Brimstone

The photographer was felled by shrapnel,
Next to me,
His camera still clicking,
An ogive of decease,
Postmortem pictures,
Each focused perfectly by software,
Showed a line of steel and dead-eyed villagers,
Unshocked by just another life gone by,

My own skin, a little melted,
Caused no pain,
Until my fluids leaked into the chatter,
Of rescuers and outrage,
And carried by many bearers,
Like rivers between the makeshift ambulances,
I flew and fainted through the high dust,
Of felled and falling buildings,
Into an oven of bare and ringing metal,
Jerked into movement by a tuned hand,
That urged no delay,

But in a place of little safety,
Armoured with ragged crosses,
Painted hastily across the roof,
And struggling to be vertical,
I was marked as non-urgent,
By sleepless doctors,
Who made me sleep,
Until I woke up, automatically evacuated,
On the say so of my passport,
Empty of the memory of flight,
In a white room with curtains,
Lifted by the breeze of warm seas.

The Edge of the World

It's not true North as far as we can see,
Just the gusty edge of sun-swept docks,
Emptied of shadows by half-day closing,

An even sky lights a fisherman and his wife,
In an eyeless, slow-panning separation,
Black and white heroes of old labour,

Each not wanting to signal fears,
As he departs to the bobbing deck,
Of a boat that dares the sea to rage,

That dares the sea to sink it in a blink,
With heavy swells and temper,
Magicked from this flat calm,

The grey guttering town retreats,
Leaving the small speck of farewell,
Waving the boat to its far horizon,

Then slowly home to the empty chair,
And the fire, now less warming,
But alive now with the gathering wind,

That tunnels down the chimney,
Bringing the marshalling weather inside,
The smell of salt and the turning sky,

And now a book and bread and jam,
And the light failing in the North,
Just the wind now gets inside,

Faith sustains sleep now in this house,

But the returns are quietly marked,
The imagined ticks on the far sea edge,
Signal a mast or two and then a hull,

Then hulls of this entire little fleet,
The wood scraped to paintless wastes,
The hold brimmed with ice and fish,

The True North burns away in the sky,
Shining on shy reaquaintances,
The slight touch and held-back joy,

And Faith sustains sleep now in this house.

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,

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