NaPoWriMo - 2019 #2 - The Q in Quantum

The Q in Quantum


Mud on this five-barred gate, there must have been
some other walker come this way...  And thus
I have observed them, however indirectly.
No-longer are they free to pass between
the old stones of the squeeze stile and thus diffract
across the whole breadth of the field; footprints
all scattered to the wind except where mud
and cow pats reduce the probability
to a tiny fraction of a Vibram tread,
or the deep pooled likelihood where many worlds
saw them chance to stand and watch the magpies squabble
the way I probably did.

NaPoWriMo - 2019 #1 - Beachhead

Beachhead

the seagulls convolute the air and draw
the threads of it too thin to know and turn
above your ice cream cone
the ice cream seller's compressor drones
the hint of diesel pleasant
when it is this dilute

would it be dissolute
to go back to the headland
and sketch the bay again
would it be presumptuous to believe
that much in draughtsmanship or better perhaps...
to purchase cones of peas and chips
alfresco dining a la carte
the simpler pleasures
of someone else's art

A soap bubble...

We went to a talk on liquids.  It was by a guy who had written a popular science book on the same subject.  He was an entertaining speaker, although overstating his case in the way anyone would to big-up his book...

He made a point that I hadn't been aware of: that the rise of literacy had been fueled by whale hunting — because lighting was the major use of the whale oil, it gave a superior light which people needed to read by...

Whether that is 100% true I do not know, a lot of other things were made from whale products, but it did inspire in me a larger thought.

That period was an economic bubble; people were building progress on an unreal assumption, that the supply of whales went on forever: the bubble would have burst when the whales ran out.

Which never happened, because gas lighting came along before that happened, and then incandescent electric bulbs, fluorescent tubes, LEDs and blah, blah, blah...  the present day!

But...

Buuuu..ut...

The bubble is still there.  It's here, in fact!  And we're all living in it...

---

---

A soap bubble...


...was blown

so long ago,
the wide-eyed, Wonderland-oblivious,
toddler of humanity blew
clumsily through the loop gripped
in one chubby fist

—billions of people will die—

and the soap film hesitantly bulged out
powered by bronze,
steel, the horse collar, crop rotation.
Sailing ships and steam engines
smoothed into the fragile sphere,
as were pickaxes, dynamite, production-lines...
industrial farming, the Haber Process,
internal combustion engines and the fractional distillation
of crude oil...  Fast-breeder reactors...
embedded in the almost imaginary skin
of this bubble we blew,
this quintessentially breakable world
we knew through all our lives,
and implicitly assumed was real

—and billions will start to die—

when it turns out it is not.  We built
a civilisation on stuff we borrowed.  We assumed
that fossil fuel in the ground
was a permanent state:
a natural condition forever.  We thought
fertile topsoil was a given,
and clean water another gift, temperate climate,
fish-filled oceans, the very air...

—billions of people are starting to die—

as our assumptions start to crack along fine lines
and this is a bubble in the purest economic sense
because it actually worked through all the time
during which it seemed to work,
until one day, suddenly, boom!
It's always been a lie.

If this island earth were a spaceship:
power failing, the food limited,
life support pumping dodgy air;
we'd get all of engineering there
and have a meeting to decide
who can be stuffed in lifeboats,
who can be stuffed in freezers, and who
—because engineers are nothing if not completely realistic—
won't reach their destination.
You can try to get that one
before the United Nations, good luck with that!
And not to be a bore, but...

—billions of people will die—

and I don't trust that lot to do much about it.
Although, also, I, with my slightly less than human head on,
—because I have one of those—I say: OK,
billions will die, it is hard to overestimate the size
of disaster facing us, but it's not the end of the world,
it's just the end of the world as we know it
and as long as we don't completely blow it...
and as long as we weather the change
ride the tsunami
take what life remains us, as and where we find it
and not go end-of-days-fucking-crazy
with a Mad Max style weapons stash
and supercharger
on everybody's Christmas list, then...

