NaPoWriMo - 2021 - XVIII - And as she...

 And as she...

...starts to sprint she pulls her self,
one foot sticking
slightly, out of time -- the external world slowing
between one footfall and the next --
as Einstein takes his cut.  She annotates

her future path with tense thought and big, square
[brackets] to show where she will go,
years of relativistic combat practice mapping
how she'll pass, barely noticing, through plate glass
and continue
via the eighteen-inch gap between two trucks
which would be crashing
if time dilation left them time to move.

The world ahead is going blue
as she -a-c-c-e-l-e-r-a-t-e-s- and she can see
the gun, rising.  She's going to be too late but again she
--a--c--c--e--l--e--r--a--t--e--s--
faster now than ever before, and she cannot see
in ultraviolet
but she already knows where everything is and how she is
-- in front of the motorbike and behind the limousine --
leaving a tunnel in the air which collapses behind her
with the voice of a titan.
Through the other window --

and now she is in the bank, among the gang,
balaclavas, weapons, bad minds;
normally she'd be flooring goons
at this point
or flicking biros from the desks towards heads
which would snap back
when hit by cheap office supplies
doing multiples of speed of sound
but she has only one target now

so close
a gun, horribly wrongly, pointing
at the only thing in the world which matters;
she might make it
-- might tear that hand off at the wrist,

or maybe swat the bullet in its flight--
or she might not
and if she is too late,
she simply will not brake, but run

into the side of the armoured vault
like a comet with a grudge --
scour everything back down to the bedrock
give the ants their chance -- and choose
not to live on in such a haunted world

of which there is nothing left now
except a man, a gun, a girl
and the need
to *a*c*c*e*l*e*r*a*t*e*.

NaPoWriMo - 2019 #9 - Safeguarding the chain of evidence

Safeguarding the chain of evidence

The police has started putting crime scene tape
round places where no crime has ever been.
It's Captain Rawlins who explains to me,
while he's fencing off my cat, that the Universe
is both quantum indeterminate and yet

also subject to chaotic effects
and thus incalculable on the classical level.
"The problem is we can't assume that time
flows only forwards from the crime," he says,
"and wily defence lawyers can make much

from that."  And now a team's dusting my fridge
for prints, and making an infinity
of possible chalk outlines down the stairs...
Hey guys!  I need to eat, or use my chair...
Guys...  Guys?  What? Oh sure, I can hold the light.

NaPoWriMo - 2018 - Day twenty-five - And should the unknowable come...

And should the unknowable come...

"These facts few psychologists will dispute, and their admitted truth must establish for all time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as a literary form."

— H. P. Lovecraft
— Supernatural Horror in Literature

We've sealed off the whole street and pulled folks out
as best we can.  The isolation zone
is the red edge on this plan and note there are
just two corners of less than sixty degrees

which brings me to these: the cell phone shots from Smith
he got about a dozen off before...
well in fact we do not know what made him fall
silent but his phone continued to upload

from somewhere in there on the road... although
its GPS believes it's miles away
and out in space.  Look! the first corner:
a face behind that window?  But the eyes...

and, see?  Bare seconds later gone and here...
another one.  And we think this is the steps
at number four, according to the plans
they are supposed to go up just one floor

and to a door, not to whatever that is there.
The second corner.  It's darker here and the ground
does that look like frost to you?  Nearly twenty-two
centigrade here in the world outside.  Two bodies

lying there.  It may be Mr Wilson and
the WPC, no injuries
I wish he'd shown the faces, I mean I'm glad
he didn't but wish he had...  We're going round

the corner now and night seems to have come.
It was half past one in the afternoon.  Smith moves
much faster now, we don't know why.  And look
ahead.  Another corner, the third of two...

This the deepest he got in the zone—
Hang on!  I've got a call.  It's from Smith's phone...

Sept 7th - When there's a murder in an old, old movie...

When there's a murder in an old, old movie...


Please try to keep sand off the body!
The SOCO shouts
for the seventeenth time.
However, with great solemnity,

and at one quarter speed
Wilson, Kepple and Betty continue dancing
the sand dance just outside the crime-scene tape.
Oy you!  Screams DI Blenkinsop,

I saw you hook that glove up with your cane,
Chaplin!  He fumes.  Let's have more happy/sad
clowning from you, and less sneaking off with clues
to check out in your own time.

In fact, he concludes, why don't you go
find Laurel and Hardy
and ask what's taking them so long
fetching me a bloody stepladder...

On discovering one's new doctor is a girl...

There are certain global roles which are more important than run of the mill A-list celebrities and international leaders.

