Drone (Two Fractured Sonnets)

Upside: detail left alone,
Becomes jagged outside your head
Spaceflight takes collected knowledge,
To networks out of system,
Where the undiscovered orbit,
Strangely, a swarm, a mass of,
Drones with little purpose,
I missed a breath here,
My autonomics failing,
Empty of air,

The lack reached consciousness,
A considered inhalation,
No longer drowning,
In the sight of awe,

The scraps of thought attached,
To almost-sterile hardware,
Careering, reactor-first to other stars,
Take news of no-gods to other minds,
There is no plan for spinning worlds,
This path is born of rocket scientists,
Those who scorn freewill like light,
Computing with complexity,
The orbits of these three bodies,
Impossible things for breakfast,

Demolition comes to me,
I would crawl with charges,
Through the rough excavations,
The incompleteness of our time.

Nighthawk

Headlights sweep cold retinas,
And the rain can't keep us safe,
Deep in the eaves, in shadow,
It's just red, suspended eyes,
A silent, patient sniper,
With a scan, a laser knife,
To build models of the world,
Thought logical and constant,

Sanctioning is, they say,
Non-lethal, a trivial incision,
To help one with focus,
So precise and targeted that,
We're supposed to welcome,
All the shocks and nudges,
The suggestions of employment,
Designed to suck out hope,

In this dark world, the hawk is king,
Distributing advice, a prophet,
Submerging the dead in debt,
Streaming flesh on barbed wire,
Under the shelter of rotten wood and,
Calming the fearful dangerously,
Karma would be a welcome echo
Sent like a shark to quarter men.

Vanishing Point - On The Randomness of Ceiling Tiles

It's a long view to the vanishing point,
Somewhere out with all the cars,
A roof interior dotted and self-similar,
To suggest a natural feel and texture,
Some stone wall in a childhood garden,
The ever-green fields and rushing river,

     With pockets full of stones,
     Something tepid and awry,

The analysis of patterns and thunder,
Breaks some simmering processes,
It's just the calculations stopping you,
Holding back the decaying ideas,
Of manic and maniac to terminate,
To set an escape clause in the mind,

     Perhaps a fault with gravity,
     The river bed is flying,

There's strong bass melody in the line,
Tracing a rhythm down to earth,
Catching the final invisible touch,
Of where all the constructions meet,
In relaxed focus, we build dimensions,
And the airy demons leap out at us,

     White water sucks out everything,
     Reaching into the mind like surgeons,

On the history of ceilings, chapter 2,
There's a philosopher hidden here,
An old, bearded thinker lunging,
Sparking with heavy logic, hard ethics,
Questions to resolve in seconds,
For God on how to kill and not kill.

     You move me like music,
     I dance with you for seconds,

Stakhanovich in The Library

It's eating at the coal face,
A rough swipe across the mouth,
And the scran goes down easily,

Perhaps not satisfied enough,
You lean back against hard rock,
Stealing sleep from the company,

Ten minutes of production,
Up the wall, gone forever,
A notch in the five-year plan,

Comforted that days later,
Some poor Apparatchik,
Will get it loudly in the neck,

Or more likely will fake it,
Rounding off his figures,
With a guess or two,

Standing tall with Laskier,
With Feng and all the other,
Poster-boys of revolution,

This evening is austerity,
In the eternal low wattage,
Of grime and leaks and rot,

But we have civilization,
Present in the dusty shelves,
Plato stalks the corridor,

Like a hawk of the high lands,
Its shadow swift across the ground,
Stealing knowledge from the party,

The drip of density, of science.
Always undisputed on the page,
Lies still and true for ever,

Fight fiercely in your sleep,
The mind will always know itself,
Facts are facts, and love is love,

Kuiper (New Horizons)

It's aimed at the stars,
Gunning for a gap between planets,
Barreling like rain from the sky,
And fractally repeating,
Forever outwards,
To the clouds and belts,
Of the outer systems,

It's just so, a sweeping eye,
To define in near space,
This last unknown, cold rock,
Pinned for a single probability,
Into an orgy of imaging,
Scanned and beamed, then gone,
A scream of near-zero friction,

From here on it's all toroidal,
The thousand trillion small worlds,
Comets and primordial accretion,
All unsentient yet planet killers,
Dressed in the dust of eons,
Kicked up by our passing,
And turned into a new entity,

Distant generations give it form,
Object, year and number,
Calculate its risk and orbit,
And then leave its end to systems,
Made autonomous and mad,
Serving humans without oversight,
They nudge it with space drive,