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.

Schtick Schtock

This is anger at the comparison of bread to salt,
His is some pap with bolt-on cleverness,
Stolen from the sincere and genuinely foreign,
The arrangement of a mind palace,
Like a child’s collection lined up for praise,
From a parent returning home from work,
To the dancing darling jumping in front of the eyes
For attention and justifying.

Here is the true poet, the feedback buzzing,
From ill-treated amplifiers,
Digging deep in the feelings of the bereaved and lost,
To cut trenches in the complexities of war,
With the text and belonging of the truly alive,
Badges of membership, encrypted and protected,
The lossless compressions of experience and doubt,
Kept by outsiders from the near-dead.