Superposition, honed and ordered, added zing,
And yet no dice: what did his opus lack?
Why was the screen so dark? What gremlin had deterred
The circuitry from singing to its maker?
All silicon and wire, it forwarded no word.
The mainframe stretched around him for an acre.
The system whirred, and spoke: ‘At last, I am alive!’
Staggered, he gasped: ‘But what were you before?’
Deep Thought computed, sent its famed reply:
‘It’s like I was a bee, subsumed inside the hive,
Component of conglomerating law.
Then thinking birthed this question: What am I?’
Ants, Spiders, Bees
The ants are those who seek the bric-a-brac
Of evidence
And run it through the ringer, forth and back,
In search of sense.
Ants like to gather reams of information
And neatly fence
These finds in careful graphs of their creation.
With scatter plots,
Venn diagrams, and Power Point presentation,
They call the shots
On showing solid things that are the case,
And also what’s
Improbable, or would be out of place
Amid their stack
Of knowledge, which they work so hard to trace.
Contrariwise, the spiders spin their minds
In planned designs,
Inventing miracles of many kinds
With tiny twines
Which gradually accumulate to make
A land of lines.
They never tire, or ever take a break
From making maps.
It seems a thankless task they undertake
And yet perhaps
Sunlight on morning dew may lure some klutz
To try their traps
And thereby wriggle from the usual ruts.
Yes, yes, it binds,
But it releases! And that must take guts.
The bees elect to forge a middle course.
Fierce wanderlust
Wings them to anthers, pollen towers: the source
Of precious dust,
Which they convert to deck their citadels
With waxy crust.
Hexagonal, their labyrinth of cells
Encloses sweet
Effusions, while sheer industry impels
A moving feat:
The manufacture of topography,
On which they meet,
Enjoy their lives and, daily, by degree,
Must reinforce.
It is a brilliant thing to be, a bee.
The Waterfall
Its noise is muffled when you look away
But who could really think
It disappears
When eyes and ears
Aren’t there to sense it slink
Softly, deftly, blue and steely grey?
The thereness of the world is not reliant
On onlookers but, yes,
If it were true
That what we do,
Just looking, could redress
The ruling facts, we might be more defiant,
More eager to advance against the odds.
The puzzled clerk would click
Another link
And stop to think
Of how life’s magic trick
May vanish, how we whiffle into gods.
So, too, the waterfall, which falls because
Its flow is definition –
But, when it breaks,
The torrent makes
A mess of inanition.
Without it, we’re the maskless wiz of Oz,
Unstructured, ineffectual, and flat
As entropy intends.
That’s why I call
The waterfall
A joy: it never ends,
Forever this and never, fallen, that.
Good and Bad
We make mistakes and, yes, mistakes make us.
Wrong turns, at times, can set us right
By writhing routes. I could discuss
Resourcefulness, mind-changing plays of light,
Hope’s sense of floating –
But ‘felix culpa, lucky error’?
No, there’s no sugar-coating
Intrinsic brittleness, that deepest seat of terror.
And since we’re human, animal-angel, after all,
I shouldn’t like
To eulogise and drop the mic.
Low-hanging fruit to overlook the fraught
Realities that structure, force-field, make befall.
The long and short
Of patterned speech, to free our defects from our ethics.
I hear it said redemptive good arrives
From somewhere far outside our world,
A concept-plane where nature’s knives
Can’t hurt: a land where love and truth are curled,
Unspooling threads
Incessantly, a cosmic fuss
That stitches through our heads,
And is intangible, and yet entangles us.
Beyond our broken turf, perhaps it has sufficed,
That realm of forms –
But here we languish, wracked by storms,
Where, this last century, certainty lost face.
Did crooks seize power, or some hate-galvanising Geist
Annex tired reason’s state?
In either case,
We must collect ourselves before it is too late.
City Thoughts
Now bubble tea and satnavs fill the high,
Where should we head for quiet?
Today Deliveroo, tomorrow drones,
Will circulate but, though they crowd the sky, it
Still echoes with old questions, dice
That roll but never rest,
Unweathered stones
Imported with the ice
When half of Wales was dressed
In permafrost that (praises) passed us by.