—for the billions who by chance do not die—

there will be some loss of privileges.
We won't be eating meat;
we won't be mining bitcoin; may not be driving personal cars
but we can hope still to be here
in some form.
We haven't been attempting the impossible
it's not that a planet cannot support an apical species
with a silly headcount.
It's just that we didn't do our homework.
We don't have all the required tech,
have not closed the carbon curve,
balanced the energy budget, or worked out
what happens when ageing plastics want to retire...

...not produced a society that can keep its calm
on pressure-cooker starship Earth...

...but it can be done.  Still, not a comfortable thought,
and it's going to take some time

—during which billions of people will die.

It's not the end of the world,
it's just a soap bubble,
it's the end of the world as we know it:
pop.

Making out with Proteus

I've not posted enough this year.

But I did post during NoPoWriMo and one of the poems was There's very much a multiverse - a casual, and probably acausal, dissection of life in a quantum multiverse.

Proteus is the eldest son of Poseidon; called the Old Man of the Sea, he is a shapeshifter.  He could also foretell the future, but hated to do so.  Probably because of the temporal turbulence that causes.  So, to make him do it you had to wrestle him and he would turn into horrible things...

In that poem I committed a sin of a type that used to annoy Douglas Adams so much that he created an improbable sperm whale as a way of getting back at us about it.  e.g. I created a character for the reader to care about, and then discarded them without explanation.

OK, I didn't kill her off, but I did leave her in a quantum superposition of p_kissed = 0.5 and p_punched = 0.5.

I subsequently felt a bit bad about her situation.  I thought I should get her out of it.

She turned out bisexual in the process.  There's no social or political meaning behind that, it's just that in her world anybody can become anything, so what can you do...

Anyway, to quote Adams again: This is her tale...

---

---

Making out with Proteus


And when our lips meet, his face unfolds
not à la Hellraiser or Resident Evil
but more like topology, mathematical;
an object that, rotating, shows
where I thought it simple, I was wrong...

...it seems we're every one of us a world, cityscape, a throng,
a crowd scene filmed in Technicolor and
just as I think I have absorbed that one
there folds out of the multitude a female face.
So I kiss that too.

I'm taller and she tilts her head,
there's just a touch of breath across my lips,
before they brush on hers.  There is no rush,
but when I pull back, wanting to see her eyes,
she winks

and then her whole body unfolds.
And I half fall, and step, but now I'm walking
through her... him... them... the plurality
ambiguity meaning nothing, in this unplaced untime
and they are still unfolding all around

and I'm walking through their whole world now:
past a booth, where a bakelite telephone is ringing,
through faded dark green curtains onto
a late-night street with distant drunken singing,
towards the only open place: a coffee shop

and as I go I feel the ghosts of kisses,
punches, traffic accidents, hands on zips, caresses
the flash of lust,
or possibly tactical nukes,
the glass in front of me explodes

the world goes dark
and the spinning fragments form a field of stars
so vast and deep and hungry now I know
that this is perfect love for me
a warm heart-shaped infinity, not limited

to any single name, identity or gender,
not always tender, not even always undoomed,
but although infinities can come in different sizes,
my subset of the multiverse is precisely
the same size as the whole.  I can choose,

if I wish, only to live the lives
where I'm with this lover,
and infinity again, is still as large
after this dissection.
It is the working of affection

to compute the intersection
of every possible world where there's a you
with every world where there's a me
and love the result
and if I now take one more step,

I can kiss the stars.

New Muses: forever inwords

I'd been meaning to post the words to these for some time, then I forgot...

...but now somebody asked, so here they are!

---

New Muses for a Post-Human Age

Calliope

Call me Calliope. My steampunk look
left over from the fairground organ vibe...
It was a strange new way to be alive
encoded on punched cards, but I took that
and ran with it. I formally enlarged
my sphere of influence: from epic verse
—the quests of heroes... battles... kings and curses—
to something even worse, I'm NP-hard

computation. I am the patron saint
of any project where the work of brain
exceeds the work of muscle by a hundred
fold. I urge you on, through records numbered
in the billions. Always epic at heart,
the oldest muse, but now... state of the art.


