Raspberry Pi

This is a boundary condition,
The fence-posts of infinity,
Saving the cosmos in one place,
With a record for everything,
Where each particle is numbered,
And recorded in position,
Requiring its own universe,
Its own space and history,

The state issues me an integer,
Unique in all proposals,
A sequence, taking few bits,
Each a small self-reference,
A self-swallowing fracture,
All time slowly running out,
From cold to total immobility,
A trillion years to start again.

Penumbra

In the transformations of sight,
What once was gray turns violet,
A trick literally of the light,
Turned between the eye and memory,
From hard fact to perception,
To a noisy, fuzzy non-colour,
Like a half-heard sob of grief,
Caught behind a TV interview,
In the grimy crowd of relatives,
Scanning manifest and cargo,
For signs of the lost and drowned,
Until it seems all worlds and time,
Are concentrated in a single howl,
For the whole collapsing structure,
A cataract of masonry and faith,
Raising clouds across the city,
And emplacements in the mind,
To set positions and futures,
The digging of new trenches,
And the drawing of new lines.

Space Junk

It’s a wire panic, cascading light,
A photon pressure in the world,
Trending through circumferences,
To orbit in the clouds of waste,
We build in space as territories,
Footsteps on the moon as sculpture,
The concept of high planetary art,
Un-moved in evolutionary time,

I’ll make a signature at depth,
To turn this world to my creation,
My claim to these many-zeroed Tonnes,
Of fundamental coalescence,
Valid as any dusty mark from 1969,

I saw it build itself, un-manned,
Un-handled by deity or meaning,
Witnessed or inferred self-creation,
An inevitable consequence of dust,
And gravity with starting numbers,
The elementary question of design,
Who creates posited creators?
Is wasted, a pointless exercise,
In imagining humans centralised,
The peak of intellectual races,

Instead throw sticks and rocks,
And watch them know their paths,
Through those parabolas to impact,
A mineral with mind and heart,
Integrating its own space walk,
On the fly, instantly and exact,
Landing where it knew it would,
From before it left your hand,

It buzzes with small uncertainties,
Interference at lesser scales,
Creates possible absconders,
As the necessary consequence,
Of waves disguised as particles,
Disguised as standing waves,
Not once holding information,
Until glued to screens,
Chloroformed, jarred and pinned,
Beauty made static by experiment.

Cat Man Do

In some small hour we woke,
Disturbed by clattering,
Of drum machines and smoke,
A dream of dance on water,
The surreal places made,
In mind by bedtime music,
White noise eight tracks,
Spooling ambience forever,
Running round the bedroom,
Like a moth disturbed,
Mistakes our light as moon,
And circles it eternally,
It could be a horror film,
Makes us wake like this,
At this age, fearing all,
But we're old and helpless,
Not fogged or drugged,
In wars only when asleep.

Julia's Song

Doors to manual; we take all disorders,
The favoured saviours from insomnia,
Of the auto-immune and of the damaged,
We are the designated place of safety,
The AA-Alpha clinic listed everywhere,
Scratched on front-desks hastily,
For referrals of late-night derelicts,
And where once they'd sleep it off,
We take them in, all devils screaming,
The corner shakers, mumblers in pain,
They cannot tell through disconnect,
The addicts and psychotics, listed,
Indicators noted for the shift change,
A courtly trifecta of sainted beauty.

Voodoo Economics

Some claim chaos governs everything,
From the spread of moulds and wind,
To shares and social sciences,
All things riding waves of noise,
Set off by Butterflies on Mars,
To make storms in the oyster beds.

From small anxieties in lesser cogs,
Panic grows, the viruses of money,
Stealing true life from matter,
Spreading, not caring for the rest,
Slowly eroding the sand and clay,
The square mile of talk and rumour.

Some squeeze commerce down to dust,
Manufacture money out of nothing,
Spread betting with derivatives,
And hedging with the risk passed on,
To users, drugged with acquisition,
Seeing things and wanting more.

Hold two opposing thoughts in mind,
And still believe in both of them,
Make vacancies in key areas,
And in a week all are forgotten,
Burn capital and keep commodities,
Ten thousand routes to market.

