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.
I am the product of four-billion years-worth Of winners and breeders, and fighters and choosers. But now they shall wither, extinguished forever – For billions they flourished, yet still wound up losers. But hold on, my genes are my sister’s, my brother’s – They’ll swim through the side streams, these spawny succeeders. For they are the product of four billion years-worth Of fighters and choosers, and winners and breeders.
We start the wars, we fight the wars, We win them and we lose them – We argue out the truces and the peace. We write the laws, we break the laws, We honour and abuse them – And either way, our meddling shall increase. For we are Men, alas, we’re Men, We’re being masculine again: We’ve got the whiskers, got the beer – We’re patriarchitypes, my dear. For we are He, alas, Himself – We’ve got the jobs, we’ve got the wealth. We must be heard ! We shall be heard ! We started with the final word.
At least, that’s how it’s always told By critic and historian: From hunter-gather days of old To present times – the myth is sold That ev’ry man is brute and bold, And endlessly Victorian. But we are more than legacy, We’ve learned to share and redefine. The mercy that you beg of me Is yours these days as much as mine. For we are us, thank god, ourselves, We’ve equal now, not trolls and elves – But that’s enough from me today, I’d rather hear what you might say.
frontispiece from Novum Organum Scientiarum by Francis Bacon, art by anon
The Voyage of the Novum Organum
’Twas in the summer of ’20 When our galleon set sale. Now gather ye, and plenty, As I lay the fearless tale: We soon approached the pillars bold That Hercules himself, we’re told, Had planted, so’s to say “Behold ! Behold these sights, and quail ! Here lies the End of the Earth, my friends, And who knows what may lie beyond ? It’s time to find what you’re worth, my friends, If dareꞌst ye leave your pond. Will you view my gates as a warning ? Then head for home on the turning tide. Or will you view my gates as a dawning ? Then pass on through to the other side !”
Who knows if God shall forsake us ? Who knows where the currents take us ? Over the seas on our questing quest: With our fortunes pressed for the holy grail, As on and on we sail.
So wise old Captain Bacon Gave the word to pass on through. We prayed he weren’t mistaken And a-gambling with his crew. We sailed betwixt those ancient piers, And set a course for new frontiers. Once Argonauts, now pioneers ! ’Twas time to earn our due. “There lies the Start of the Earth, my friends, When we find out what lies ahead ! It’s time to give rebirth, my friends, It’s time to raise the dead !” We knew great riches would await us, All our maps were full of exes ! We dug up booty with apparatus, And unearthed keys to fresh complexes.
Follow the clues, be smart and plucky – Here be dragons, if we’re lucky ! Over the seas on our questing quest: The better we guessed, the more we unveiled, As on and on we sailed.
We plumbed that deep wide ocean So’s to chart her reefs and bars The first we found was motion – It was written in the stars ! Then spied we microscopic forms – A hidden world of tiny swarms. We shuddered, but we rode such storms, And better for the scars. There lies so much joy on this Earth, my friends – Let’s find out what we share her with ! There’s nowhere upon her in dearth, my friends – She’s always more to give ! We sailed upon her seas of numbers, Fathomed her amounts amounting: Formulas and patterns slumbered – Ev’rything, we learned, was counting.
And the point where the limit of our learning meets, There’s always a fair wind filling our sheets. Over the seas on our questing quest: The more we professed, the more we regaled, As on and on we sailed.
The further out our striving, So the better stocked our stores. And always we’re arriving Onto ever-stranger shores. And on those lands we took our drills And tapped the streams and dug the hills And set down bridges, rails and mills, And just and noble laws. We learned how the whole of the Earth, my friends, Is built from the same few blocks, not more ! We learned how the life round her girth, my friends, Is built from life before ! We sailed away to explore and learn, And still there is so much more to find ! We know we can never again return To that ancient world that we left behind.
We’ll never be bored and we’ll never be done – We’ll never arrive at the setting sun. Over the seas on our questing quest: The more we progress, the higher we scale, As on and on we sail.