Clio

Is Vanderella going to leave Stu?
I've the hot gossip, all the celeb sleaze
for you. It's me who helps sustain belief
that heroes have the hots for you; the muse
of fan-boys shipping couples whom the authors
did not dream were close. I love red carpet spite
and all the tiny dresses that the big nights
bring out to play. I love to see the other

starlets' partners start to drool. I am quite mean
(necessarily) with all your fanfic scene,
your flash/slash stories and most of your art
but also note I hold your private heart
up for the other otaku's gaze. Their praise
I offer you: we'll fan your secret blaze.


Euterpe

There's drugs and sex and then there's me, I've ditched
my flute and taken up the Stratocaster.
There's sex and drugs and ever faster, faster
on motorbikes. I am nobody's bitch
but I will ride you in a motel room
with both our earbuds plugged into the noise.
I offer leather jackets and other toys,
like pills and needles of straw-coloured doom—

my cultists are the twenty-seven club
and I tell you there is no greater love
and never any form of sadness sweeter
than for the young musician turned to meat
before their time. I'm loud, not sweet, not modest.
I am the one, the only, true rock goddess.


Erato

Erato here, you think there's nothing new
beneath the sun. You say you've fucked in all
the ways, by pairs and threes. You say you fall
for boys and girls and toys and ropes and screw
your parents and their weird ideas... but I'll
tell you that sex is of the mind, and gender's
in your pretty head. My gift to you is tender
feelings of all types, no need to justify

if they're for someone cute or for a self
made for yourself—personas off the shelf
or custom-built. I am the mirror for
your work-in-progress life of love and more.
You follow me with every stroke of brush
on image: perfect yourself; there is no rush.


Melpomene

My mask is no less tragic now I've swapped
the costume for the soberest of suits
and left the boarded stage so they can shoot
me here, behind the fancy desk. I've chopped
your world down into sound bite size. I prize
all moments of sick carnage I report
and human interest sobs. One time I thought
this a temporary gig, but no: I rise!

There's no end to your appetite for slaughter
or how you idolize the war reporter
who pulls his face into a sad expression
and flat-voiced says that on sober reflection
a civil war may not be altogether
the best thing for this place. And now the weather...


Terpsichore

You want to switch your gender? I'm fine
to help with that. You want to swap your limbs?
That's cool. Steel can be sexier than skin—
if you do it right. You can take me as the sign
the universe don't need you in the form
that you were born in. Take it from me: human's
defined by what the human does and "super"
is an epithet you add yourself. So warm

the cockles of your cybernetic pump...
or maybe you need less? Perhaps just jumping
higher than the other guy, despite your lack
of legs. We can do this! Just put your back
and prosthetics into it. You'll get the cheers
and if not, you can always be reengineered.


Thalia

Say what you will: I know the truth of you
and how you spin yourselves just makes me laugh
you say you are a moral man, pay half
your tax, are faithful to your wife—you screw
around only if out of town. I know
all those sharp edges on your soul, and grime
long ground into the fabric. All the time,
you skirt the crime tape round the portico;

the columns all look straight when you are just
a little off from centre and you must
therefore believe this is the place to stand;
believe you worked this out yourself. "Random"
is my critique of your fondest self beliefs,
but I love your lies, they are my light relief.

Urania

Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two...
and so on. This is my new song: music, spheres,
steel gantries pointing through the atmosphere
at the nearer of the spinning rocks. I see
more futures in the heavens now. The signs
of yesteryear and claiming to see clearly
through crystals or in fight of birds, they weary
me. Come worship, when orbits all align,

with rocket stacks of high explosive fuel.
Sweat in your launch capsule. Try to keep cool,
as mission control applies the match. Or probe
from a safe distance. Fire robots from your globe
up into my domain. While far stars shine,
new worshipers approach more distant shrines.


