Work in Progress
I’m not some focused market-hype,
Or beta-tested prototype,
Not better – not faster – not fickle.
I still have flaws and silly quirks
I still have bugs within my works:
Like chuckle – like freckle – like tickle.
I’ve no save-game and no abort,
I’m version one-point-double-nought;
No cover – no sample – no sequel.
Organical of recipe,
I move through ev’ry part of me,
As slowly – as sweetly – as treacle.
The Gravity Pin
Paperweight, paperweight, glorious paperweight,
Balanced on letters and jottings and files –
And whether beneath you are crooked or straight,
They are anchor secure in obedient piles.
Star-Glazing
(after Walt Whitman)
When I heard the Learn’d Astronomer,
When the proofs and figures were ranged
In columns before me, to add and measure,
When shown his charts and diagrams strange,
When I, sitting, heard the Astronomer,
Where he lectured with much applause,
How soon, tired and sick, I stirred
And wander’d off by myself outdoors.
There in mystical moist night-airs,
From time to time I look’d up clear
In perfect silence at the stars,
(And thought them small, and rather near.)
This is my take on Walt Whitman’s poem of the opening line. I’ve shuffled things around and made it rhyme, but most of it is his words except for the last line. Turns out he was just a luddite after all.
And Saw That It Was Good
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.
There is no Plan A
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.
Epistophile
Her lovers’ ink, the sneerful think,
Is sentimental brine –
But no, I say, for each cliché
Is lyricment divine !
The very fact her tritesome pact
Is heaped upon my shrine
Is surely worth all laboured birth –
Her rapturelust is mine !
Her spotted graft becomes a draught
Of witticismic wine;
Her passion grows in purple prose,
To bloom incarnadine.
Falling Worlds
(After Molière, The Learnèd Ladies, Act 3, Scene 3)
Another world has passed us by
Just as we were sleeping,
And fallen through our vortex as we lie;
A happenstance unseen across our sky.
For all the while the linens we were keeping,
A momentary spark can live and die.