And a great stillness then knew me, As a lightness of thought did rock me then. I thought how the Lord had come to me; Alas, it was but lack of oxygen.
detail from Experiment with an Air Pump by Joseph Wright
Soul-Lights
Perhaps she is just a chimera, Or otherwise born with this curious guise – For ev‘er‘ytime that I’m near her, I cannot but help to look into her eyes. Perhaps she has suffered a trauma, Where blood is now staining her iris tattoo That partially came to transform her, With one eye of hazel, the other of blue. And further, her hazel is golden Encircling her iris, but greener beyond. Her stare surely has me beholden, Her pupil eclipsing its het’rochrome pond. No contacts nor tumours nor ’Shop-tricks Are needed to give them what rarely occurs. If souls can be glimpsed in our optics, Then softly she carries a rainbow in hers.
Judas in paintings is often the one Who’s sporting the bright carrot hair. What does this signify, why was this done ? For redheaded Jews were exception’ly rare. Maybe he dyed it with henna, of course, For most nat’ral gingers were Celtic or Norse, So who were the genealogical source Of Judas Iscariotson ?
Edom has nothing to do with Judas, being the brother of Isaac in Genesis, but his name means ‘red’ in Hebrew.
How will love fare on a far, strange planet ? Something tells me, just fine. Astronauts are after all as human as the rest, On those long and lonely voyages to Sigma Ceti Nine. It really doesn’t matter how Control attempts to plan it – Some eventualities are harder to decline, And improvised solutions are unlikely to be guessed Until that fateful moment when our instincts come online.
Then to the fore comes ambiguity, When foreign incongruity’s the only game in town. But, when it comes to promiscuity, Then human ingenuity will never let us down.
We are the pioneers Across the galaxy we plumb We are the copuleers We boldly go and boldly come
So Human-Alien exchanges probe To grasp a firmer bond – Exploring green and grey and blond, Until enquiring ends combine In intimate communion. We’ll scout each sucker, fin and lobe, And softly test how they respond To fingers from the great beyond – And arms and tentacles entwine In interstellar union.
I have heard it suggested that humans would be disgusted by anything even-slightly non-human. After all, for all we snigger at bestiality, it’s a very rare proclivity. And just look at our closest neighbours, the chimps – when the females are in heat, their genitals swell up to advertise the fact, though good luck getting any human gentlemen callers with that trick !
So if we’re six million years too distant for Pan-spermia, what hope have we of getting horny for alien horns ? Well, I think it’s a case of uncanny valley and not marrying cousins. After all, there’s way more octopus porn than monkey business.
Life, it seems, is ev’rywhere, An opportunist spiv: And ev’ry nettle, ev’ry rat, And ev’ry spider, ev’ry gnat, And ev’ry roach and snake and bat, Is one more proof of nature’s flair Through evolution’s sieve. So love each thriving organism: Dandelion, botulism, Dry-rot, fly-bot, feral pigeon; Life, it seems, is ev’rywhere, It cannot help but live.
First there was sunlight and bedrock and ocean, And acids amino, all churned in a dance – When somethings were randomly formed in that potion Of nutrient flow in a soupy expanse. They hadn’t a thought or a want or a notion, They hadn’t the know that they’d barely a chance; They had no creator to watch with devotion, So where could they go, and just how to advance ? But networks were working and systems in motion Which favour and grow and compete and enhance – And so, life is life – a fluky explosion, A spawny crescendo to blind happenstance.
Yes, I know I put an extra ‘e’ in the title of the picture above, but now it’s so much easier to say ! Interestingly, I’m not the only one, though there is some debate over which letter should represent that extra schwa:
Animalacule (both singular and plural) yields 1 screen (at twenty returns per screen) Animalecule produces 3 screens – this one is my favourite, as it could mean “animated molecule” Animalicule turns up six screens Animalocule generates just 9 entries in total Animalucule scores a measly 8 hits Animalycule strikes out completely – though that’s before this page goes live, of course, which will increase the result to one.
Rhyming Couplets 