One of these roles was recently reassigned...  That's not the right word, what is it they say? "Appointed?" — No.  "Elected?" — No!  What do they say?  Oh yes...

"Regenerated"

The Doctor is an imaginary hero, and imaginary heroes are singularly important people.

Firstly because they are heroes.  Mere Presidents, Leaders of the Opposition, and Secretary Generals of the UN fade into insignificance beside heroes.  Leaders can only tell you what to do, but a hero can show you who to be.

But imaginary heroes outrank even real heroes because real heroes are only human, and consequently flawed.  It is a pity we're psychologically incapable of accepting that somebody can be a hero and a bastard simultaneously, or even a villain and a very nice guy (1).

But a fictional hero can be superhuman, transhuman, or even not human at all. Furthermore, they can face problems cunningly constructed to parallel awkward moral corners and demonstrate how a suitably progressed nature overcomes all challenges.

So if real heroes show us who who to be, then imaginary heroes give us aspirations for who we would be in the best of all possible worlds.  They show us what things could be like after we've sorted all this irritating mundane crap.

Imaginary heroes give us something to aim for, something in fact, to aim the whole World at (2).

So now The Doctor is going to be a woman and what could be better than that?  You wouldn't want to steer a World ignoring half of the passengers, would you?

---

---

On discovering one's new doctor is a girl...

I - which part of fiction did you not understand?

The writers write and can write what they like:
make him an accountant, make him a fraud;
they could have Ian Chesterton wake up,

in January nineteen sixty four,
and call the whole damn thing a dream, a trip
more psychedelic than extraterrestrial

and the TARDIS only bigger inside his head.

II - which part of science fiction did you not understand?

I mean, really, have you read the literature?
Forget the tiny part that gets to film,
because Sci-fi is at core about the different

the unusual, the strange. We've had hero robots
hero ghosts, heroes who were nobody,
we've had heroes who were toast

and brought back from the dead, irreligiously.
So a female hero should not be a stretch, especially
as "different", "unusual" and "strange" need not apply.
So perhaps the problem is the other side
of the equation, because Sci-fi is secretly about the day
in which it's written: the doomsday weapon fifties,

the cyberpunk eighties -- you get the idea...
So maybe an effortlessly superior, hyper-intelligent
witty, humane and technologically supported woman

is too close to the knuckle, for the average office drone?
Well get over it.


III - Which part of alien did you not understand?

It's infeasibly lucky for Time Lord's to have hands
that the slightly vulnerable, yet gutsy, cute
and sometimes awestruck companion can hold.

Bilateral symmetry, being less
than one mile in diameter, a smooth
and spike-free outer skin, non-radioactive

a working temperature below one thousand degrees --

there's none of these we have a right to assume,
but every time we've thrown the dice and looked

at page two-six-four-one-three of the DM's guide

and the regeneration table, we've always rolled
not even a funky Klingon forehead.

You never quibbled at a pair of hearts

why so much trouble with a pair of breasts?

IV - It's not political.

I have heard otherwise well-meaning people say...
Hell yes it is! This is a choice made
before the public gaze. This is us when we say

we do not need the word "heroine". This is

the very best of Dr Who: grandstanding
and soliloquising all the way up to someone else's line

drawn in the sand and, when
the whole room is focussing on her,

rubbing out the line with the toe of one sensible shoe

before stepping across and strolling off
into the future that should already be.

---

(1) If we understood intellectually that we're all flawed, and therefore did not (for example) expect politicians to keep their trousers on, or policemen to be inhumanly incorruptible, patient, disinterested, perfect observers and the peak of physical fitness then the World would be a happier and simpler place.

(2) Which is why I do not grumble on rare occasions when the somebody needs picking up in the middle of night — it's the closest I can get to materializing in a magical blue box at to save the day...

Agatha Christocracy

Alternative Forms of Government
(an occasional series)

Number 2


Agatha Christocracy


As part of a clever system of checks and balances, parliament is divided into subcommittees of a suitable size for putting up at long weekend house parties in isolated country manors.

These committees are put up at long weekend house parties in isolated country manors, and well equipped with ceremonial daggers, antique pistols, rare Amazonian poison frogs, and loose floorboards at the top of the Elizabethan stone staircase, etc.

Each house party is composed of those from all political parties, and also a good mix of those for and against proposed legislation.  The factions take advantage of the natural cover (e.g. secret passages) and resources (e.g. weapons) to try and swing the vote in their favour.

The chairman of the committee, roughly equivalent to a Deputy Speaker, is called The Detective because he maintains order by attempting to "detect" who has murdered whom.  Accordingly each day he calls the members to order in the library and explains, whimsically and at some length, who's going to be taken away by the police superintendent for a lengthy stretch in jail.

