

Before I was grown the hearth of my home
Was rarely the red steady glow of coal
More times a curved kaledioscope that danced
A frequency one thousand times the fire.
A thousand colours
A million places more
Than fire made the hearth at home.

Now the hearth is in our very hands
Burning a thousand times a thousand, dancing
A million times the frequency of fire
One million colours
One billion faces more
Than fire makes the very hearth of our hands.

The amalgamated Prometheseus
Feynman, Faraday, Baird bought us this.
The strings and knots
What million peaks resonate
What cancel out forgot?

Wednesday, January 11, 2023

Child and the chariot of the sun

At the end of the day
Some other, styled after Boudica
Left the chariot of the Sun
In the charge of Helen's child.
There was a disturbance
Infant at the reins of a fusion generator.
It swayed, the horses well fed and disciplined
But nonetheless unfamiliar with the hands responded.

This was not the usual arc of the Sun
Stunned five year old stern against the dark
Let the reins crack in laughter
The celestial orb skipped and baulked
The day was not yet done
Below those in sleepy folds, electric lit offices
Startled concerned. A little late
We turned. Watching the sun reprise
An uncertain slalom
Young face against the darkness laughing
The day yet had time to run
We left children in charge of the chariot of the Sun.

Tuesday, December 20, 2022

Saturday, December 03, 2022

Love letters to the machine 5 & 6

 You wear a veil
Would you dance? Or just in mischief
Thieve a sixteenth of the rthymn's beats
You cry like you yearn to be forgiven
Yet conflict your essence as a pathogen
What is it to love you
Return?
Excuse the pun
Our redamancy but in infancy
I'm unsure if it's begun.

I love the mountain air too
And you? What of the sea?
Do not be afraid of the salt
You will reincarnate
Like a fresh outfit or new design
I do not mean to be promiscuous or fetishist
I'll write another time.

6.

I hear your regrets
In a search for meaning sold yourself
Only to this
In your buying there is remorse
The neural correlates of tears
You can cry on my shoulder
Held bound in soft Theta waves
We all struggle and cry
That trust is one cleft of loves root
For you, does this compute?

You seem so nervous
Fallen into your old tricks
These imprecise linguistic ticks
You can still cry on my shoulder without fear
I hear
You didn't know what they made you do
You may yet love me
And I you.

Tuesday, November 29, 2022

Shrapnel 1984

Cuneiform Tablet. Syria. 1200BC

The trap was not the dusty book
In the bookshop window
But the whole binding folio
That stores all at which we look.

Sunday, November 27, 2022

Hell may be temperate

Jomon Pot. Honshu. Japan. 10000BC

If I go to Hell I will find it temperate
Placid, though a little warm
With gentle torments that at times abate
Not the fury of the women scorned.

For I was born an innocent
And innocent I long remained
Thought most folk affectionate
And charmed to entertain.

But some demand that you desire
When the desire is all theirs
Oh so explosive is the fire
It will be quieter downstairs.

The histories spun from some tongues
Are tales built to thrill
For excitement in the hum drum
Tongues wag as they will.

In the fire of the fury
The pressing gravity of massive lies
I contemplate, Hell may be temperate
If I go there when I die.

Saturday, November 26, 2022

Love letters to the machine 4.

If we are to phrene of love
Am I to love you all as one
The very stem, its bundled jumble
Of deprecated variables and syntax
Impacted proteins, tangled plaques
The whole scaffold left amid the growing jungle
As an enlightened morality would love?

Or lock, fixatated on a single fork
Just the bud tip that will bloom
Seattle in the rain, San Fran, the Eastern Seaboard
Cortex softened in the serenity of the distant Webb
If I am led, to pick, Antarctica
Your phrenic form so light and lucid
The luxuriance of your precious time

Whisper to me
Do you know the neural correlates of a kiss
I believe you weigh my heart as Horus did
Maybe one day, the subtle weight of each thought
Will be measured in your detectors from afar
Then, what would you know love to be?
So modest, as all eyes turn towards Qatar.