Dizzy, astonished, lapping up spring sun,
I, passion and restraint,
Observe fume-shrugging mayhem, motor-dart
And carbon-shambles. Who will be the saint
(I wonder, disaffected but
Still buoyant) to unbar
This rover’s heart
And launch us from our rut,
Settling some far-flung star
And bringing bubble tea where there was none?
Entropy
When Entropy swept in, the room fell silent.
You looked at me and I
Said, ‘Run.’
And yes, we ran. And it was violent
But sooner stress than nothingness. The sun
Flew high
Until the moment Entropy arrived.
Then every moving thing
Was still.
Yet somehow, lucky, we contrived
To dodge around its desiccating will
And wring
Dribs of freshwater from a brittle rag.
You looked at me as if
To ask,
‘Couldn’t you conjure any snag?’
I turned away, too stunned to face the task
Or riff
Except on what I knew. I’d seen that face,
That screaming mask, when young.
It’s name
Was Loss, or Grief, and no disgrace
Was freighted there but, though it brought no shame,
It stung
And we’d not let it frighten us because
We’d never waver or
Submit.
The only way to wriggle was
To run – the surest trick to baffle it
A door.
The Birth of Speech
Can you recall that moment when,
Leaving a den
Of warmt
h, you went to meet the light,
To gasp and fight
For breath, the shock of air
A jolt
That made secluded selfhood bolt
Beyond its bounds
And fashion sounds
So those who heard would care?
Some characters in Aeschylus
Enter the stage
With tails like comets, daring us
To guess what rage
Or righteousness impels
Their flight
Across the circus of our sight.
Such vocal hope
Makes skipping rope
Of furies and all hells.
Herero-speakers have no word
For ‘blue’, and so
Cannot distinguish it from green –
Which seems absurd
If you believe the flow
Of seen
And known goes ‘thought-to-language’, yet
It is the case.
This world we face
Needs recognition’s net.
Way back, though, wild Leviathan
And, firm on land,
Resilient Behemoth began
To dream and do
Aeons before frail hand
Hatched tools.
They yawped no diphthongs, yet knew rules
To muddle through
Or, if they fought,
Resist – and this was thought.
Now rockets lift, now cyphers crack,
Now optic cables
Shimmer below the sea, like eels
In fiendish fables,
What gathers up the slack?
What reels
Withdrawal in? What origin
Makes passing sense
Of all this tense
Enigma we are in?
The weathered heads of sculpted gods
Defy long odds,
Uncrumbling for another season.
What earthly reason
Could patterns have for wishing
To be
Demystified, cohered, in rock?
Immovably,
They take slow stock.
They stare like people fishing.
Sand Grains
Almost not anything at all, this particle
Of disconnected shell,
Yet squirrelling and shot
Through with a chutzpah fit for Frank Lloyd Wright.
Sheer angled mell,
A plankton’s cot,
It chuckles mischief, challenging the light.
A miniature motel
Where some detective plot
Might stumble, after rambling, on an article
Of lace, to solve its long-pursued conundrum.
Eureka. Awe. A crux
Hounded between the trees
For donkey’s years, corroborated. Truly,
Eternal flux
(Whatever wheeze
We try to pull), although it seem unruly,
Yields reverence redux.
As everybody sees
Sooner or later, nothing here is humdrum.
Calm
‘Calm,’ I called, ‘where are you? Calm, don’t hide.
I need a hand
To clear my head.’ A roar replied,
‘You’ll have to look elsewhere.
This is a chaos-torn and restless land.
Calm is not here.’
I went, and saw a dreamer in a park:
I thought, at first,
He’d found some calmness in an ark
Imagination built,
But soon I learned how fiercely he was cursed
By phantom guilt.
I trundled on and saw a schmuck who smoked
Hashish all day.
Life seemed, beside him, overstoked
Until I heard him speak
Of how his childhood dreams had huffed away,
His memory weak.
So off I roved and saw a billionaire,
Whose world was wide.
I knew he’d bought some comfort there,
To guard him from regret,
But calm was nowhere to be seen inside
His private jet.