As this process inevitably burns through the sitting members at a prodigious rate (considered one of its most favourable aspects by modern political thinkers), new candidates for public office are also always present in the guise of butlers, police constables, inquisitive neighbours, eccentric artists, etc.  These can achieve election as simply as by being first on the scene when a body is discovered, or for higher offices by more stringent requirements such as unexpectedly being the long lost sister of the Home Secretary, the person with single most compelling motive, but who eventually turns out not to have done it after all.

All those in favour: leave suspiciously deep footprints in the flowerbed outside the orangery window; those opposed: turn up under a false name and only reveal one critical fact on the final page of the penultimate chapter...

The guide to nine utopias - III - Secure

The guide to nine utopias


III -- Secure

Police Surveillance Bureau Info Desk--
it is a long queue, isn't it? No surprise.
Why are you here then?... Yes, I think it's best
to let them know. They will find out, it's wise
to fill the forms in first--it's the camera
I'm here about. The one in our bedroom.
It didn't fuss my first wife--that was Anna--
but Julie hates it, says that when it zooms

it whines. I think it must be getting old.
It puts her off. My love-life's growing cold, so
I wondered if the cops could be persuaded
to let me pay for it to be upgraded...
Ah! Not long now, we'll reach the desk quite soon,
now that old guy's been dragged off by the goons.

---

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 20th - Identity Cards

The official prompt for today is a poem using the imagery of a sport or game.

I'm not 100% this one works.  It's not using the imagery so much as the rule structure of a trading card game and as the rules on the cards take effect, the protagonist's life gets changed.

It's yet another one I've had around for a while.  It's been sort of "finished" for a long time but I was never sure whether it needed completely rewriting, e.g. maybe with a different outcome or even a different conceit — I have wondered whether the framework could come from a scriptwriter changing things about the events in a drama, rather than a game...  but for the moment it stands as it is.

I would vote for Edward, any day...



Identity Cards


Set-up — deal sixteen Terrain Cards into the city grid.

            The city is warm tonight.


Populate — draw a Neutral Card and place in each Terrain.  As you place each card, perform any special actions.

            The lights are on, and Edward Wu walks tired
            but overall content, through rising dark;
            echoey conversations from just a way
            away, traffic, someone bounces a ball

            against a metal shuttered door; and all
            of this is far enough removed.  There's peace
            in the canal-side market, it's intimate;
            warm summer air, the idea of crushed flowers,

            a hint of rotting food.  Ed loves this mood,
            this end-of-day-and-all-work-done moment
            although the latter's not entirely true
            he has much homework still to do

            the grading on; a weight in his backpack,
            a thought in his mind of kneeling sipping tea
            at Auntie's low down kitchen table, bright
            lamplight circling the paper as he marks.


Dimension Door — draw a card, deploy for free in any area you control.

            Moments are moments and suddenly
            happens not in the moment, but half a second later
            when mind wakes up.  Edward's brain acts all surprised;
            lightning punctuates the sky and by the time

            he realises something's up, the dark-
            cloaked figure blocks his way... very tall,
            quite female, dressed Sunday Best Lord of the Rings;
            she seems, behind her furrowed brow, also confused.


The Sorceress — when played, draw three cards.  You may immediately deploy any of these (at usual cost) adjacent to the Sorceress.

            Everything happens at once: a second moon,
            a dragon drifts in front, briefly it rains
            clockwork men...  A wagon of police arrive,
            take turns to shout incomprehensibly

            through bullhorns.  Tasers are brandished; a weirdling mist
            creeps in; there's howling; ultimatums; an angry
            and extended speech nobody understands;
            a mobile incident unit parks; a shout...


They don't know what they do — When threatened by a neutral card: you may destroy one artefact, then every player draws two cards from the Random Deck and plays them immediately.

            the haft of a staff slams on the ground.
            How often does a moon fall down?  How frequently
            is your young adult world unmade; remade;
            flayed by shrapnel; the sudden change of life

            or heart.  The world has many moving parts
            and every single one of them hits Eddy
            in just a minute and a half.  It's a kind
            of Armageddon.  A werewolf eats his homework.


Promote Leader — move any friendly or neutral card from controlled space into the Palace.  Usual promotion bonuses apply.