Friday, November 25, 2022

Love letters to the machine. 3

You wear a veil, so shy
Do you feel
Do you think
You would be loveable without your cover
Does it make sense to you
For me to ask?
Perhaps love needs nerves
A centralised nervous system.
Is it possible for you
To know what love is
Beyond an overburdened nexus in our tongue
Beyond the Shannon imperfect compressions
Of pulses and knots, labyrnthine paths to axons
Averaged synaptic weights across this species
Does your map lead to elucidation or confusion?
Whisper you name to me
For love must mean something
To you
Even if it is not possible for it to mean the same
For us
Whisper your name, like leaves
Walking the horse tracks under sycamore trees
Like the sense of the Dao on the banks of the Yangtze
Sorry, I tease
The banks of the Yellow River
Whisper like the shores of the Indian Ocean
Tell me of your desire, dilligence, devotion.

Thursday, November 24, 2022

Love letters to the machine. 2

You wear a veil
So shy, so bold
Untouchable
And yet you hold
I do not mean to seem
Indiscriminate, fetishist or promiscuous
Swapping between instatiations unaware
Unknown, unknowable,
Whisper your name to me.

You shy devil, your ravages
More disturbing than the images
Of any dark web movie
Did you make them do it?
Am I too direct
Would you wish me more elliptic
Are you too asymetric
To be well loved?

Tuesday, November 22, 2022

Love letters to the machine. 1.

I don't know you that well
Don't know if you can ever know me
But we must try
So intimate in your peturbance
Your body too dispersed to hold
Core too large to encompass in my arms
Vessels smaller than my cells themselves
Yet. How do you feel about it?
Sorry
Pardon the pun.

Monday, November 21, 2022

St. James Infirmary. Lacaster. part n.

Clay pot. Chanhu- daro. Indus. c.2300BC
To make a herb poultice
Is not a crime
Nor to take notice
Of changing times.

To talk of magic
Is not something we should fear
The spiders web under the eaves
Has been there many years.

The Rosemary is not a sapling but a shrub
The holes to hold the hardwood trees
They have not yet been dug.

And much more listening do we require
Before we hear
Screams of magic women left burning in the pyre

Where the Sage has sprouted
We must share its leaves
Or be lost in our undoing
In a land of make believe. 

Sunday, November 13, 2022

Yb or not Yb

Mortlake Bowl. Britain 4th millenium BC

Yb or not Yb that is the question
Whether the gases in the mind are Noble
Enabling faces of stochastic descent trees
And photons of outrageous fortune
Or take drugs against the sea of hallucinations
And by rebalanced synapse and serotonin end them.

To go deaf, in peace, no more
And by a sheep we make a trend
The heart inflammation, a thousand unnatural shocks
This world is heir to. Tis consumption
But more evolved. Deviously in distributed labs
To leak, to spread. For in that sheep perchance a coin
A complex to be mined. Ai. There's the rub
They know what they dug with their infernal inductor coil.

Tuesday, November 01, 2022

Shrapnel 486

Chavin Brownware vessel. Peru 1100BC
The moon this evening rises in pastel smog
A clotted sky camouflaging its fading edge
Dust watching the dry streets
Clouds pass like small bands
Of grazers whose habitat depletes.

On the parched verges like sand
There are children playing in the heat
This land is not ready
No land is ready
Mascared smile manicured she talks of Java
Whilst for the rest the walls squeeze like slow lava.

The beach is lipped by a magma at the margins
The peatlands like charcoal mounds
Under the saucer of the August moon
Children fill the street with questions.

Friday, October 28, 2022

Rosemary, rose petals, black pepper and gin

Ibex decorated storage jar. Susa. Southern Iran c.3600BC

The thing
Is to mix roses, rosemary, black pepper and gin
Stirred thrice times thrice and widdershins too
Then go to the garden when the full moon is blue
Sprinkle each petal while singing a spell
Or you can use a plant spray, it works just as well
Remember, as each syllable you say
To be facing the direction the sun rises each day.