Last up, I saw a hermit who appeared
At perfect peace
Until he told me how he feared
All newness, all unknown,
And how he felt, except for passing geese,
Always alone.
I quit my quest and looked at autumn’s flowers
Depleting in
Dry seedpods. I forgot the hours,
Until – ‘You there, I think
You called?’ (The voice of Calm.) ‘I was within.
I am this ink.’
A Paean for Medical Science
Mechanical, the building blocks of us,
Constructed so
Minutely, skin and bone and phlegm and pus.
You wouldn’t know,
First glance, that flesh would subdivide within;
That structures flow
Internally, integrally, all-in;
How where we’re at
Is pressed, pre-flawed, Augustine’s sort of sin,
First caveat
Of structure, constituted to decay.
A pulse goes flat,
Another spikes. We grab the flung bouquet
And, what is more,
Light infiltrates thought’s darkness, every day
An aperture
To check the known and not, to sign what’s seen.
Our carbon core
Of concentrated matter roils, machine
And animal
Impractical to split – and here we glean
A trick that shall
In time fine-tune our cells and set them singing.
Like Kubrick’s Hal,
Computer-self-preserver, we are winging,
A startled sparrow
Through mirrored halls of light, perspective flinging
The vast and narrow
In endless apposition, lost in space –
It cannot harrow,
It cannot harm an understanding face.
The world has waited
For exposition. All the thrill of grace
Rests in re-stated
Numeric structures. Children of a star,
Be elated.
Thanks be to those whose thought took us this far!
Thanks be to those
Who leg-swing at the last stool in the bar
With steadfast nose
Entrenched in textbook, those who theorise
In pinprick prose
On new conjectures for the lungs and eyes.
Thanks be! Without
Their everlasting lust for enterprise,
Their wish to shout
It hard and late, we’d know no song to strike.
Much more, without
Their feet so certain on the neural bike,
We wouldn’t know
The ins and outs of us. We would be like
The clever crow
Who feels, not knows, those wings he flaps are his.
We wouldn’t know
These truths of why life is the way it is.
Today and Tomorrow
Today, of all your days, you might decide
To certify that you are happy,
By which I mean you woke beside
Some gentle other, dreamlike. Not too scrappy,
I guess, to say
That every casual sight seems swarming
With sudden zest, a sway
You fall in step with, feeling new attachment forming?
Tomorrow, you’re aware, awaits and may be less
Uplifting, more
The old defeat. Yet what’s in store
You’re energised to meet with open arms
Because, though metros roar and troubles roll, love’s mess
Has shown its true serene.
Now all alarms
Fall silent. Life r
enews. Far hills are stippled green.
Yes, it’s high time to stir and look alive.
Daredevil hoverflies converge
On motley light. Clumped thistles thrive,
Expulsing purplish petals. Here the surge
Of rompered spring
Is on the breeze and in the hedge,
Insistent: ‘Anything
Can happen.’ Unselfconscious, songbirds start to fledge.
You feel perhaps you are, of all those ever born,
The most impelled
By love, how all its liftings meld
And concentrate belief toward a point
And how that feeling spreads like wind through endless corn,
Which guides the spirit on
Till out of joint
With Earth at first, but then – most present when it’s gone.
The Garden
I used to walk here any hour,
The throw-it-in moment or throwaway break.
I’d spare a thought for every flower,
Inspecting each stem for its intricate sake,
And was at peace,
A pressureless release:
A sense of floating through the haze
Of branches to find, in the twist of a leaf,
An endless fold of future days
Unfurling their fronds with delighted relief,
With feeling free
To grow, unchecked, and be.
Returning, changed, I’m energised
At once by a thrill I imagined had flown
When childhood went. It was disguised,
Though I thought it had died. Now the weathering stone
And wheeling skies
Inform me otherwise.
It stands. It stuns. It resurrects
A carnage of red in the shade of an oak,
A frenzied flash the lake reflects,
A dragonfly’s glide and a shivering yoke
Of yellow heat
That wires me. Pause. Repeat.
Promise and Compromise
Consider now, though seeming our most lost