Hero of Socialist Labour

Parabolas of light know consequences,
In confidence across the sky to impact,
Where the flowers grow in dusty scrub,
And children covet mass production,
Of little thought and fewer principles,
Here at home we are icons of free will,
Proudly manufactured, stoutly utilised,
To defend the borders of the Motherland.

You couldn’t hit a tank at twenty feet,
Fire instead would scatter, uncontrolled,
The hollow points and makeshift rounds,
Into the crowds, to split on concrete,
To spit at mufti and military alike,
Perpetually defining you as radical,
And other weasel words for angry child,
Joyful until death in games of soldiers.

Mikhail reports he sleeps unburdened,
Not once plagued by sweats and terrors,
Called up by visions of countless children,
Disassembled nightly in his dreams,
Oiled and cleaned then put together,
Shouldered casually in cafes everywhere,
The tiny, mighty gods of conflicts,
These Juju offerings for safety.

BPI

Somewhere back in nineteen-eighty-five,
The Novel-Writing Machines were copied,
Then modified to make music, safe and warm,
Something unobtrusive built to merge,
Into our long-valued lack of revolution,
Made to sooth the blank and supine youth,
With rattle and no hum, no hook or thought,
Vanilla waltz and four/four, little else,
Nothing to excite the soul but soul,
Dilute, shake, dilute again, prescribe,
Just expensive sugar pills and water
Not the rage of nineteen-seventy-six.

But that was reproduction just the same,
A manual factory for all the filth and fury,
We’ve got this money, you’ve got anger,
A Revolt to harness the old establishment,
And wet money to curse innocent society,
As so uncool, the word itself just so,
We are archaeologists, documenting rants,
Unearthed from Palaeolithic trenches,
Long-hidden under Wardour Street,
Then brought up nicely by new radicals,
You are the future, your new waves fading,
All hot air and no sound worth saving.

Two Minutes

Detail all invective for later, emetic recall,
With your punctuation in the zone, about right,
Lorentz equations, the details of aggression,
Favoured over things of more cultured import,
Lead us or not into these defined appointments,
The hate for the sake of time and space to fill,
The faces in the manuals of how to criticise,
Stopped short every time at hurt or contact,
We want them clean at execution time, undamaged,
Forced compliant by your emaciated language,
The ever-shrinking dictionaries of rightness,
Until your limited ideals become the only words,
And the word becomes thought, begets behaviour,
The walk and talk of good party members,
Or the sex and drugs of Proles, kept sweet,
Navigating carefully along a third way.

The Public Interest

It’s on the border between right and wrong,
Though maybe it’s more like no man’s land,
With all that fetid dirt and gossip,
Justifying break-ins and hacking,
For a few inches of Sunday diversion,
From the boredom before evening TV.
We’ll send in our trained reporters,
Fresh from the college of no-conscience,
Taking the role from the state as arbiter,
And claiming to be defenders of ethics.

They can spell out “ethics” and “morals” too,
A nice turn of stock phrase and cliché,
Bound for the dustbins they root through,
For letters from lovers or accountants,
All sustenance for the strange animals,
The shadowy invertebrates in the alleys,
And I’d read anything they print,
As diversion from the pit and vipers,
Slowly it fills me, kills me, buries me,
But deep down it does me good to die.

Quants

These decisions rest heavy on the world,
A few sparks in the ether of grey markets,
Framing credit default swaps and hedges,
With dancing money, imaginary cash,

Multiplied by values impossible to say,
Enough to buy or bring down countries,
To start programmes of defence, offence,
To construct spacecraft to the stars,

And with cartoon dollar eyes we'll forget
Food and shelter in the races we define,
Maybe include ourselves in the easy money,
The destruction of all principles,

We won't die anarchists, poor and weary,
Or fall back to the edges of history,
For worldwide funding buys us out,
We are nothing but input to the quants.

The Birth of Light

One rule of engagement covers gas,
The fade of a single drop of liquid,
From the unprotected skin
Into the blood of the affected,
Killing them either now or later,
Taking them down forever,
Into the attenuation of memory,
Freeing them from the edge of graphs,
With each point a whole mind gone,
Leaving just names and engraving.

