Pips in the Slips
There’s no such thing as in-the-round,
For ev’ry stage has front and sides,
And despite ev’ry good intention,
Actors shall forget the wides.
So sit dead centre, free from such malarkey –
For ev’ry circle has its hierarchy.
Round tables, while we’re at it,
End up far from democratic:
Always there’s a head, and it’s
Whichever side King Arthur sits.
Then right hand, left hand, straight across –
There’s no disputing who’s the boss.
The Change
Caterpillars metamorph, from juvenile to butterfly,
And maggots turn to ants and wasps and beetles, by and by,
And tadpoles can be newts and salamanders, toads and frogs
But when it comes to mammals, well,
There’s little change of which to tell,
For puppies only ever get to grow up into dogs.
But you know, that’s not quite true – we’re changing too,
Though the other way round:
See, larvae are more evolved than their parents –
Their bodies the new kids in town.
But we, you and me, start out as a fish
With proto-gills and a tail to swish
In a primordial sea of warm –
Then it’s time to move, to shed our skin,
And let our reptile-selves begin:
Engage, evolve, transform !
It’s time to metamorphosise,
We mongrel robots in disguise,
From instar into more-bizarre,
Our restless genes must shift and swarm
And take this blood-cold world by storm
By becoming the mammals, the furry mammals we are !
But don’t stop now, the urge ain’t gone –
I don’t know what’s next, but I feel it coming on…
Doublelife
Hey kids, here’s fun to boggle your mind:
Take a bacterium, brainless and blind –
Now, a single-celled critter is never alone,
When three-times-an-hour it buds off a clone,
And each twin is twinning and growing the brood,
(As long as it’s warm and there’s plenty of food).
And so, in fourteen hours or so,
That single bacillus will grow
To fill a cubic millimetre –
After twenty, there’s a litre –
And in one day, a bathtub’s-worth
Of constant twenty-minute births.
That’s loads of germs from hardly any –
Two-and-twenty-one zeros-many !
But don’t stop now, let’s let them grow:
And in another day or so
They’ve reach the size of planet Earth,
And soon they match the Sun’s great girth,
And long before the third day’s out
They stand a cubic light-year stout.
And that, dear children, clearly shows
How statisticians lie and cheat
For while their figures all add up,
The real world is never neat.
They think we’ll never notice how
Their precious model’s skewed,
By casually just poofing up
An infinite amount of food.
And how do bugs within the ball
Increase in size where there’s no space ?
And never mind their gravity,
Of which we find no trace.
The lesson we should really learn
From all they get so wrong,
Is how such exponential growth
Can never grow for long.
James Somersett
“Granville Sharp the abolitionist and Lord Mansfield of the King’s Bench are well known, but the eponymous defendant is more of a mystery.”
The Sunday Items
He ran from the court
To the door of his champion,
Slaved no more,
And he knocked on the door of his champion
To show he was free –
He ran from the court and he ran from our history.
Did James and Granville then
Shake hands like proper gentlemen ?
Did they embrace, perhaps,
In a quite un-English way ?
We cannot say,
For James is never heard agen.
Did he and Granville,
As they bid goodbye,
Look in one-another’s eye
And share a smile and knowing nod
That seemed to subtly imply
“We’ve started something here, by God !”
Maybe he died that very day,
Or lived another three long score,
Maybe rich, maybe poor –
He went about his way.
The last we see of James
Is at that door.
Superheavies
Smashing atoms into atoms,
Gee, that looks like fun !
And easy-peasy with the lightest ones –
Just ask the Sun.
But when they get more bloated,
It gets hard to make them kiss –
They should be bigger targets,
But incredibly – they miss !
Or else they break each other up,
They fizz instead of fuse –
But smash and smash and smash again,
And finally, they’ll schmooz.
Just one or two or half-a-dozen
Made in once, we think,
Before they break apart again
In quicker than a blink.
But then…but there’s a secret doubt
That lingers round the lab –
For did we really, truly make ’em
With our smash and grab ?
Was all of that momentum dissipated
From each core
Before they spat some neutrons out
And were themselves no more ?
Was the Strong Force strong and forceful
In all nuclei
For that thousanth of a second
That it took each fluke to die ?
And have they really earned their place
Upon the sacred Table,
Without a single isotope between them
Pure and stable ?
