Category: Engineering, Maths, & Physics

Silicon Sideman

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Silicon Sideman

The trouble with a drum machine
Is that it hasn’t got an ego,
Trouble with a drum machine
Is that it always keeps in time:
The fourth beat goes where the first three go,
As do the crash and click and chime.
Ev’ry beat created
Is so beautifully weighted
And it comes along precisely
When a beat’s anticipated.
Yes, some settings let it swing
(In a very predictable way),
But at its heart, it can only play
As its programming dictates –
It has no art in how it syncopates.
From the moment we press start,
It serves up static jazz and bluesless blues
At gridline rates –
And despite what the singer would choose.
It can’t insist on using toms or gates.
However loud, however smart,
It never tries to build its part,
With never a roll and never a fill –
It just keeps beating,
Beat-beat-beating,
Beating on and on until
At last the plug is pulled, the button pushed,
The damn thing overruled and hushed,
And finally each tireless brush and stick is still.
The trouble with a drum machine
From marching boys to charging pop,
Is knowing when to make a noise,
And knowing when to stop.

Lokomotiviy

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Lokomotiviy

We’ve all heard of the sealed train
That carried the 36 between
Zürich and the Glasbahnhof,
In April 1917.
A couple of ferries and a new suit later,
Tornio station, platform 1,
To catch the sleeper to Petrograd –
And become the prodigal son.
Finnish metals all the way,
On over the swamps and rugged terrain
To the Finland Station and history,
Though no-one thought to note the train.
One is preserved – it may be the one,
But as likely not – we’ll never know.
Those locos were all faithful workers,
Too busy toiling to stop and crow.

But in the height of August,
Fleeing back the way he came –
Working his passage with a shovel,
Lenin stoked the movement’s flame.
293 – preserved in glass
The only loco we know he rode,
Not that we can blame the pistons
For their unexpected load.
American built, as the century turned,
A proud ten-wheeler, H2-Class,
A broad-gauge beauty, wood-fired boiler,
Black, without that bourgeois brass.
Does it matter ?  Holy relics ?
Lenin was also just a machine
That public anger drove to the station
In the red-heat of 1917.

I have completely failed to determin which platform at Tornio the train to Petrograd would have departed from, so naturally I chose the one that rhymed.

The Blacktop Jungle

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Mulefa from The Amber Spyglass by JamesMargarum

The Blacktop Jungle

Evolution has no use for wheels –
It walks, it never rolls –
Beyond a tumbleweed or spider
That the random wind controls.
For real life lacks our perfect strips
Of smooth and tarmacked roads,
These alien technologies,
These edges linking nodes.
Biology’s against it anyway,
Unless the wheels are dead –
For how can blood and nerves attach
To grow the spokes, repair the tread ?

Though germs can grow their flagellates
Upon an axle, loosely bound –
And they can drive by swimming,
Just by spinning tendrils round and round.
So give a million years or ten,
And life may well adapt
To these ribbons of oil and gravel,
If they haven’t been buried or snapped.
But while terrain is bumpy
And a bogged-down caster cannot trot,
Then legs will always run the show –
The world may turn, but life does not.

Auto-Desire

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Auto-Desire

I remember watching the cars go by
From the back seat of my Dad’s Cavalier –
A rep-mobile, that would sometimes change
Into a Sierra, or something near.

I could name them all, down the motorway,
From the back seat of my Dad’s works’ Rover
By make and model, and sometimes trim,
And dreamt of driving them all twice over.

But when I left home with a job,
It didn’t come with its own Passat –
And I was living in digs in London,
Without a garage, and that was that.

Besides, there’s never any parking,
And what there is will costs me loads –
And if the Tube is crowded, well,
Then you should see the roads !

But still I eye the kerbside cars
Beyond the pay of my nine-to-five –
And fantasise which one I’d have,
If I’d only learned to drive.

Until my sensible shoes recall
The fossil fuels and rusting hulks –
And the boy inside with the brum-brum dreams
Just sits in the back seat and sulks.

Any Colour You Like, as Long as it’s Charcoal

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Any Colour You Like, as Long as it’s Charcoal

When did cars become so boring ?
When did roads become less roaring ?
When did bland become okay ?
Paintjobs dull as office flooring –
Offered in a monochrome of grey.

Call it Silver, call it Graphite,
Brooding Shadow, Summer Midnight
Any guff that comes to mind –
But once we see them in the light
You’re surely fooling no-one but the blind.

White and black are offered too,
And boy, that’s really big of you,
But what will people think ?
Leary over red or blue,
And terrified of lemon, lime, or pink.

Remember – we were bright and fun
Before the mortgage and school run ?
Oh, we were colourful and proud !
The dial tuned to Radio 1 –
Not Archers, Proms, or Magic, not too loud.