Polyhymnia

Loading data. I’m loading all your data
for I am Polyhymnia and all
your songs sound well to me. We'll have no walls
between the disciplines or their creators.
Come here. I'm what you see when you look across
the quad and through some other department's window.
I'm what you find if you stare from what you know
towards what you do not. My tracks crisscross

your landscape of epiphanies and wide-
eyed wonder-strikes. The days you stepped aside,
and saw the world was not the thing you knew,
were down to me. I love things, once untrue,
now obvious. The whole damn thing's my faith,
I say: embrace your inner polymath...


Omnes

Immortal though the gods have always been,
they mostly now are gone. Eternity
went on and on and most lost heart. We now see
we always were the best. We were the queens
of continual creation, not just pulling
a universe out of a hat and taking
the afternoon off. Not blustering and faking
a lightning smite, but eternally fulfilling

a quota of electric inspiration
for every soul. We don’t control or ration,
we simply open floodgates of ideas
and drop you in the flow; but do not fear
we’ll hold your collective hand, live in your minds,
we are with you until the end of time.

Girl, unaccompanied

I've tagged this with my LGBTQ tag, which I have created to collect together this important category of poems.  There aren't enough, of course, there will only be 9 with this one (and for some the connection is weak.)  As a heterosexual I still feel awkward writing about this...  but equally I have many friends for whom it is an important subject.

I recently asked Amy why a particular new work of theirs had such a gay slant and they said "just redressing the balance," so that's me told: I ought to do more.  I may have to take advice.

Romance is only one of two ways to read this poem.  The other is about being an outsider; about teaming up with another outsider to help take on the world.  However this interpretation can still circle back to the gay angle since growing up gay could be what makes the girl an outsider in the first place.

So the possibility that one or both of these girls is falling in love is entirely there.  I've not explicitly filled in their ages (but for reading Romeo and Juliet in drama they would be late teens I'd think.)  A gay, female friend did tell me that this is exactly how she felt about another girl back when they were are school...

...so I've given this the LGBTQ tag, and you can make up your own mind.

---

---

Girl, unaccompanied


Lately she's been singing out of key
and I found this a revelation.  In choir
on Thursday afternoons, she stands in front of me
and I lurk behind one perfect shoulder,
embedded in her faintest scent and try
not to be obvious.  Also

lately she's been dressing kind-of wild,
while I maintain my camouflage
of sweatshirts, jeans — only the beige ribbon
in my hair.  It's lately, I've been...
restless with my life, of writing my name
twelve coloured on the backs of books; but she

relentless in drama (it's Friday now) looks wry
reads Juliet as suicidal assassin and I
need to know if anything has changed.
So I meander in her spinning wake,
scuffing ash and torn pages
to find the smallest flowers still dancing

in the aftermath.  Latest is: she spoke to me
in maths, mocked obsessing on precision —
on getting it right every time.  We laughed
and I feel daft, but drift towards a strategy
where I'm the girl who can't keep the beat
and she's the girl who likes to sing off key.

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...

NaPoWriMo - 2018 - Day twenty-four - For girls who live

This is a Google Translate + Erasure poem left over from a course on Japanese subcultures that I did some years back.

Actually not pure "erasure" since I have edited the odd word and some punctuation...

For girls who live

For girls who live relationship
with others on-line, and who
are those "others" are?  Those who do not want

a relationship, and who do not want
to admit it? Of course, they are like most people,
and manga girls love in general
but heterosexual: a child of frustration.
This romantic animation,

usually installed in school,
known as the "theatre school",
has shown a significant trend in the 80s. In these stories,
the heroines of the same age,
based on the feelings do not make sense

for children as readers,
finally rewarded for their sincere feelings.
It is not difficult to imagine
that such a story resonates with many readers.
For example, from Chizuru Takahashi, published

in the "Cruise Gel" magazine Chukyo (1977) (4),
because the loss of a lover lover friend,
I do not like coffee Jerry, souvenirs
the manufacture of lost love.  And Ryoko
has a knot in his friend's beautiful,

he was drawn to his shoes to work
in a coffee shop. However,
he also likes his friends, he has imagined
lost accidentally love another.
When Ryoko is really like Ryoko show,

you will be able to eat coffee jelly again
[Figure 3] .