The Great Baboon Escape of '71 BE*

From patriarch to just-born flee through wire,
The cheap mistake of Men with Vans,
A dusty tunnel to the scrub and Lancashire,
A file of mischief, four-handed burglars,
An evading invasion machine,
Loose-limbed and camouflaged like mud.

Out on the killer road, they dodge,
Traffic police and traffic,
Make landfall in allotments,
Crossing farms and fields on vegetables,
And scavenging, on wits and freedom,
Made heroes in confusion and flares.

They are punks in a sea of Glam-Rock,
Mug-shot in colours not-seen before,
Beige and short-haired with three chords,
Visigoths with wiper-blades,
Fencing car-parts across the county,
From shining sea to Yorkshire.

They sideline in play scripts,
Tapped out on a billion, stolen typewriters,
Lifted invisibly from dock containers,
Stealthy editors of all promoted garbage,
Telling the truth on the life inside,
Sanctioned vandals to a man or monkey.

* Before Ebay

Eat That Dog

They'd find your heart out beyond Neptune,
Where The distant Sun is a cold star,
And blood is always ice.

I've written code that cares more than you,
Three fake brain cells and the truth,
Binary ethics required by law.

Dressed for dinner, armed and blank-eyed,
They'll be sure of anarchy tonight,
From weaponised invective.

Perhaps blue-suited, manning the cameras,
The dusty, state surveyor-in chief,
Thin-lipped in disapproval.

Gulping down the Victory Gin, free drinks,
Lined up in the Green Room,
A week of Government aid.

It's a flat repeat fee for this appearance,
The cost of opinion stamped out,
From the ciphers of 1953.

How many seconds to make them hate you,
Your truisms and not lying,
Not technically anyway?

They ended a sentence with a preposition,
And you gagged at a wasted education,
Like poetry without a rhyme.

The Implications of Maths

The equations of interference in a single particle,
Are the additions of clock hands and magnitudes,
Of complex numbers again, easy to tease out detail
When you’ve seen them moving the earth once before,
In those false colours, like the DNA of Beethoven,
Dragged screaming from its elemental hiding place,
Processed, turned from the bases into system music.

We could code everything with a single number
Of infinite precision, a bar of specific length,
Defined down to the quantum distance, a cosmos,
The total extent of all known and unknown things
In this particular path through sum over history.
The belief in this clockwork came before clocks,
And now clocks define its indistinct replacement.

Every projectile studied calculus and follows paths
Through space that only intellect can totally define.
We thought it gravity but some fracture hides in there,
A message from god, ignored in the hope of deletion,
Telling tales on the machine, whispering “look here”,
Until a cloud of the wrecked pieces of Universes,
Showed us the way through every infinite path.

Crab Canon

All of Human knowledge is a vital thing,
Increasing though all time is flat,
Stops clocks that halt invasion fleets,
Forever pulling back, tracer stalled mid trace,
The soldier falling falls no more,
Stolen from a lover once is now returned,
Uninjured in the breeching landing craft,
Demobbed across the seas to memories.

Hey boys! What gives you pause? How may we help you in these adventures? I’ll show a leg, the wife of a sailor saved by jaw and peace talks, a pretty leg across the edge of a bed lit by the oblique sun in the early morning back in some quiet county in some forgotten state. We’ll look inwards, point our minds at the calm interior and know we need never leave. All the day is a rising and sinking of seasons, the permanent end of war.

Called up to cross the seas to uncertainties,
Panting in the beaching landing craft,
Stolen from a lover now was once returned,
The soldier who now falls, was held,
Forever grinding on, tracer bright mid trace,
Starts clocks that call invasion fleets,
Increasing through all time knocked back,
All of Human knowledge lies, a forgotten thing.

Why Everything That Can Happen Does Happen

They recommend reading this again,
To confirm and satisfy your understanding,
Two paragraphs taking different paths,
Through space, to buttress arguments.

This is not structure or common sense,
But rather new thoughts on truth,
A special trace in the parts of mind,
That take more dimensions than is usual,
And mould them carefully into the real,
But unexperienced many worlds,
A cross between reflections and shadows.

And in this moment it becomes poetry,
(Though moment has no meaning),
Fitting the imaging of concrete things,
In the windy darks of the very-small,
Where squalls of particles in closed eyes,
Manufacture ideas out of nothing,
And show Philosophy as the only science.

