Network of Things

Rolled out like new thunder, 
A gleaming commentary on escape,
And redemption,
Listing hard and threatening,

It moves on, searching for the world’s edge,
Cutting new taxiways for sentient weapons,
New paths for the fallen to take to salvation,
Through the babbling mines,

The nets made of light and wire,
Surrounding the old flesh and blood,
The obsolete stuff, sensitive to ambience,
To drowning in its own solvent,

It’s a calling, an occupying of time,
A reward for automating death,
With sensors and robotics,
The stereo camera that clocks movement,

The heat-seeker of soft bodies,
All children of the dead-eyed inventor,
Maker of the shining, sterile beams,
Which cross the world with no intent,

But the defined instructions of paper-tape,
Binary-coded words without nuance or regret,
Their sealed orders are assayed,
Machined to the edge of visibility,

And they error,
Fail unsafe,
In the not found,
Always break bad,
But see no fault,
No funerals,
In crushed buildings,
The soft things,
They know, 
Not as makers,
But as targets,
As real as steel,
And Concrete,
War is peace
With machines,
We are collateral.

National Poetry Day 2013

Death of a Poet

They like their poetry to rhyme,
Men old before we'd call them so,
They like a beat to it,
All Iamb and Trochee in regiment,
Like the National Service,
That passed them by,

They'll quote the dirge of "real poetry",
As if defined by statute,
Laid down in steel like ships,
To slip without wave or sound,
Into the grey and maudlin sea,
Asleep with the polydactyls,

War and Peace in Haiku

With conflict we fail,
Our own humanity errs,
With every shot,

The gods weep for us,
All children one, divided,
By empty quarrels,

We'd not put paper,
Between the races living,
In the chosen land,

Take some blood for blood,
For measuring and placing,
All your ancestors,

Apart by billionths,
Separated by ideas,
Never ever wrong,

Gassed

Gassed by John Singer Sargent

I am ashamed that I have not seen this painting before. It took this cartoon in The Telegraph to bring it to my attention. The cartoon may be moot now after last night's vote and though it is hard to turn away from the terrible events which prompted it, and it may well be negated by any action taken by other countries, I am hopeful that this is the start of a distancing from these foreign escapades. I am sure that any statement that this is the start of a new, more peaceful era will be seen as hyperbole but like someone more erudite than me said 50 years ago, I can dream.

Cutaway

I do not own this ground,
But it falls to me to undo its covering,
To scrape away the grass and rocks,
To get to the rich,living earth below,
The earth of the million buried there,
Since hard life diffused to legends,
And the land was the choice,
For adventuring and invasion,

We've turned far away these days,
Leaving the escapades to others,
Rooted and indifferent to distant outrage,
It's now all just vapour and politics,
Parliament will simmer and steam,
With their cross-bench invective,
And we stand off from the first shot,
A sword's-length away from destruction,

Music for Geologists

This is the noise of rock drills,

The plates of Earth that slip,

And grate against themselves,

With a frequency set at decades,

The wavelength of an entire planet,

Stretched beyond its orbit,

Outside the Oort and dust,

The haunt of Pioneer and Voyager,

We'll tape it over a hundred years,

Then shrink it, shift the pitch,

And listen to the music of accretion,

The bass of all the continents,

The rhythm of an atmosphere,

Cycled and then recycled,

Into the sound of now,

The hit of the Millennium,

Airlane

Stolen from deities everywhere,
Omnipotence? Discuss,
And this is not in my philosophy,
Or anything that I might own,
I read the syllabus today,
And explained it all in seconds,
With a puff of non-existence,
Nothing necessary in chaos,

White Spot

Stand against the ban on peaceniks,
They're ill and do not approve of you,
For they deny their own existence,
Automatic writing shows the way,
A random graph of objects,
Lost on Chinese Railways,
Scrawled graffiti on the bridges,
Insulting party members,
Humming work songs while in government,
Show trials in the winter,
And the alphabet reordered,

The Sylvia Plath Riots

In 1980, as her daughters rebelled,
She joined them on stage at school,
A proto riot grrrl, always in, and black and white,
Spitting out the blood of her enemies,
That dissolved in the TLS she ate as fuel
For the venomous next phase,
The boyfriends cowered and left,
Excusing themselves to cocktails,
At F&F with Valerie and Ted,

It was revolution, nothing less,
Made cool again by low-slung bass,
And all her grammatical attitude,
Though the boys demanded choruses,
She stood tall upstage and faced them,
Making her own, new manifesto,
In just verse, truth and three chords,
Opening the set with drama,
And the dropping of a burning book,

So revolted by her lack of scansion,
The purring critics, missing rhyme,
Counting syllables and prime numbers,
In songs that were just prose to music,
Missed the point of drone and throb,
And called upon more subtle emotions,
To excuse the stench of politics,
Arguing themselves to singularity,
In the end of the Post War,

Sylvia burned the theatre down,

Prophets

They are here to save the world,
Lovers happy in their charity clothes,
Hair pinned casually as control,
To keep the clear view ahead,
They have all the basic needs,
Food and water and each other,
And that perhaps was me,
With all my empty counterculture,
Forever concealed in depths,
A minefield to catch invaders,
Passing the outer nets to harbours,
Where the battleships are moored,
Grey and stately, massive engineering,
Defining the situation with arms,
And meaning nothing.

Electroacoustics IV

It was always an imperfect sound,

The fundamentals never pure,

Were corrupted hard by simple air,

Made rough by ambience,

And all our inattention,

We had no control of sound;

It left our bodies unpiloted,

Hitting the ears, modified,

By miles of cracking vapour,

But now we can fill the mind,

With an exact sound, music,

Made to match the mind,

In which it is absorbed,

Joy and sadness moulded,

To the mood of the day,

And in that stream of sound,

We'll hide a way to kill you,

With resonant frequencies,