Tuesday, January 19, 2021

A Corona of Sonnets











We Have Emptied the Skies - 1 27/03/2020

So all the world is natural again,
When negatives have silenced the machines,
No love among the animals for men,
Until bluer skies meet land, and night seems,

Colder than the dots of code that blight us,
All through the substrates humans cannot touch,
What we believed was true was always dust,
Upon the jet streams and the dreams of putsch,

This is a whimpering catastrophe,
The end of something which we can't define,
Which reeks of planet-wide stupidity,
Taint that forever shows up down the line,

We are dust and to dust we must return,
Always repeating what we never learn,


Airlane - 2 02/04/2020

Always repeating what we never learn,
We make objections to the history,
That's cruelly taken from us while we burn,
Or starve idly in our complicity,

And so we hoard resentments deeply-held,
Pass pious loathing down through our own caste,
Clans differing in nothing but compelled
to pacify and hate, rewrite the past,

For our reward, and so we fear the shades,
Of humankind not kind or qualified,
To own this world and all its palisades,
Its covert bunkers and the lies implied,

That justify themselves in brevity,
Where hides the guild of our complexity,


Shadowlands — 3 05/04/2020

Where hides the guild of our complexity?
They're always with us in plain black and white,
Uncoded living, as children crave security,
Ignoring those not born to sweet delight,

Forever hoping for the dead to pay,
Benevolence to make but never do,
What saves, but revel in the disarray,
Of history and faith, and so accrue,

All that's meant for building better states,
For saving life, but theirs is not to save,
Unless it's via a banker's draft and surrogates,
Those listless shadows circling our graves,

And so I stir from passive middle grounds,
This world filled with quiet and angry sounds,


Sleeping Priests — 4 07/04/2020

This world filled with quiet and angry sounds,
That hint at murder in the ears of men,
Has breathed and raised the usual battle grounds,
This country fell and so must rise again,

The murmuring in endless summer feasts
is rage, a sour acid on the breath,
That nears the fuse and stirs once sleeping priests,
To organise and preach on righteous death,

They'd pull the lever if they had the strength,
They'd drown the bastards in the stream,
Then run home knocking sticks along the fence,
And back to mother in some fifties dream,

Of economics and the rise of light,
But nations fall again in endless night,


The Collective - 5 08/04/2020

But nations fall again in endless night,
A people drowning in their false beliefs,
Which even children question, leukocytes
arrayed in neural nets and sickly reefs

acidified with rain, know more than us,
This ray that worms its way in through the door,
That flyspeck bug that comes in with the dust,
Together in the mind must herald war,

A long haul, endocrine apocalypse,
Fragmenting truth with all those backward tapes,
And in our minds we're making up our lists,
An intellectual voodoo of distorted shapes,

Behind the frosted glass that hides the pain,
Between the rattled lines is our domain,


Isolation — 6 12/04/2020

Between the rattled lines is our domain,
A smaller world than all the worlds before,
The future stalls, a slowly flowing vein,
A burning frame of film, a dead-eyed store

of our insistent small-hours reckoning,
Pulsating in the brain like insects beat
in solid ground that seemed unquestioning,
Until the scars of earth, the very plates,

On which our overflowing cities rest,
Shake down the ordered plans of engineers,
Leave open wounds and fault lines coalesced,
But show us ways to change and new frontiers,

To break and turn us to the unaligned,
A newer world with no one left behind,


Keystone — 7 20/04/2020

A newer world with no one left behind,
We will decry the growth which made us strong,
And so move outwards with the non-aligned,
Into the gaps where humans scratch along

the bottom, with the pits and traps and dust,
The snares of systems set complacently,
By those who climb and welter in distrust,
Of those they push or press into the sea,

Of those who make and form the stairs they climb,
But now were all detached, at one alone,
And all intoning blues in common time,
The world resetting, made of monotone,

Which scrapes the satellites and frees the brain
So all the world is natural again.

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