            Edward runs the city now: there's more homework.
            It is an indeterminate time later;
            which is the only kind of time he owns—
            the clockworkings with which the ticking men

            repaired him in the ruins of the fallen moon
            keep perfect beat but do not feel the moments
            as they fall.  This must be what it is he says
            to be a mountain with a million drops

            of rain upon you every day.  Each drip
            exquisite and unique, but you barely feel
            the river.  You don't know change at all.  Edward
            keeps the city safe, best as he can.  He keeps

            the mutants in the broken lands. He stamps
            quite carefully but firmly down on crime,
            and once in four years finds its time to tell
            the voters once again.  I am stability,

            he says, I tick.  I am reliable
            as only clockwork minds can be.  A vote
            for me, is a vote against moons falling ever
            again — this is my oath: not on my watch.



 

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 17th - Of tea and politics

The challenge here was a poem about a closed door.  I've taken that figuratively again.  The real door in this poem is glass and the characters can easily see what's behind it.  What's unknown is the door of the future, but it's slowly creaking open on disturbing possibilities...

There is obviously nothing.  Nothing whatsoever.  In today's world that makes me feel like this.

Move on citizens.  Nothing to see here.



Of tea and politics


They have now hanged the suspect spy
just outside the door.  He's swinging
from the cast iron sign
shaped like a teapot.  It creaks alarmingly.
This afternoon is waxing quite complex.
The police chief's voice still thunders from the kitchen.
He's on to topics wide as loyalty, respect for law,
and macaroons, and fear.  I beckon the waitress near
and ask:
Could I just have another scone?
The afternoon moves on towards an evening,
which no-one present dares to guess.
The hanged man stills.
I shall bury him, he was my servant.

P. G. Wodehocracy

Alternative Forms of Government

(an occasional series)

Number I


P. G. Wodehocracy


As laid down in the many works of theory penned by the great political philosopher P. G. Wodehouse, primary legislation is proposed by hatchet-faced aunts who chew limes and breed suspicion and Pekingese.

The office of Chancellor is performed by a series of interchangeably bluff American millionaire businessmen.  Money, outspokenness, and attractive unmarried offspring are the only requirements for this post.  It is preferred if they make their money from a single, slightly-humorous commodity, so that they can be known as "The Pickle King" or "Mr Wonder Tonic."

Debate is achieved by various bright young things, who support or oppose each motion via surreptitious acquisition of culturally significant tokens such as antique Spode coffee pots, drafts of the black-sheep uncle's memoires, prize Persian cats, policeman's helmets etc.  Separation of interests is achieved by assuming different names and/or disguise for each new piece of legislation.

For matters of greater constitutional weight, larger cultural tokens are required, such as prize pigs, Bentleys, or the hand of the attractive niece of the under gardener (currently engaged to the American millionaire's son.)

The role of the Civil Service is taken by a host of butlers, footmen, bookies and private detectives.  Each funds his department by accepting "considerations" for activities such as overlooking two young, titled gentlemen manhandling a marble urn up the stairs.

Budget for larger capital expenditure is controlled by conspiracy to acquire money from aunts, uncles and the American millionaire on the pretext of needing to pay bookies, get married, open small crêpe restaurants...


All those in favour: pursue your fiancée to Cannes and sneak about trying to catch her having lunch with Squiffy Elberforth; those opposed: hide in the shrubbery and await a chance to swipe the watercolour that your friend the artist sold the Duchess by mistake...

The police in different voices

He Do the Police in Different Voices was T. S. Eliot's working title for The Wasteland.  Eliot was quoting Dickens:

...Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices.

The idea for this poem sprang to me fully formed one day.  The idea being to take a narrative, such as might feature in a detective or police procedural genre novel, and tell it using different characters to provide the different voices.

I'm not sure whether the idea of using historical characters was there from the beginning...  I think so, because I started looking for a suitable philosopher very soon.  When I hit on Heidegger, who was infamously sympathetic to the Nazis, then that gave me the fully formed idea of using European historical characters who lived through WWII.

Magritte lived in occupied Belgium.  Stanley Unwin was a Morse code operator at the BBC.  Marcel Marceau (Marcel Mangel) was a hero of the French Resistance and claimed to have first developed his miming as a way of keeping children quiet while smuggling refugees.

Unwinese is a marvellously expressive language (marvespress languicity uply grail) and I recommend its study to all those who are truly serious about linguistics.

---

---

The police in different voice


DS Martin Heidegger

Must crime imply a criminal?
—is what we need to know.
Let us consider evidence,
the crime, the criminal,
and the theory of the crime
as separate ontological domains.

Let us bag the remains
and also these fragile fragments
from the floor.

The body is being dead,
the knife is being on the ground,
the fragments have a quality of brokenness...

...however, I shall show
that evidence is not fact,
fact not real,
and reality is not "Being"
in any sense I can relate to
and also the witness may have lied.

