In Finity
“I’d rather believe in an absolute something
Than trust in an absolute nothing at all.
And thus I choose faith in an undefined coming,
Than ponder the empty and chanceful and small.”
But how can an absolute anything be
In a finite and singular universe host ?
And as for an absolute nothing, well see,
That nature abhors of a vacuum the most.
Four Thousand Million Years in the Making
Unbeknownst to exis’tence,
Who lived in bodies, firm and dense,
There looked upon with apprehence –
An unknown entity.
Beings of a diff’rent class,
Not formed of solid, liquid, gas:
For not one atom had they mass,
But weightless energy.
When they looked upon the Earth
In hill and cave and brook and firth,
They found the rocks had given birth
To life most tangible.
Life alive as mould and trees,
And slugs and crabs and honeybees,
And frogs and crows and chimpanzees,
With tooth and mandible.
“This is outright blasphemy !”
They screamed in thought-like energy
“For never life can ever be
Built with a hard physique.
And they live at such extremes
In ocean depths and fissure seams
And in another’s fluid streams.
With mutant-gained technique.”
Terrified by solid life
They blew apart this world-midwife,
For only there could such be rife,
And now it was destroyed.
Rock and lava shattered thence
And sped across the void immense,
Without a single thought or sense:
A thousand asteroids.
Thus were ended carbon forms
In fumigating magma storms,
Biomass now dusty swarms –
Extinction voracious.
But all this life is hard to kill,
And even in the deathly chill
Of outer space, it’s clinging still:
Patient and tenacious.
As the debris drifts afar,
So come the tuggings of some star
Upon this frozen reservoir,
And bring about a thaw.
Let them countless orbits make,
And with an endless time to take –
One bacterium shall wake,
And life resume once more.
The Gods of Melodrama
I swore I’d never once again be fool
For the lies of actors.
To open up like that, it’s all too cruel,
To be only actors.
But when they looked at me with such a look,
Like we’re likeminded –
And yet the stalls were dark, and I mistook,
We both were blinded.
And yes, I know, I know, I’ve always known,
Yet fooled I always am –
They make me feel and feel in ways
Alone in life I never can.
Parable of Architecture
Imagine that you’re sat at home,
Lis’ning to some Bach, let’s say –
When thudding through the party wall
Comes Iron Maiden, ev’ry day.
Now perhaps you rather like
To mosh from time to time –
But not at home – for home is Bach:
Subtle, delicate, sublime.
You’re not a snob, there’s room for both,
Though Eddie’s really out of place
At festivals of lilting strings –
They ain’t the stage to show his face.
And Glastonbury’s Pyramid
Is likewise not the perfect gig
For chamber-orchestra-quartets
To strut their stuff and make it big.
But ah, you say,
There’s shuffle-play:
A random stream shall come our way.
But if you try another’s Pod,
I bet you find their choices odd.
But now imagine, ev’ry day,
Their music blares until it bleeds –
They always crank it to eleven,
Cos that’s what our music needs.
And all your pastiche must be crushed,
For that is old and we are New –
We are the only tune allowed,
Cos all your heathen hymns are through.
But long before they moved next door
There used to live the sweetest song –
It’s gone forever, now, that air –
Alas, the future came along.
They took the song and stripped it bare,
Then slowed it down into the grave –
They tore its notes out, cleared its score,
To build their tune upon its stave.
But ah, you say,
That’s what we pay
To progress through to come-what may.
But I say we can play them both
If we just learn some civil growth.
Your False True-Colours
America, no ! You’re doing it wrong !
It’s red on the left, and blue on the right.
The rest of the planet can all get along,
But you Yanks as usual are picking a fight.
For red are the hands that must labour and toil,
And blue is the blood that possesses the soil.
It hardly takes NYPD or the Feds
To spy just how blurred is the choice of your hues –
With red-meat Republicans labelled as Reds,
And New England Democrats down with the Blues.
But red is for passion, and rage, and hard knocks,
And blue is for loyalty, culture and stocks.
America, no ! What you practice today,
We follow tomorrow – and follow you blind –
Our system for centuries soon shall decay
As crimson and cobalt get quite misaligned –
Then blue are the collars that lefties much cite,
And red are the necks of the folks on the right.
