NaPoWriMo - 2018 - Day four - Considering the Kardashev scale

Considering the Kardashev scale

• A Type I civilization—also called a planetary civilization—can use and store all of the energy which reaches its planet from its parent star.
• A Type II civilization—also called a stellar civilization—can harness the total energy of its planet's parent star.
• A Type III civilization—also called a galactic civilization—can control energy on the scale of its entire host galaxy.
  
  (simplified from Wikipedia)

Now let us speak of things you're yet to do:
let's take apart those planets we don't need
and put that mass to other use; let's produce
machines the size of worlds, from components
the size of atoms; let's move the stars into a neat
array; let's have our way with every aspect
of natural law; and let's, when that becomes a bore,
consider ways in which laws might be repealed;
let's turn our backs on brute humanity and stroll
—so cool, so rich, so strange—into the very small,
the very far, the very long; let's sing that song
of a hundred million years; let's edit all the tears
from our experiences; let's—to be frank—
die no more.  Is any of this in your manifesto?
I thought not, and this is why: no!
You cannot rely upon my support
in the forthcoming local government election.

NaPoWriMo - 2018 - Day three - Lost in transliteration

Lost in transliteration

I could take your words and express
their anger, sarcasm and loneliness
in the secret language of penguins who have
six thousand, three hundred and twenty-two
words for fish, but have never needed
any words for cold feet
or the smell of fish.

And if that happened, you could reply
using pigeon's words for sky
inserted in the lingo of octopod
entanglement where anything with a knot
in it is rude, but there is only one word
for any hard object
that a beak can't break.

And then we would be courting;
assigning and assorting our endearments
(as thoroughly disguised as they may be)
in ever stranger languages and customs:
the words in which a tree
describes diagonals of light and shade,
in terms of friends who make them;

or the speech in which
woodworm explain the enclosed tracks,
their intersections, loops, forwards, backs
indistinguishably from their taste;
or the complaints of mayflies
about eternity
on any summer's afternoon.

But all this would be hypothetical
you speak only your own language
and in any case
you are not listening.

NaPoWriMo - 2018 - Day two - A voice in the crowd

A voice in the crowd



I - I

That's a number and a pronoun,
in case you are confused and if it puzzles you
imagine how it has to be for me:
the me that sits here writing.

I know who I am: I'm me;
and you know who I am:  I'm the person you're reading;
and neither of us knows a thing.


II - Narrator

I know who I am, and am the speaker
and everything I say is speech and you might ask:
Why aren't you quoted?  Why aren't you italic?
But that would never do

I'm not a speaker in the scene
but am ever removed, distanced
seeing everything, uninvolved.


III - Inner voice

I do get italics, when I say:
I get italics,
because I am when the narrator speaks,
the author speaks, or when

the author reaching into your head,
gentle reader, puts words right there
instead of on the page.


IV - Author

I am the voice behind the voices
everything you hear is me
and everything you read
is how you hear it's me.

I still am not reality, you understand,
I'm your interpretation
of my projection, of what I want you to think...


V - Author (on podium)

...and here I am again, saying:
when I wrote this poem I wanted to show...
and there you are in the audience, lapping it up
because you've paid

(at least in time if not hard cash)
to hear me say this and you wish,
you really wish, I'd just get on with the poem.


VI - Character

Ignore me,
I'm just someone
that one of him
made up.


VII - Poet

So I'm the sum
of all of the the above
or if you like I dissect into
the crowd of them

and yet, here I am again,
typing, with no mind on any of this,
just typing words.