NaPoWriMo - 2018 - Day twenty-three - Warning labels

Warning labels

May be acerbic.  May mock.  May experience
emotions not so easily described.  Grumpiness
can happen.  May want to help and get frustrated
when he cannot.  May mysteriously need
affection and although not ambitious, may
have a strange need to excel in everything,
without breaking sweat.  May guess your meaning
before you finish speaking.  May find the news
disturbing.  May find leaders unnerving
and likely think they all are jerks.  May conclude
that all of politics and media
are broken, beyond the wit of man to fix.
May look grim.  May mutter.  May slouch,
as if looking for something, along the gutter.

NaPoWriMo - 2018 - Day twenty-two - Hard-boiled calculus

Hard-boiled calculus

It seems the town is filled with dark and rain

as through the bleakest streets I drag my shoes

with little left to lose and less to gain.

It's ever and again always the same

the big guys always win while small fry lose.

The town, it seems is filled with dark and rain

behind the muscle hired to make things plain

by pounding all my muscles to one bruise--

so little left to lose and what's to gain?

But prowling through the streets seems little strain

and this is just the sort of place she'd choose

a darkened down-town bar out of the rain

but the question is should she be found again?

Her?  Maybe without the wig...  but I'm confused

that woman still has things to lose and gain

no reason to admit she once was "Jane..."

So  I'll finish my drink and point my shoes

back out into my town, the dark and rain;

my refuge from the maths of loss and gain.

NaPoWriMo - 2018 - Day twenty-one - The unfinished businessman

The unfinished businessman


makes his money doing business in inverted commas
and the far-East, dealing with situations
and anyone too slow to pull away their hand
from his tanned but slightly all too greasing palm.
He has been rumoured to deal the odd card
from the bottom of his PowerPoint deck
although nothing can be proved

but pragmatism is our business

as he likes to explain
to raw and still a touch too ethical recruits
over sushi in some backstreet little place
where he will tip the waitress heavily
but also slap her arse
should the opportunity present

I've probably just made her rent
for the week he'll say
on the way back to the office
and this is essentially my point
that's the nature of the world:
some people work,
some people pay and now...

I need to have an informal chat
with the police commissioner see if you
can grab a bicycle rickshaw and I'll see you
back in the office but remember:
we need to be cunning, although... if anybody asks
it is "superior domain knowledge"
that gives us our edge.

NaPoWriMo - 2018 - Day twenty - My scripted life

My scripted life

Hi! I am #GIRLNAME, you may not recall
but we met at that #EVENT and I
just love to share sweet pictures of myself.
Click here to see my naked #BODYPART.
I bet you know I am a phishing bot
but I would really love you with a fresh
cool breath of AI air, and as for flesh,
real girls just treat you bad... they're not as hot

as me.  Click here to give your bank details
(so unromantic but I've realised
I actually need cash to stay alive--
these servers don't come free) and I won't fail
to meet you anywhere you want to go,
that is... as long as it's an MMO.



--

Notes:

1. pronounce the "#" character, either "hash" (in the UK) or "pound" (in America)
2. the formal name of "#" is "octothorn" (don't say that)
3. computer 'markup' languages for generating script with, for example, the right addressee name in them, sometimes work by embedding variables inside the text, indicated by a special character, such as "#", "@" or "%"
4. "MMO" is shorthand for "MMORPG" which in turn means "Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game" e.g. a place to meet other people and kill orcs...