I debated whether I should leave out the superfluous ‘u’ in colour in the title, but I just couldn’t let logic overcome my desperate need for identity.
Mortal Remains
These tombstones are listed, these crypts are protected,
Preserving the love and the pride that erected
These grand mausoleums and gravesides historic,
Their statements and passions to questions rhetoric.
Yet time shall erode with its rain and its frost,
Till their dates are obscured and their epitaphs lost.
It weathers their angels and softens their urns,
As lichens enshroud and subsidence upturns,
And insects will burrow in mortar and crack,
And ivy will clamber and marble turn black.
Yet do not repair them, their tarnish amassing –
Such monuments solemn are records of passing.
Anatamour
I love the way your halves combine.
I love the way you place each lung
With careless grace and good design
On either side your centre line,
And equidistant from your spine.
I love the way your ribs are strung.
I love the way your shoulders fit,
I love the way your arms construe.
I love the way your kidneys sit,
So each, the other mirrors it
To keep the couple quite legit.
I love the way your hips are two.
I love the way you wear your legs,
So nicely paired, and just enough –
For with a third, the question begs
Of where upon your frame it pegs.
I love the way you keep to regs.
I love the way you’re up to snuff.
I love your face with eye and eye,
I love the way they both are blue.
I love the way they flit and fly
In unison, to watch me pry
Upon thy tygrish symmet-try.
I love the way you’re balanced-through.
The penultimate line is inspired by how I always read the fourth line of a certain poem of William Blake’s.
Roofus
How do churches stop the rain ?
And send the downpours down the drain ?
That’s pretty simple to explain –
See, the footings hold the buttress,
And the buttress holds the flyer,
And the flyer holds the corbel,
And the corbel takes the strain.
For the corbel hold the springbrace,
And the stringbrace holds the hammerbeam,
And hammerbeams hold hammerposts,
And up, and up again.
These hammerposts hold collar-ties,
And the collar holds the kingpost high,
And the kingpost holds the ridge-beam,
And in turn, the weathervane.
So the kingpost holds the struts up,
And struts support the rafters –
Or at least, they hold the principals –
(The big ones, in the main.)
Then the rafters holds the purlins,
And the purlins holds the sheathing,
And the sheathing holds the shingles,
And the shingles stop the rain.
Hammerbeam roofs were developed in England in the 1300s, but not named such until the 1820s. So just why are the short horizontal ties called hammerbeams ? I mean, what’s so hammer-y about them ? I suspect it was just to show that architects could be manly when talking about their erect members.
The High Cost of Knowledge
Life is full of spoilers – there’s no way to avoid them,
However much we try to shut our ears and plug our eyes.
Upon the ether, through each chink –
These rumours reach us out-of-sync.
Life is full of spoilers – we just have to abide them
They leap out of the bushes and they creep up in disguise.
It’s rarely cruel, it’s never fate,
But sometimes warnings come too late.
We’re creatures with a mouth and with a will,
And if the price for censorship is never letting banter slip,
I’d rather keep the quips, for good and ill.
Life is full of spoilers, from those who steep the boilers,
And don’t cut back their stoking to preserve some heat for later –
And from these spendthrifts, gossip comes:
Sometimes whispers, sometimes drums.
So life is full of spoilers, and unintended foilers –
Annoying, yes, but don’t assume each blabber is a traitor –
With so much on the telegraph,
It’s no surprise we blow the gaff.
We are a talky species, let’s recall,
And if the price for ignorance is sharing no more than a glance,
I’d rather take my chance and hear it all.
Just Another Face in the Choir
She rises to the golden glow
From ev’ry cloud beneath her feet,
And curls her hair in ringlets so,
In waves of strawb’ry, loose yet neat.
She pins each blossom into place
To form a halo round her tress,
And adds a paleness to her face,
And dons her fine and pleated dress.
She plucks her harp and tunes its strings,
And warms her voice to sweetermost.
And so, with flexed and polished wings,
She clocks-on to rejoins the host.
This poem was written in response to the painting shown above (sorry she’s so blurry).
