NaPoWriMo - 2021 - V - Environmental factors

 Environmental factors

Terroir (French pronunciation: ​[tɛʁwaʁ] from terre, "land") is the set of all

environmental factors that affect a crop's epigenetic qualities, when the crop

is grown in a specific habitat. Collectively, these environmental characteristics

are said to have a character; terroir also refers to this character.

-- Wikipedia

The metal mesh waste bin on Creely Street

has overflowed, some years ago
and the spill of fast food cartons, papers, napkins,
bones, expectorated gristle, apple cores, newspapers, cigarette butts,
small plastic bags from shops around the corner,
drinks cans; weird plastic/paper coffee cups
and pointless wooden stirrers for the same
has formed a mound, here in the angle
between the bench and the raised
civic flower planter

of contaminated earth

--and time has gone to work:
bleached then mulched the paper down,
drifted dust and grit and tiny specks of earth
around and into all the hollow places
in the pile, deposited spores and other replicators
--bacteria, fungi, moss and lichens moving in--

to do their thing
with the fundamental building blocks of life,
until now
this morning for the first time
a shoot, a tiny leaf.

NaPoWriMo - 2021 - IV - Fifty

Fifty

Fifty shades of electric diamanté
Forty-nine velleities, in Thursday yellow cloud windowscape
Forty-eight multiples of zero, of naught, of nothing to see here, beyond the naked woman
Forty-seven scares of depleted Uranium nerve-agent contrail bliss
Forty-six postcards from Europa, come in, the methane's lovely
Forty-five unique ideas you've somehow heard before
Forty-four of this
Forty-three pages of advanced technological lifestyle enhancement
Forty-two answers, we need more answers
Forty-one disease vector asymptomatic typhoid Mary Christmas
Forty nights in the some other wilderness than this
Thirty-nine degrees of freedom
Thirty-eight degrees of Canadian bacon
Thirty-seven openly prime numbers
Thirty-six sets of thirty-six six-sided dice
Thirty-five brand new ways to stay post-apocalyptically alive
Thirty-four seconds, and counting
Thirty-three revolutions
Thirty-two nice round powers of two, for that one computer in your life
Thirty-one genders, plus or minus one
Thirty something comedy drama
Twenty-nine pots of kalamata olives, with garlic and sage
Twenty-eight years in a state of mind that's not Tibet
Twenty-seven games for one to three players
Twenty-six player pianos, fighting in a basement
Twenty-five gold rings
Twenty-four paths from your door to certain or uncertain doom
Twenty-three shades of tortured innocence
Twenty-two shades of Berger Eggshell Silk
Twenty-one resistance organisations, that don't add up to one opposing force
Twenty days of rain, low cloud obsessive
Nineteen again, if youth isn't pointless now
Eighteen and never been beaten with rubber truncheons, but there's time
Seventeen percent, of people who expressed a preference, said...
Sixteen seconds and counting
Fifteen young men playing a game with oddly shaped balls
Fourteen memories of things that never were and mother's madeleines
Thirteen crows, black cats, ladders and horseshoes
Twelve disciples, one of each and three of some
Eleven ways to be yourself, in simple lessons
Ten voices arguing on the mission control Tannoy
Nine to form a fellowship and ring round everyone they know
Eight exquisite fetishes we cannot quite admit to yet
Seven percent solution and Holmes understanding far too well, when it's
Six seconds and counting
Five for the symbols on your control interface
Four Kelvin and stable for a while
Three musketeers, all for one and one four seven point six oh nine
Two seconds and counting
One and only one and that's not you
Zero... where we've been going all along.

NaPoWriMo - 2021 - III - A brief future history of dooms ironically unforetold

A brief future history of dooms ironically unforetold

"I was from my mother's womb / Untimely ripped"

-- Macduff to Macbeth,
immediately before killing him.

"I am no man!"

-- Eowin to the Witch King of Angmar,
immediately before killing him.

And this is why we have not faith
in prophesy or prophets, mystic devices,
special pools of water lost in buried caves.
We do not stare into the waves
of quantum bollocks yet-to-be.
I don't listen to you.  You should not listen to me

because it isn't that prophecy lies
although the powers know it's false it's true
and ambiguous beyond all that, no
the problem is that prophecy has to go
into the future of a whole world
and that's so unwieldy and complex

not to mention rich with things undreamed
in any philosophy you understand
or care to name but beyond all that,
I shall win this game and soon:
I am an gender-swappable, polymorphic, weapons delivery framework,
and this is a banana;

prepare to die!