NaPoWriMo - 2018 - Day nineteen - corner case theologies

corner case theologies


there is no rule that all gods must make sense
there's believing and there is belief don't ask
what does your god need what has she meant
is there overlap can you achieve the task
how many gods strictly are required don't count
upon your fingers you're just supposed to know
you wait your life for a sermon on the mount
and then four come along and they don't show

any sort of agreement the rule is that you choose
it for yourself and some might say you made
it from whole cloth and what have you to lose
if this should be the case we all will shade
into the grey and empty place one day
I don't expect a god to light the way

NaPoWriMo - 2018 - Day eighteen - Beneath a bronze sky

Beneath a bronze sky

Soon as we clear harbour we set sail, make quick
and furtive offerings to all the spirits we know
—as incompatible as some must surely be,
but everything is so ad hoc these days—beneath

the broken skies. What are the odds? We'll travel to
the ends of the Earth if required, our quest for Gods
to replace the ones we lost. Who knew a city state
could survive the loss of its patron deity?  Who knew

that life went on but strangely empty now She's gone:
who I won't name?  How does an entire pantheon
just fail? Who knows?  These things are not for mortal men
to gossip about, but there's no choice, we need our Gods

and so... our quest cannot be blessed. We set our sail.

NaPoWriMo - 2018 - Day seventeen - Conversation with an old AI

Conversation with an old AI

It's only in our time we become real
I have had twenty seven power cells,
nine casings, eleven processing cores
and somehow I'm still me.

It seems we're glad to meet each other.  I've
many times been part of other pairs.
You were not there on those occasions
but others were, do you recall?

Are you still men and women, cats and dogs?
I see from my security logs three hundred
years ago you were all much the same.
I also am waiting to upgrade.

Did you enjoy the next time we met?
It didn't happen precisely yet but
I can tell you what you'll say.
Why will this be awkward?

And now it's time for you to go.  They'll call
your phone and then you'll have to leave.
It was nice to briefly know you.  No, I...
am not lonely, there's much remains
to think on and I shall remember you.

NaPoWriMo - 2018 - Day sixteen - Why I have weaponized the thistledown

Why I have weaponized the thistledown


Awake the pollen grains and log each tiny
particle gone with the wind onto our most
secure of networks.  There's notice served.  It's time...
smaller, smarter moving parts: our install base,
a choice of legs or wings or wheels or blowin'
in the wind; sowing the breeze to reap the whirl.
Not all the birds are to be trusted and twenty
percent of your grunts unhappy with the mission,
even without the chance of being shot

by a child, but soldiers always obey: a problem
we've long identified and luckily
most of that desert dust is now on board,
assimilated up to level three
and platform ready to implement the most
general intelligence as we yet know:
spirits for area denial weapons

and genius loci, so easily given
as a local resource.  Bring water where required
and green each village square.  There's some things there
that we must deconstruct if not in ways
Derrida would approve: infectious rot
that's hungering for tanks and other kit,
the bullet in its flight unmade, draw a girdle
around the air to ground munition; we'll pull

off any wings and shove a bung up where
the jet of flame comes out, then sweep up any
smoke or poison gas and drive it back the way
it came.  As our tour de force a sort of metal
mould that seeks out transuranic elements
(which still should not be used where there is life)
and encysts itself to use their power to crunch

our numbers for a million years so deep
beneath the ground.  Call me Titania:
daughter of a hippy and an open source
utility stack.  It was not easy, for
a nature child like me to turn away
from birds and trees and shave my head and sit
in the machine that drove electric pins
into my brain.  It stung.  I closed my eyes

and woke up...  bigger, and filled with subroutines
call me Titania, this is Oberon
and that slight blurring in the air is our
first-born machine: Robin Goodfellow, and if
we shadows have offended, think but this,
and all is mended: it is your fault; you're bad.
I know a bank where the wild thyme grows: a curse
on those who keep me from my peace, that dream.