The reason, I suspect, is that
Our Chelsea Tractors grew so fat
Our excess-baggage showed.
And so we dressed them down in matt
To blend in with the tarmac of the road.

And as a side-effect, we get
To hide the dirt and hide the threat
That purple-headed Greens advance.
So boring cars are worth it yet
To motor on in blissful ignorance.

Purity Error

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Purity Error

Back in the days of cathode rays,
Electron guns of RGB
Would bring the colour to TV –
Except they could get out of phase
If unwanted magnetic strays
Would tamper with the purity.

And boy, were mine unpure !
With ev’ry colour out of sync,
Where skies were green and trees were pink !
They told me there’s no easy cure –
“But I’ll get used to it, I’m sure”
I tried so hard to think.

I might have made it through,
But for the glaring lack of red
That ultimately screwed my head –
Faces, lips, and roses too –
Those cyan people made me blue
As if the aliens had bred !

I thought I dug the mood
To love all races in my sight –
But skin-of-denim just ain’t right !
So I rejected modern dudes
For old-time films and attitudes
That showed the world in black and white.

One Size Fails All

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One Size Fails All

Office chairs with starfish bases,
Wobbly levers, sofa wheels –
They never fit quite right, most cases –
Either leaving swinging heels,
Or bunched-up knees and hunched-down shoulders,
Wimpy pistons full of slack.
But still, a useful perch for folders
Till the backside needs it back.

Conjure-Less

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Conjure-Less

Hogwarts is a trade school –
Its graduates are magic-wise, but culture-poor.
Their basic maths and science tools
Are lacking, from their focus on excessive lore.
So who will pioneer the medicines ?
It won’t be Harry.
So who the next Brunels and Edisons ?
Don’t look to Harry.
And who will score the soundtracks to our lives ?
Or teach us how to exercise,
And thrust and parry ?
Just who will study bees and save the hives ?
Or write, exposing greed and lies ?
Or help us marry ?
Your world of Latin, nods, and shadows,
Operates clandestinely –
But will it save the climate ?  Who knows ?
We’ve no time to tarry.
So who will help us muggles take control
Of our own destiny ?
And who will feed the intellectual soul
That we all carry ?
And who will tell me I can be
Whatever I might wish to be ?
No Sorting Hat’s the boss of me !
Hey, Harry ?

I find it bizarre that a self-confessed lefty wrote about a super-powered elite secretly running the world because the plebby muggles were incapable of doing it for themselves.  And poor Harry, having to suffer growing up with those working class oiks until he was restored to his true destiny as the golden child.

Humbuggrit

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brown deer
Photo by Sohel Patel on Pexels.com

Humbuggrit

It is easy, far too easy,
At this mawkish time of year,
To call it crass and sleazy,
And commercialised veneer.
Muzak-strewn and wheezy,
And bubble-wrapped and cheesy,
And cuddle-cute and queasy,
And worthy of our smuggest sneer.
But once we’d dowsed the festive ember,
How then would we warm December ?

It is simple, far too simple
At this twinkly time of year
To only see the pimple
On the face of winter cheer –
The self-appointed saviour
And the goon from Scandinavia
Who spy on our behaviour,
Yet who we’re told we should revere.
So kids must don a wimple
On their thoughts, and simper insincere
With innocence of dimple,
And conviction in the flying deer.

There’s very little needs to change,
Just don’t forget that kids are smart –
There’s plenty in this world that’s strange
Without the need for lies to start.
Tell them all the pretty stories,
Tell them that they are just stories,
Tell them thanks to Newton’s glories,
How we know that deer can’t fly.
Tell them that it doesn’t matter –
Love them as they are, reply.
Birds are tiny, deer are fatter,
That’s the price for antler-clatter –
Evolution tells us why,
Despite what stories say.
Robins cannot haul a sleigh,
As deer cannot fill the sky.

History Never Changes

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painted fore-edges by Cesare Vellecio

History Never Changes

The trouble with the past
Is that the past is pre-determined –
So we know just how it goes
Because it’s all already been.
Now at the time they must have felt so free,
Yet they’re confirming
That the past is fixed forever,
With no wiggle-room between.

Little did those little people know
There’s just one way for things to go,
And ev’ry time we play it back,
The same old things are still on track.
There’s just no way to keep hold of dinosaurs
When dead is dead –
There’s no way to replay the wars,
Or Anne Boleyn to keep her head.

But wait – if there’s a script to act,
We write it out together
From a million potential drafts
That could go either way.
For just like us, they got to choose
But once they chose, they chose forever.
The past is post-determined –
Once it’s set, it has to stay.