And yet, who gets to say what form
An atom occupies ?
And must they hang on long enough
To boil or oxidise ?
It looks as if this argument
Is set to run and run…
But smashing atoms into atoms ?
Gee, that looks like fun !
Elements above urnium are all man-made, although no doubt a few superheavies are spat out of a supernova, they’ll decompose before any future star system coalesces from its dandruff. But the real reason they’re man-made because this area of research seems to be little more than willy-waving, (and that’s something best left to the biologists).
Ununoctium
Hurray for element one-one-eight !
For the briefest of fractions of briefest of seconds
A handful of atoms held just enough protons –
And lo !, the Nobels and the Naming Rights beckoned.
By why stop the searching, oh lab-mates ?
The legend’ry Isles of Stability lay
Just over the Period Bound’ry, they say,
Where fusion-forged atoms don’t wilt and decay !
So on with colliding, oh lab-mates !
We’ll find a few more, by-and-by,
And if they’re as fleeting, we’ll keep on repeating –
We’ll keep chucking atoms till funding runs dry !
Huzzah for element one-one-eight !
But will she prove to be our last ?,
With the Table so neat and the budgets so tight…
Fun while it lasted, though – truly a blast !
But don’t stop the searching, oh lab-mates !
Learning is never a wasted adventure !
So rustle up bursary, grant and debenture,
For Wisdom’s our master, and Knowledge our quencher !
So on with the atoms, oh lab-mates !
Let’s boost their ephemeral hearts
For better we sink all the budget on trinkets
Than letting the generals split ’em apart.
Element Uuo has since been named as Oganesson (a far less interesting name) when it was proved that a handful of atoms were forced into being for an instant before decaying away with a half-life of 0.89 millisecond. Can I just point out that much like energy, public finances for scientific research is a zero-sum game…
Obey in All Things your Masters According to the Flesh
When even Jesus shrugs his shoulders,
Utters not a word ag’enst,
And Paul is rooting with the holders
Over people bought and fenced –
All these chattels in their fetters
Must submit unto their betters.
God had cursed the sons of Ham –
So help yourself – he just don’t give a damn.
And thus were Haitians much maligned
By France, the Pope, and even God,
(Who spat upon their Negro kind
And swore to keep them ’neath His rod.)
Till after ev’ry prayer had failed,
They struck a pact which countervailed –
It’s such a sorry state of works
When Satan saves and idle Jesus shirks.
A Year without a Summer
April was sulky this year,
And May was too shy,
And June was a truant who failed to appear,
And then came the tantrums of jealous July,
And August was but an imposter
Who left us quite sober,
And as for September, it seems we had lost her –
And soon we were greeting the gloom of October.
So where had our Summer gone, all Summer long ?
Hiding above the clouds, he was.
His rain was heavy, his wind was strong,
And as to why – well, just because…
But that is the way of the weather, we say,
He’s always been fickle round here –
When all four seasons are met in a day,
Yet no Summer met in a year.
Not a comment on this year’s actual weather, just a general mope when we get a bit of rain.
Nom de Guerre
Somewhere out there,
I’m not solitaire,
Cos somebody’s sharing my name.
An unaware pair, we are,
Not quite so rare, we are –
Feels so unfair, but there’s on-one to blame.
I must share a claim
To some unwitting fame –
I ought not to care,
But it still seems a shame:
With names going spare,
It is baffling, I swear,
That two of us bear one the same !
The Name Not Taken
I always wanted to change my name –
But of course I never did.
I’d invent noms de plumes as a game, as a kid,
But be far too embarrassed to tell.
Instead I languished on in the hell
Of my parents’ choice – my nominal shame.
And I never gave voice to my secret name –
The pseudonym that I never became.
But hey, we cannot help the way we’re christened,
And parents cannot ever hope to guess –
And so we get their hand-me-downs
And grow to like them, more – or less.
And maybe also we’re conditioned
By these names with which we’re branded:
Bright Miss Pinks and drab Miss Browns –
We’re bound by handles that we’re handed !
I always wanted to change my name,
But of course I never will.
Though who needs shelter more from unsought fame
Than the bashful-still ?
So my lovingly-crafted pseudonym
Is firmly kept inside,
And it’s too late now to allude to him –
I could never be him if I tried.