Where cats have wings and never die,
Where fish fall foully from the sky,
The world is a collapsed wave equation,
Defining entropy and its cessation,
When singularity becomes a drain,
They recommend reading this again.

Midterms

Viruses abound,
And I'm brought down by sickness,
Poems are delayed.

January 1st 2012

In a warm, chaotic room, defying searches,
Slipped between two of the million pages,
And any of the trillion seconds since its loss,
Hides a verse epitaph, exposing traitors,
In some long-vanished political strategy,
The stuttering of reconstruction kills it,
For those who try to raise the thing to life,
From a title and three, half-remembered lines,
Travelling through time but never space,
Passing through to the end of copyright,
The death of all intellectual property,
Worth nothing but the price of manuscript,
The paper, pen and ink, with no provenance,
Just a dusty fragment, flattened in a book,
Safe from fading, a child's proud boast.

DSM-5

It’s almost judgement day,
We’d have a parade, an escapade,
To celebrate completion number five,
The big book of deviations, shocks,
And anything wrong side of normal.

They’ll catch that quirk of yours,
The midnight guilt at an ancient kiss,
That leaves you sleepless,
And blows away with breakfast,

Remember (or more likely not),
The counting of locked doors,
The pavement cracks not stepped on,

A dazzling myriad of missile chaff,
Disorders scattering like sweets,
One for everyone and some to spare,
For states to define the population,
To facilitate the shakedown,
Of a species, patented and owned,
Copyrighted in scripts for selling,
Everything from birth to death,

You’d be better with a crucifix,
Or crystals, or a remote life,
Of disinfected books and no joy,
A warm cabin in the woods,
With true madness and a pen.

Priorities

All darlings break in this barrage,
The un-smart bombs of indiscrimination,
Hate everyone and so fall randomly,
Live across a city of smashed concrete,
In front of the wide-eyed children,
Waiting for their tea-time TV, waking up,
To the top story of a man resigned,
For murmuring his raging discontent,
His lack of salary, his lost respect.

The editors don’t choose his stance,
He makes it clear but does not care,
How they represent him, he’ll shrug,
And leave having stated his position,
We cannot see how he sees himself,
Or list his errors for he’s a cipher,
A flexible envoy of the tedious world,
Bright shiny lights for animal minds,
And we in the party take it hard.

I’d forget his name but it takes work,
To force out the minor thought of it,
Sneaking in front of blood and damage,
Smiling his waste of bandwidth away,
To raise murmurings in later bar talk,
Such barrack politics has no outrage,
No calls for blood or boots for blood,
They’ll sink back into the warm beer,
Like salt or dust in uncared-for air.

They ignore the sharp sting of spirits,
The drink of the angry men, the armed,
Booking their tickets to foreign wars,
That call them to supposed heritage,
Forgetting the old village divisions,
That made refugees a generation past,
Back to the old country, ancient kings,
Ruling them with primordial dark ideas,
Morally ownerless in enlightenment.

Division by Zero

Radical is the term attached to thinking,
As against not thinking,
Psychosis is stages beyond this.

Before spitting out an idea,
(Not your own), an automatic stance,
On the existence of continents,
Why not choose the whole world for oblivion,
Everyone but yourself? We’d go along,
But suggest a small change,
The inverse solution to your equation,
One over you, fixed forever,
Just a tick in a list of problems.

There would be no pain,
Just the logical, mathematical,
Cancelling out of your existence,
Your being becoming not being,
Defined in the logic of singularity,
That expanded into the universe,
Writing the textbooks before text,
Before books, before everything.

And yet the boundary condition fails,
In all this creation you were made too,
An uncertainty in simple light,
Interfering with itself in shadow,
To turn mere field to mass and brain,
And thought and ideas and pain.

One over X, where X is you,

Anything Over Zero is undefined.

Circus

Choose your case and industry,
And fix yourself within it,
Say pin making and Taylorism,
As your gods and wizards.

Watch CJ dash himself on rocks,
Like a Benzene Dream Snake,
Referenced at a thousand yards,
Of bleak obscurity and wit,

To wreck on his own shores,
Back-slapping the foul mists,
Of fellow-favoured thinkers,
Lost in cursing rhetoric.