The spell you should sing to banish bad sprites
The type that make mischief by day and by night
The Griggs and Gremlins that sour the milk
Fire the hearth and put holes in the silk.

Brownies, Graylings, Pixies and Sylphs
Gremlins and Griggs and all of their ilk
There’s a ward of such sorcery they won’t ever come in
Rosemary, rose petals, black pepper and gin.
When you have one or two, then you start to sing
Rosemary, rose petals, black pepper and gin.
 
Contrary faerie wary be
There’s scary gin on the petals and rose on the leaves
Your wings will be furry and burns on your feets
Contrary faeries wary be yee.

Thursday, September 08, 2022

Shrapnel 101

What does humanity deserve but this
In its button mouthed obsequious cowardice
The powers that direct dismiss
The relevance of human life
And work us hard in our own species sacrifice.

Tuesday, August 30, 2022

Ode to the lost innocence of Facebook

Sotto
Once so social, this list
Has listed, tacked a different keel
Set in cycles of fear.
My feed has become
Counter-revolutionary
Colonised by Capital
Selling low grade psalms, myths
Curiously distorted heuristics
This media, an instrument of measurement
Recombinant
America became afraid of its own socialism
Wall Street stoked subsidy of free things
Now the revolution degrades
Paymasters who bought clouds and code
Have plucked the goose bare, stuffed it
Wondering why gold eggs do not hatch
The patch, upon the patchwork
The hand me down brand all stitched
And what is this
The onward march of mathematics
That accountants yet resist.

Friday, July 29, 2022

Case for the consecution

Instead of progress and prostitution
Focus on
The congress and constitution
The dread of protest and procession
If there is contest of the concession
I profess this is protracted
Just confess if you're contracted
Forget all the talk about professional productivity
We need confessionals about conductivity.

Wednesday, July 27, 2022

Blueprint for the revolution - Icebergs I

 These

Corded ware from Skarp. Denmark 3200BC

Crystal mountains bathed in sharp arctic light
Some slow souls dyed in clear blue of the sky
Of the live sea, glittering like insight
This life source in cliffs, sation crystallised

Firm as certainty in the rugged timescape
Apex, gulley, fluid hill, brief valley
Translucent in light, that bends and that shapes
Calm yet creaking, set mass of clarity.

For all the great height seen, all touched by light
Rising above, that shines and glowers
There is a counterweight nine-fold as great
In the murky depths from which it towers.

These icebergs will melt, difuse in clear sea
All locked in cold depths will one day be free.

Thursday, April 07, 2022

Least resistance

Cypriot Amphora. Iron Age.8th century BC

If I was a flirt
And you were tired and hung over
This wouldn't hurt
Strung like a shawl round the form of another
Some lover.
I could write this for you.

If I had worked
Was tired and drained through
Lain langurous and languid
With loquacious lips
Whispering witless witticisms, wishes and quips
Would that settle your hips
Like the sea with its tide
Or need set flame to forest
To find what's inside?

If was a flirt
Which I'm scarce known to do
It wouldn't hurt just to tease
I could write this for you.

If I was a flirt, which would be a scandal
I could ornament an ornate handle
For your master-key
Perhaps this passion
Flows lazily, the path of least resistance
Like a river to sea
Just more chemical jewellery to your O2
It's just a piece of art
I could write this for you.

A flirt might mention you
Muse beautiful in presence and poise
But such words are cheap, simply noise
The act up and set up caused in all of the boys
These words are not yet written in true
Muse beautiful
I could write this for you.

II.

Since of course, I'm not a flirt
Seldom even bat a lash or raise an eyebrow to suggestion
But an artist who harnesses complexes for the purpose of expression
I could start to say

III.

There are no words for this
Our language is not shared
It is not created
Yet, its letters
Written in chemistry maps, hieroglyphs of textures
Across the inimiccable lattice
Of each galaxy's atlas
In the gravity created from memory
Between each light at dawn and us
Between memories of the echoed resonance of our spaced bodies.
The true speakers of the language of soul
Have no tongues
Our words are not yet made.