Parallel Paragraphs
Don’t just write what you know,
But let your words off the lead in the wood –
To run and bark where the nettles grow,
In a left-hand neighbourhood.
Use your writing as reason to read,
To shake up the status quo –
Sometimes the blank page plants a seed
To write what you want to know.
Aero-Bats
Why can bats fly ?
And I don’t mean at all,
I mean still ?
Why have they never gone ostrich or penguin,
But never stopped flapping, so upwards-ascending,
Refusing to temper their skill ?
There’s plenty on islands without all the predators,
Plenty of time for their genes to face editors,
Yet, to their credit, their urge to grow lazy is nil.
Though perhaps that’s unfair on the dodos and fleas,
Who have repurposed bodies to new strategies –
So their airborne commitment to natural fitment,
Is not simply down to sheer will.
The pterosaurs never turned flightless either,
At least from the fossils we’ve found –
It seems that neither stuck to the ground.
I wonder if it’s all down to their puny legs,
Unlike the biped birds,
That stops them forming roaming herds,
Or burrowing into the hill ?
The membranes, though, of their wings attach
To their nether-limbs – is maybe a catch
To developing muscles down there with a kick ?
They just aren’t quick enough for the kill.
Though evolution is ever the tweaker –
The pika-pika can forage and scramble
With hardly a gamble or grounding or snafu –
While vampire bats, they can even run if they have to !,
Yet flying remains their thrill.
I guess it continues to work well enough,
So I guess they continue with flying and stuff,
And we all have our niches to fill.
I Before E
“I before E, except after C,
19th Century proverb
When the sound you are making is ee.”
Well, yes, there are exceptions,
But not nearly often as they claim –
Can we look at some ?
Well, sure, I’m game.
No, not science, that’s bogus and you know it –
Do I really have to show it ?
Look – the I and E are each in a sep’rate syllable.
And no, not eight, nor beige, nor vein –
I surely should not need to explain –
You’ll have to do better to prove that it’s a silly rule.
And no, not foreign, nor ancient, nor surfeit –
Pronunciation-shifts short-circuit,
Their violation will not outlive you –
I guess there is keister and casein and teiid,
Yet when was the last time that those words were needed ?
So much whaffle we have to sieve through…
But caffein, and Keith, and seize, I’ll give you.
But heifer and leisure, they don’t disobey it,
While neither and sheikh, it depends how you say it,
And feisty, and height, and Reich dodge the label,
While theirs are just weird, with their Rs unstable,
And suffixes don’t count – your swingeings are fallacies –
You won’t find your gotcha in all these banalities –
But buddleia, species, and Eid ? Yeah, those are fatalities…
Dear The Future
Thank you for taking an interest
In my world and my life and times –
Well, not specific’ly mine,
But those around me, and those that shaped me.
Except… you only get to see
A tiny slice of our paradigms –
The few that were preserved,
And yet most likely wholly have escaped me.
The art we leave is the art commissioned
By those with means to commission art –
And overlooks the many times
I’m left to feel so left behind –
Where nobody is saying the things I want to say,
But where to start ?
While all around are images
That in no way represent my mind.
I am a part of my world, in theory,
Yet wield so little influence,
That I sometimes swear I’m an alien visitor,
Stranded on a dead-end street.
But what if every stranger around me
Is thinking the same ? And yet the sense
That what the Future will take from us
Is simply that of a tiny elite.
I guess that means I’m probab’ly wrong
About the Romans or Tudor-men –
I don’t know bobbins about their likes
And politics and dreams and stuff –
Just because a certain art made money,
For a few years then,
It doesn’t mean it had a lasting impact
Once it lost its fluff.
So thank you, Future, for your int’rest,
But it’s only int’rest in
A few strange costumes from our wardrobe,
Picking apart the hem.
I get it – you study what you can find,
The memories you think we’re dressed-in –
Even though we most-of-us never wore those clothes,
But laughed at them.
The National Fabric
Flags are funny things, really –
Waving from the stands,
Or draping over coffins,
Or the jackets of mod bands.
Flags are flown for diplomats,
And flown when armies fight,
And seized-on by protestors,
Tearing-down to set alight.
They’re simple, you see,
And classic designs.
That’s their key –
As branding with bold, bright lines.
