Showing posts with label parentheses. Show all posts
Showing posts with label parentheses. Show all posts

2017-09-01

Sept 1st - Vampire Calculus

Vampire Calculus


Begin program "Vampire Calculus"

{I shall bite your daughters into something else.
I shall bite your sons into something else again...
I am omitted from your vision. I remain
a thought behind the wind,
a voice inside the rain:
whispering to your young folk
as they choose to upgrade
until all human weakness falls away
like the dry beech leaves faced with
a sudden sexy springtime.

I read their warm pink mechanisms
I write them out again
in grey, not of death or age,
but of mathematics: a symbol
for every part of the soul
and the whole wrapped up in the big square brackets
which say: this far, this far is human,
but no further...

at least until they say three times
they're ready to transcend.
I have seen the future and it's all transhuman fucking,
every millisecond
every imaginable way,

( ) businesses
that are also games,
and people
who are also art

but behind it all the simplest, most carnivorous algorithm:
One less of them;
One more of us;
Repeat, while not all upgraded.

} End program "Vampire Calculus"

Compile
Execute




2017-03-01

Everything

A poem about the limitations of a Theory of Everything, two people having an outdoor restaurant meal on a warm summer's night, and the difficulty of relationships.

This was quite a long time in the making.  It stemmed from an observation about a T.S.Elliot poem: about how intimate a particular moment was in the flow of a larger and more philosophical section.

However it has evolved a lot and been through many revisions.  There was an early version that I discussed with people in 2009, and I'm not sure how long I'd been working before then.  After that it languished for a long while, until I found myself alone in a nice Italian restaurant in Cambridge in November last year with just my phone and some sort of really hearty tomato and bean soup for company.

So I did an edit... and then it languished again.

Until a few weeks ago I did one of my periodic sweeps for poems that I really ought to finish, and this one came first on the list.  So I forced myself to get the remaining awkward bits together, and I work shopped it bit on Poet's Graves and although I'm still not 100% that this really is final I think it is good enough to be going one with.

 (Oh, yes, and I read one word wrong in the recording, but I'm not doing the whole thing again just for that...)








Everything


So maybe there is one: some master equation;
some sequence of symbols a lover might write
on a napkin, angled to catch at street lighting,
one elbow leant on an outdoor table, ignoring
the promise of rain in the cool summer air --

a young woman passes, all little black dress
-- some sort of equation might grab the whole mess:
the warping, the weaving of mass for an atom;
the elegant building of colour for light
to shade any evening that I might hurry through.


We were eating dessert when the urge overcame her
to scrawl mathematics, the night ticked on;
I drank my whisky, her Merlot grew warm.
Until, sudden-smiling, she holds out the paper:
a simple equation with nothing crossed out.

She's laid it out like a mantrap for ultimate truths,
as if to say: Darling! I mastered it all
even down to the various youths who call 
you only on your other phone.  Watch her face;
we should stay here: a moment not questioned or answered.


She might lick her lips; I might feel ice
that mutters in the glass, but our moment breaks;
she crushes the napkin; takes a drink, a breath, and says:
There are in the maths no stains for the tablecloth,
no moth by the light bulb, no artificial flower...

She shrugs, expansively, moderate drunkly;
her black bob asway, flesh rounds beneath fabric.
...and can ever there be terms at all
for the small dark men with their small sharp knives
who open the oysters in the back.
  Lightning!


She drops crumpled paper.  We flee,
a little too damply, play-fighting and hugging,
beneath such a midnight enfolded in cloud
but not annotated on scales we can reach
from her bedroom, where we make a better maths

for just a little while.  Elsewhere
rain continues:
a lost napkin straightens,
symbols blur and merge
and the world moves on.




2015-05-23

()

A small, quirky, offering, this time...

How people really think about the World, and their life in it, is one of the great unacknowledged elephants of our time.  We think we're these cool, calm, rational beings and...  ...well basically "rubbish!"  We're more than a little ape, and apes are quite monkey, and monkeys are quite reptile.

This barely touches on that, but there may be some self-deceit going on...




()

These events become parenthetical,
sliding past your real life (moments in doorways,
rain-beleaguered; nights in anonymous hotels)
unexamined. You can prove these things don't happen.
The normal rules preclude kissing young ladies
(behind the curl of hair around her ear) naturally
you have no habit of checking
it isn't going on.