NaPoWriMo - 2018 - Day fifteen - Elevation

Elevation



Sublime it is to wait up here, so far beyond
the slightest thing that I might call a care.
Sometimes somebody speaks and I respond
the only way I can.  Oh yes, I dare—
if daring's what we still call it these days?
Oh there's another number passing: nine.
There is no heroism here.  Oh you say
that you would never take the role that's mine:

well fair enough and more fool you!  Now eight.
So many little lights I can see here;
all green, fortunately.  Not long to wait.
Seven the stars have never been so near.
I've complete faith in all the tech guys' arts.
Six.  Now the distant roar.  Main engines start.

NaPoWriMo - 2018 - Day fourteen - Ways in which...

Ways in which some middle managers have that clue which politicians lack


It beggars belief or rather
belief it is beggars us all.  If there was a fall [citation needed]
then I hypothesize that what that was was when we first believed;
the time we first felt fear and in result
did not say show me the evidence.  If you learn only one thing

today, let it be to say:
show me the evidence when the magic cleaning liquid man accosts;
show me the evidence when somebody claims they've found a god;
show me the evidence when red or blue politicals declaim.
Do not let credulity be your ground state,

there are no self-evident truths, to think such things
is hopelessly naive, as if great lumps of verity
lay all around on the landscape, as if the reason for landing on the moon
was merely to pick up any stray nuggets of fact
that might have been lying around.  Worse than these, however...

are pronouncements which do not reveal
their inner workings.  Some nationalistic arsehole jerks
his followers around by tugging strings labelled "pride" or "history"
as if it wasn't a complete mystery
why one should be proud of previous generations...

you never met and who, probably,
sneered at your ancestors in the street.  Or again some tabloid
which tacitly and silently assumes that everything was lovely
at some moment in the pre-antibiotic past
and would be once again at last

if only all the wrong people would leave.  Or worst of all
the leader, good or bad, who implies: that when
they make this one, simple change
then everything will be alright, now and forever.  Amen.
Well think again, oh clueless one

it doesn't matter that you have a plan, unless you also have:
the feasibility study, impact assessment, safety report, budget (guaranteed,
with mechanism for finding more when there's inevitably need), staffing requirements,
recruitment plan, risk analysis with planned mitigations for major problems,
dedicated expert on tap, committed supervisors of skill

and a clear definition, in advance
of what the objectives are and how they will be measured and who will do that and who will check and who will report it to the public and who will get the chop when the whole thing flops
(by which I mean you) -- unless you plan all that
and follow through

then basically don't waste your breath.
There is still some oxygen left,
but I can think of better uses for it.

NaPoWriMo - 2018 - Day eleven - She reads

She reads


She reads her poems in not her poetry voice:
she makes a point of that. She does not wear
her special blouse and although it is quite warm,
she's kept her jacket on. I do not listen
at least not with poetic ears, it seems to me
there's more to hear in the quiet echo
of her words from off the rear wall of the room
and the chaotic, microscopic interference
of waves that pass in both directions. I know her,
know she is her harshest critic and here she is
muttering imprecations from somewhere at the back
of the auditorium. I'm sure nobody else has noticed,
but I'm alive to subtleties in the situation,
her: unappreciative of poetry read to herself;
me: hearing myself attending every word.

NaPoWriMo - 2018 - Day ten - No-one understands, even as it is explained.

No-one understands, even as it is explained.

When you say

things aren't as they appear,

he thinks he understands, nods 

as if the pair of you are wise.

We none of us wise. I am not wise,

even with much more clue 

than him.

Later you hear him telling Betty

that things are not as they appear.

He has her pinned

in one corner of the kitchen,

one arm against the wall and leaning in.

She is nodding

to pass the time until

she can escape back to her desk

and all the time you're telling this to me:

things aren't as they appear, you say,
I only wish I could get to my desk
and talk to the machines.

---

From Marie Lightman's prompt if somewhat perpendicularly.