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,

Psithurisma

There is the continuous whisper in psithurisma,
The shuffling of atmosphere through empty forests,
Winding the unheard sounds of the dead and gone,
Across The Steppes, up through the lost lands,
And into the endless, treeless deserts of ice,
Where all the mix of souls find ghostless peace,

Remember on days of no weather, the trees calling,
Like screwed-up, torn-out pages, dead biography,
Bent by time and elements to fragments of talk,
Long forgotten by humans but saved in air,
Until brought back and decoded by the movement,
Of cyclones, anti-cyclones, turning the words again,

Until they leave you with no more than a guess,
As to what the argument was actually about,
Or how it was resolved in making up that day,
It's all just history, everything that ever happened,
Running headlong to the absolute end of entropy,
Where the universe is nothing more than this,

And how this sky-seen manifests is moot in black,
Its mechanism all bright thought and nothing else,
No thing of mindfulness to see or hear its end,
A scrap of hydrogen and what goes for white noise,
In it, where the storms abate to long-lasting eons,
With nothing but cooling and all time imprisoned,

We are watching for the last moving particle of light,
And finding it, watch it slow and end this murmur,
All things and time ending in this quadrillionth second,

But Time still passes .....

Time still passes ....

And now the hiss of ideas has coalesced, repeating,
The whole, evolving, eternal show reconstructing,
From a whisper through a tree.

The Jazz Age

It's a wall that hits you here,
Your own noise back at you,
A room-sized plate echo,
The reverberation of architecture,

Brought to you by no one,
This is the noise of the future,
The past and all in between,
Dissonance in red and grey,

Where the ore of all that's precious,
Sweats astronomy into the air,
Stealing the humidity,
To make the dry air sing the more,

Unobstructed by pollutants,
This wail and thump and screech,
Will reach you unattenuated,
Raw and free of the dirty world,

Where the work day ends,
And the dead of politics fails,
The sexless group will fill the space,
The jaded empty mind of gods,

The bandwidth fully occupied,
By frequencies in wide ranks,
Ejecting the unreasoning voices,
With skip and scratch and jump.

Spiral Arm

Weather is just the child of tilt,
A season made cruel by angles,
Arbitrary physics and accretion,

We brought no shelter with us,
And fell to sleep in a bitter wind,
Which raced itself across the dunes,

Bringing singing, stinging sand,
In graceful curves to landfall,
To drift like snow immune to sun,

And the speakers crack the air,
With all that is approved and true,
Bouncing the grit in resonance,

Twisting it to dry, bleak graphs,
Of how society is constructed,
In the ministries of maths,

It's just statistics to them now,
A section of us labelled red,
And sanctioned to despair,

And so the world orbits more,
One further arc of history,
Spitting the river in our faces,

It is bleak for those forgotten,
Those dropped like dry ballast,
To let some ascend without thought,

In another quarter turn in space,
They'll be no more than dust,
And memories.

Starling in the Garden This Afternoon

Light Cone - A Talking Therapy

Even machine-listed,
The Nine Billion Names of God,
Do not include this man,

And we give thanks,
The stars continue because he is omitted,
Restricted in his fantasy,

Confined structurally,
In the bubble of the new universe,
His space expands forever,

And we can only know,
Not prove the vacuum that surrounds,
His desultory communication,

He's settled in his orbit,
Supplied and fed eternally,
Forever separate,

In myriad idols he claims,
One God juggles morals and belief,
But like his argument,

This poem is full of holes.

The Notepad Men

It's cold today, the wind has China on its breath,
Shards of a thousand years of culture,
Wrecked by the crossing of the border,

This country will not scan for poets,
Like me, the proscribed and unapproved,
Its name rolls out and jolts us all,

The DPRK is formed from blanks,
The dreams of nana's nursery thugs,
Crushing the trash they pass off as toys,

He's a flat, grey man with flat, grey minders,
The dead eyed Notepad Men of Juche,
Fearful of hunger and re-education.

The paper is un-lined, non-aligned,
Government Issue stationery,
Locally produced for fear of empty space,

That would import a dangerous idea,
A whole white page to fill with freedom,
A page to let you think and be.

He talks, they walk and note verbatim,
Policy and doctrine, rocket drill,
Fisheries protection, isolationist redress,

The poetry of those considered artists,
Taken down in quadruplicate or more,
The white sails of charisma.

At night the Dear Leader wakes alone,
Calling for these men to note ideas,
The border smashed with ideology,

But in the low-rise bunkers to the south,
Autonomous machines and men are blinking,
It's fissile here and futile to imagine victory.

Blood Art

They fail and yet proclaim success,
Those who would deny a dirty peace,
For all necessary peace is flawed,
The future requires it to be so.

Mixing dinosaurs with men,
All the righteous floating,
In one empty, glorious day,
Away into the void of tolerance.

Years ago, old before the end of youth,
They walked in maths and envy,
Through the mad crowd of artists,
Superior in perceived maturity.

They regret now, not "going into finance",
All those red-faced, failed engineers,
Missing the wet money of banking,
Through lacking wider intellects.

Thinking theft a laudable career,
They moved outside of left or right,
Into the icy heights of avarice,
Above the tree lines of morality,

Heads down in sophistry and slime,
Apt redress from The Inferno,
They seem to revel in this lake,
This sewer of fire and foul intent.

It's just a form for filling in,
Stealing from a million mouths,
To feed a million lines of grace,
And graceless favourites.

They feel for nothing but themselves,
Hearts racing at the extreme edge,
Of hatreds built on empty space,
On the shades of skin and creeds,

These are the grey bombardiers,
We'll pen their "Blood Art" poem,
On the walls of shining steel and glass,
A hymn to The City and all its fears.

For it takes no more than paper,
Under the arches with derelicts,
Copied along the fibre optics,
Killing us all under the sky of black,

All our dreams of art are cheap,
Lost songs ,poetry and Craquelure,
All just history to those dead inside,
No more troubling than dust.

Philosophy Poem

Define yourself with numbers and it is all calculus,
Beyond all the necessary, existential force,
Confined deep in the blurry, chemical soup,
Of eyeless sight and endless, crushing hunger
Temporarily staved off with monochrome.