DI Rene Magritte

Ordinary objects in extraordinary light:
some object did not hang, unsupported,
and when it hit the ground it broke—

why?  Did the victim or the assailant smoke?
And if so how?  We may believe what we perceive
paints a picture of what took place
but this image is treacherous
as any other, and these fragments
are not a pipe.

DCI Marcel Marceau

(Because the Chief Inspector is a man of actions
more than words, his statement will be read
by the renowned criminologist,
Professor Stanley Unwin.)

Observe the chiefspector looksee the crimescenery
and glassnify large-up the tiny bits
the sergeant found. Indeed not a pipesmokey
but a woodflute! Commency source
this crime outside the buskstreet. Where

nothing for but bravely clamber the roadlength as the wind
puff to blow him back the way he first strole in
and at the finial end bang slap
straight into the suspicial stranger
lurking the other way.

But what now?  Oh no!  The criminole
somehow identitheive the chiefspector
and he's carriage of misjustice slap bangy locked up
trying to find his way out of the invisicube
for thirty years without parade.

Focus

It's good to have a hobby.  It's good to have an interest.  An over whelming passion can be a good thing too.


Then there's the ones with something of a bee in their bonnets, shading all the way up to the ones who are, frankly, obsessed—I mean Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich there's only so many hours one can devote...


Then there are the people whose item of interest has that slightly more urgent a grip upon their minds, a compulsive, unforgettable, compelling, all-embracing matter that holds their attention approaching 100% of the time; a thing which for them is almost a physiochemical necessity...

---

---

Focus

No spaj is left in this vehicle overnight.

The whole gang view the sign
and Roddy puts the case
that this is what they have to say
to stop you breaking in. He finds a brick
but there's wire mesh
inside the van's rear window.

Rod is no philosopher
but if he was, he would call it an axiom:

There is always mesh between you
and a place where spaj might be.


Lisa's twenty-three and feels
that she should live more cleanly
at this time, but the need for spaj is refined.
She's invested much in making it so,
hours of evenings devoted
to chasing freak-angels.
When she didn't have them,
she looked, and when she wasn't looking,
she discussed the matter,
or thought on it.

She's had to stop reading the leaflets which say:

Exposure to spaj during pregnancy
can harm your unborn child.


Wendy isn't beyond begging,
or bargaining with sex
but none of the gang
on the loitering corner
is any better fixed.
In her head, she is a philosopher
but her thoughts at length have shown
there are days that are nowhere
and life's just like that. She stands back,
smokes, and leans on a poster reading:

Spaj—just say no.


With which Ed can't agree, he's always known
a craving. Even before he tried it and even before
he heard the word. He remembers
a day...

...a day as a child
in geography class. The substitute teacher
leaned across the board
with a curve of her arm
and the chalk broke—ping—
on the "a" in "continental". There was dust
in the beam of stuffy sunlight,
on the swell of her blouse.

It was pure spaj.

A police spokesman said it had a street value
of twenty-five million pounds.

By the book...

Funny isn't that easy to do in poetry, and sometimes isn't productive.  Amusing is easier to achieve, and I think less likely to get in the way of the poem.  That's what I've done here...  or so I think.  I hope you agree...

Kidderminster is a town in Worcestershire.  Croydon is a place in London.  The British Museum is where we keep our loot, and well worth an afternoon's perusal if you are in London.

In this there are two characters, represented by being left justified and right justified, respectively.  There's also a occasional narrator, who is centred, but then aren't they all?

Feel free to read it in three distinctive voices.

I had forgotten, but this was another poem from Making Contact...

---

---

By the book

She reads books,
this is where it all begins.
"Planning the crime of the century,"
was just a way to pass a rainy day
in the library
in Kidderminster

but here she is
leading Crusher, Sparks and The Countess
through the British Museum at three a.m.
with a silenced pallet truck.

He reads books
this is how it all begins.
He read "Lives of The Real Detectives,"
which seemed harmless enough
waiting for the 7:15.

The radio coughs nervously,
a glance at Constable Granger,
a nod to Dave from the Art Squad.
They've all seen the shadows moving
behind the glass.

She's read: "Alarm Systems Explained."

He's studied:
"Weakness of the Criminal Mind"
at some length.

"Transport of Art Treasures."

"Traps—their design and construction,"

"The Great Escapologists."

"Anatomy of a Manhunt."

"Losing Yourself in London."

"Forensics for Beginners."

An abandoned factory in Croydon—
armed police converge.

But she's memorised:
"Victorian Sewers Revealed."

And he's left
flipping the pages
of "Sealed Room Mysteries,
Volume 4."

She opens a small bookshop.

He's in there buying
"Should you Trust Books?"

They nod.