See Psych in Action here friends,
Weirdness and delusion abound,
Set free to rise like gliders,
On the heated air of hate.

They'll peg you in a second,
This transference and reference,
Brought low on the couch,
Fearing your Doctor's own hand,

Or you are ranting and Impotent,
Madness theorising militarily,
In your own dim front room,
Thinking you have the trigger,

That you might pacify nations,
Completely with planes and boots,
But you fear no end save judgement,
Nothing more than sideshow.

Causality

Controlling and composing, light shifting through the spat ire,
Comes at me, detailing how things are in other places,
I stand head-up in the garden, mouth open, torch to sky,
And sweep it carefully between two close stars,
Knowing my codes will reach them, apart by whole eras,
Cities falling for ever in the gaps between letters,
And the bubbling of safe, unstimulated Earthlings,
Will mean nothing arriving on those far planets,
Save for an empty discordant tone in their strange ethers,
A signal bent imperceptibly in the senses,
To shine in the eyes, or equivalent, they have,

In the far-away swamp, the rhythms are undisturbed,
The photons of our weather explore this distant space,
Seeing all this that we'll never see,
Then scream back, returning to our nerves,
Hitting the sheets of extended senses,
With all the colours ever existing in a single scrap of time,

And thinking of this makes the solid world strange,
I can feel the Universe linking, gripped in the hooks,
Of the Unified Fields, the double-headed arrow,
Promising a variable time, time lifted out of its vector,
To become Force and Direction, retrieving past energy,
What Caesar said recorded in the interference of light,
Proof of nothing ever destroyed, all and nothing at once,

Poem for a Birthday

Things to come, the clock case hides,
The tick through tunings of the past,
When we were young and unsafe,
Black shadows held against the light,

Strobed in the background of films,
Forever lithe and threatened,
By our own risks and projects,
The infinite falls of youth.

Now the junk rooms fill with stuff,
The unread, unused articles of non-war,
Jamming the down pipes,
Making me immortal.

On The Perfection of Nature

It would roll but not bounce,

Would not support weight like standard,
This is a comedy egg, a yolk joke,
Broken for a calculated omelette,
It's lost its chance for fame,
Slipping down the insulted gullet,
With nothing left but fragments,
And a word in the shell-likes,
Of the record keepers, denying entry,
To their big book of Pi.

The Rebel Yells of Adults

Will not do this,
So think again my friend,
Though not friendly,
An obvious assertion,
From an observed tantrum,
My refusal loud and bright,
Seen from space,
With screams dying,
As they leave Earth,
Fading out of atmosphere,
To mark this outrage,
At something trivial,
Like bedtime for the aged,
Forced feeding,
The completion of meals,
The lack of dropped lines,
In poetry these days,
Because pages fit words now,
Not words forced to split,
Dragging the eye down,
Before carriage returns,
And the natural end,
The sensitive contentment,
Missing from the instants.

Will not do this,
Never ask again for favours,
For new collaborations,
Satellite costs shared by us,
You're on your own,
Guessing my mind, my heart,
My plans for you now hidden,
In no interest, no contract,
No adventures far away.

You'd sells arms to relatives,
Make money from their conflicts,
And stand back distracted,
By the dollars in your hand,
Until they balance dislike,
And turn to you for reparations,
Their Weimar, treaty in hand,
Detailing their future in revenge,
For a new war.

BBC 648

A mind belongs to nothing but itself,
Constrained in the brain's soft kilogram,
Is all that anger and desire,
The million identifying marks of us,
Coded, unencryptable and unknowable.

Broadcast the bits of a single thought,
From Orfordness to the whole world,
Error-Corrected, CRCed, bound to arrive,
Complete and clean, bounced off Heaviside,
Brought back to earth in sparking coils.

It is a perfect shot, slippy and hyperbolic,
Heard around a great circle, to duplicate,
In Petabytes and Exabytes, powers unbounded,
Deep in the Woomera storage bunkers,
Becoming the buried Vaults for a copied idea.,

But still all is chaos, stilled and random,
A dead, dissected process, cut from us,
Like a lost essay, pulped and burned,
Bulked up with all the wasted analysis,
A nothing without its grey matrix.

Spiral

A Month of Poems,
Announced with defined Structure,
Warming with cold fire.