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.