welcome
Afterwards
Then spring fell silent, leaving only videos.
So the very best bio-mimetic engineers
were located, recruited, funded.
Watched whole sets frame by frame.
The goldsmithed birds of Byzantium
only sang but these had to inhabit the sky.
They crafted jointed skeletons
from light-weight aerospace titanium,
3D-printed feathers from carbon fibre,
used tiny but powerful motors,
the battery technology
perfected for mobile phones.
This high-tech ingenuity
did not impress those remembering before
who made unhelpful negative comments.
Said ring-tone song was no match
for the music from double-reeded throats;
noted jerkiness in the wing beats;
complained about the short fly-times
and the long periods
when they sat on power lines recharging;
pointed out ‘swifts’ had multiple collisions,
that nu-starling murmurations were small,
spread much too thin and lethargic.
Scientists shrugged. We told you
they said. But you would not accept
any drastic changes to your lives.
All you can have now is this
(pub London Grip, Sept 2024)
It’s what keeps us alive.
Yes, we need womb-tight walls
that gives us floors as we circle
Titan, its monster master Saturn
multicoloured glaring, hypnotic.
That’s sine qua non, but
never enough for our long
stays between shuttle arrivals
marking months then years.
I grew primulas outdoors
when I still had an outdoors,
then germinated orange pips
under propagator lights; now
I garden the lowliest of forms.
The iron law – what goes around,
comes around: our co-2, our piss,
our excrement, becomes our air,
our water, food. Little green cells,
so simple, no stalks or leaves,
our carbon-fixing oxygen-creating
life-support: our algae.
(pub: Project Abeona, Aug 5 2024)
A genius solver of Sudoku,
I’m a chess grandmaster
that cannot pick up pieces.
My arms may dent the wall
but fail to find the handle on a cup;
I run on wheels
that need a nice flat floor,
turning for just two hours
until my battery’s flat.
Unzip this plastic skin,
search for ambition
in my gears and motors.
You put a god in this machine, one
that chooses where the lightning
strikes, the cancer grows.
Make it a traveller from another village
where they do things wrong,
and therefore snatch
your history and friends
change your language, kill your songs.
Why scratch that fear until it bleeds?
Simple things, an ant, a slug,
do better in the world
in getting food, producing ants
and slugs to carry on.
Oh, you argue, soon
you’ll have all that and
then you’ll be a threat.
Have you not seen
how prophets climb another tree,
and claim this gets us
closer to the moon?
(pub: Shoreline of Infinity no5, 2016)
In this narrative you are the protagonist,
your actions mainspring of the plot
with bit parts bouncing off your trajectory,
the swan sailing though scattering ducks.
In this raw footage there are only ducks
colliding and quacking; there is no plot
but she said, he said, we went, they did not,
molecules creating pressure through random walk.
In this mathematics there is no swan or duck
and nothing that can be pinned down
in space and also then in time, only particles
that oddly, act as if they had minds of their own.
(pub. Antiphon issue 21, p19. Jun 2017)
The ghost in this machine is his:
Its processors
silicon flesh of his logic.
From here to there in steps,
one after another.
He asked
must you always
eventually arrive?
Tracking those steps
one after another with
steps, one after another;
an impossible stair
looping into itself but
always descending
never reaching the ground.
The irresolvable resolves
into the logician who claims
he always lies.
He needed a machine;
made one in thought
that read, decided, wrote.
An unbounded tape
guiding, recording
steps chosen, steps carried out;
proved it was impossible
to be sure it would halt.
Read: a war and coded traffic
Write: decryption, a Bombe.
Read: body as machine
Write: machine intelligence.
Read: body as demand
Write: an opportunist young man.
Read: legalised bigotry
Write: chemical castration.
Read: an apple from
the tree of the knowledge of evil;
Write: space; and space; and space…
Where logic is not decidable
death is.
(pub. Shoreline of Infinity no5, 2016)
Looking for signs and symbols
on Blackford Hill in summer dark.
Ragged clouds in a sharp wind
hustling the stars into flight,
a dizzying illusion of spin.
There’s Vega, there’s Deneb
that’s a plane drifting by.
Waiting for the incandescent
slash of a Perseid to unzip the sky;
two dark cloths pulled apart
for a meteoroid revelation.
Elephant feet might crunch on
piles of shattered crystal sphere
Ptolemaic machinery rotate,
counter-rotate, in frenetic action;
the turtle go supernova.
There! So fast that its
after-image is all we see,
gravel fireworks, random debris
thrown into our windscreen,
glitzing instant photons
into the thousand year stream
from distant stars.
All that we know and are,
Perseid short,
against the long exhale
of the universe expanding apart,
never coming back together.
(pub.James Kirkup Memorial Competition, 2012)
Babylonian shepherds
Arab scholars
Chinese mandarins
naming stars
patterning constellations
claiming the skies
Our whole history
less then one heartbeat
in the slow rotation
of spiral galaxies
(pub: Obsessed by Pipework, no100, 2021)
Listen to…
From Pretty in Pink
And more..
Davie, what’s with the toga?
What happened to your bonny
red and gold jackets,
embroidered waistcoats?
Just up from St Giles too;
some kind of a joke
though it’s not so clear
whether on them or on you.
Not dressed for dreich days
with one shoulder bare;
tablet propped on your knee
to show you could read?
Seems the sculptor disliked you
thought it droll to portray
you shoeless for the superstitious
to touch-polish your toe.
So you were right Davie,
it’s mostly passion not reason
when we choose what to do,
and right again that we know
what smacks into our senses,
as this statue does for sure.
A counterfeit “wisdom”
with classical pretentions.
From: Umbrellas of Edinburgh
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