They’re loved and hated equally,
As diagnostic style
By the virtue-waving hypocrites
On both sides of the aisle.
Alteration of the Generations
Flowering plants give birth to their grandkids,
Two generations on.
Between them, a haploid stage in birthed,
And breeds, and dies in a matter of hours.
It’s evolution at play, and history,
Old ways still acting upon –
The hidden generation,
That is lurking deep within the bowers.
The parent cells, barely ten in total,
Died at the point of conception –
But isn’t the same as true in animals ?
Well, yes…and no.
The thing is, they have further stripped their gametes down
To uni-perfection –
No longer build a multicellular form,
They have no need to grow.
But mosses and ferns, they still do it old school –
Separate independent stages –
And algae can even be free-living –
Single, double, single, double…
So botanists have marvelled,
And have filled their textbook pages –
But have drawn the line at animals,
To spare them family trouble.
Yet I suppose there’s one more diff’rence –
If the egg and sperm that made me
Were my parents…well, that means,
My parents are within me to this day –
They gave their lives, and gave their haploid matter
To upgrade me –
So my generation has it easy,
Born with twice the DNA.
Botanists like to point out how the ancestral condition of alternating between haploid (one set of chromosomes) and diploid (two sets) each generation still exists in flowering plants, but in a very reduced form. And it is true that pollen contains two-to-three cells, and the ovule seven, making them both technically multicellular.
And yet zoologists never seem to mention that the same is true for animals, only here the haploid generation has been reduced even further – now both gametes are single-celled, and their entire mass is consumed by the emergent zygote rather than withering away like all of the haploid plant material bar the two nucleuses. I guess they’ve got to draw the arbitrary line somewhere…
Snoozeville
I wouldn’t spend so long a-bed
If my dreams didn’t bore me so –
But I wake-up with a weary head,
As I sense their dullness go.
What trite is my mind assembling
In its gaudy world of fake ?,
That is clear not worth remem’bring,
’Cept for a disappointing ache.
Free-Market Free-Fall
When I first heard
That we were living
In the throes of
‘Late-stage capitalism’,
Well, I was cheered-up
At the vibes this was giving –
That the end was in sight,
Be it progress or schism.
I mean, just how late
Can a ‘late-stage’ be
Before it collapses
To Marx or to Keynes ?
But no, it seems
That it still staggers free,
Like a zombie economy
Sucking our brains.
And meanwhile, it looks like
The environmental
Cannot hang around
For the axe to come down
And the final blow-out
Will not be gentle,
Salting the earth
And polluting the town.
The cancer is terminal,
Now we all know –
So just topple already,
Accept your fate !
But for most of us,
Still the car crash is slow –
And the late-stage’s ending
Is far too late.
Epic Names
Back when Zeus ruled ancient Greece,
He was the only Zeus around –
No mere mortals dared to name their children
So profound.
At best, they’d add a suffix,
To become an adjective instead –
So Martins are collectively “of Mars”,
And careful how they tread.
We also have Demetrius
To celebrate Demeter –
But not, we note, to claim to be the goddess,
To unseat her.
Now heroes, these were fairer game –
From Jason through to Herekles,
By way of Helen and Cassandra –
Citizens were fine with these…
But it took until the Renaissance
For the coming of Daphne, Phoebe, and Chloe –
And Diana, of course, though she’s Roman, not Greek –
But all were equally showy.
And here in the Twenty-First Century,
Our mythical children thrive –
As Athena, Apollo, Aurora, and Atlas
Are keeping the gods alive !
Perish by the Sword
Malchus was a servantman
Of Caiaphas the Sadducee,
Who tried to capture Jesus
In a garden at Gethsemane –
But Simon Peter drew his sword
And leapt into a fray,
And before the verse had ended,
Peter smote an ear away.
That ear belonged to Malchus,
On the right side of his battered head,
Though nobody appeared to care
As Malchus simply stood and bled.
And no-one apprehended Peter,
All seemed to ignore –
And Jesus even healed it for him –
(Well, one time in four…)
And once the casual violence
Had fulfilled an ancient prophecy –
The incident was never raised again,
And no apology.
Perhaps there was a metaphor
About ‘too deaf to hear’ ?
But still, the Bible soon forgets
Poor Malchus and his ear…
Rhyming Couplets 