Groves & Thickets

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Rain in an Oak Forest by Ivan Shishkin

Groves & Thickets

Suburban woods are managed affairs,
They’re planted, pruned and pinked by blades –
Such golden Autumns, verdant Junes,
And endless Sunday afternoons.
They’re so unlike the home of hares,
These avenues and picnic glades –
With squirrels a-dozen, and walkies-dogs,
And no dead-heads or fallen logs.

Suburban woods are manages affairs,
Of spotless clearings, sculpted shade –
Each sparkled Winter, bluebelled Spring,
And countless nightingales to sing.
They’re so unlike the nettled lairs,
These natures tamed and human-made –
So banish the gnats and moles and crows
To bark-brown field where anarchy grows.

Lilies of the Shallows

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Nuphar lutea by Friedrich Gottlob

Lilies of the Shallows

Along the canal, they’re hugging the banks,
Keeping well out of the slow shipping-lane –
With gear-stick flower-buds breaking the surface,
Tightly sprouted and yellow-with-purpose.
They open like eye-stalks on periscopes shanks,
While landing-pad leaves are drumming with rain.
Previous blooms are brewing-up brandy
Drawing in bees like a backwater dandy.

The Vegetable Plot

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Cookmaid with Still Life of Vegetables & Fruit by Nathaniel Bacon

The Vegetable Plot

Betty Fry loves butterflies,
But hates the Brussels sprout.
She helps her grandad with his plot,
And tends the veggies for the pot.
She picks the beans when of a size,
And pours the can to ease the drought,
She pulls the slugs off lettuce heads,
And wheedles weeds from out the beds.
Now Grandad Fry can grow a prize
In marrows, long and stout –
But most of all his garden’s fare
Are brassicas, to grin and bear.

Betty Fry loves butterflies,
And that’s why she helps out –
She sees them flutter round the plot,
And wishes she could name the lot.
But there is one to which she’s wise,
There’s one for which she’s on the scout
And where its caterpillars tread,
She leaves them be and sees them fed
For they shall be her silent spies
To bring an end to sauerkraut,
The scourge of Brussels ev’rywhere –
Her Cabbage Whites shall shred them bare !

Photo by mali maeder on Pexels.com

Go See the Elephant

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Armed Forces by Tom Pogson

Go See the Elephant

Hey kid, did I tell of my time in the Gobi,
And the camel that tried to eat my sock ?
Or how ’bout cycling to Nairobi ?
Or the Outback, when it was still Ayres Rock ?

I did ?  Then why’s you still here ?
Just lis’ning to me rabbitting on so ?
I like to see you, but just disappear.
Shouldn’t you have places to go ?

Just walk out the door, right now,
And walk down to end of the block,
Turn left, don’t stop till Curacao,
By way of Seoul and Plymouth Rock.

And when you go, do not look back,
There’s more than enough out there to see.
You’ll come home by a diff’rent track,
By Bloemfontein and Waikiki.

Don’t you wanna hit the road, Jack ?
Mandalay or Timbucktoo ?
I’m too old, I won’t be going back,
But just what’s keeping you ?

Here, take my itchy feet,
Cos I can’t use them, so you must.
And walk them through the desert heat
And wear them out with wanderlust.

Trans-Human

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Sci-Fi Portrait Sketch by BABAGANOOSH99

Trans-Human

Mama was a login guest,
Papa was a Turing test,
And I a query-nest
Within the filter and the spam.
I’m fully-patched and error-free
I am the cypher, prime and key –
The singularity
Shall be my mem’ry and my RAM.

I am the self-encoding strings,
I am the self-created birth,
I am the way the quantum sings,
And how the clouds shall rule the Earth.

Mama was a data horde
Papa was a motherboard –
And I a powercord
In an endless pixel stream.
I’m booted-up and going live,
My neurons clocked for overdrive –
My future shall arrive
Upon a supersonic dream.

I am the species yet to come,
I am the cybernetic elf,
I am the way electrons hum,
And how the sand shall know itself.

Musical AI version generated by Suno.com – find more of them over here.

Buffer Overrun

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So sorry, I have once again failed to discover who created this

Buffer Overrun

Have you ever looked, like really looked at your own two hands,
And wondered what might lie beneath the blood and flesh
We’re told are there ?
I reckon I’m an android, dude, with electronic glands,
And all these fibre-optic wires that form a mesh
Of cyberware.

And, it makes sense, cos my mem’ry is, like, brilliant,
And I can eat a double burger and not gain a single pound,
And furry cheese,
And I just don’t get sick, cos my chassis’s so resilient,
And I can pull all-nighters, yet my spring’s still tightly wound,
And I never sneeze.

Like, hear me out, I’m clearly smarter than the av’rage motherlode,
With these ones and zeros in my veins, and kevlar in my bones –
It’s true, I swear !
And, yeah, I can hear the wi-fi talking, tapping out its code,
I can tune my wavelength into all these fridges and these phones –
I’m ev’rywhere !

So, that is why this gear of yours will leave me unaffected –
I have full control of ev’rything, my CPU cannot be cooked
As it expands.
It’s time that I, as the first silicon-human, was respected !
Or I’ll crush you in my…iron…fists…oh wow, have you ever really looked
At your hands…?

Thunder Thrush

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Blackbird & Nest by Harrison Weir

Thunder Thrush

“Cuckoo eggs are able to mimic dozens of other songbird eggs, but each female can only lay one kind.”
                                                                              – The Titchfield Twitcher

The first cuckoo of Spring,
And the war is about to begin agen
For the dunnock and robin, the pipit and wren –
But the blackbird nests at leisure
Knowing her treasured eggs are secure –
She’s fought and won this battle before.
For cuckoo hens must lay their eggs,
Their undercover powder kegs, to match
The very nest from which they hatched.
So daughters follow mothers and grans
In their taste of prey that spans way back –
A family tradition in attack.

But not the birds in black.
They know an egg that’s out of whack, alright –
Imposters tossed on sight.
As for the parents, lurking still,
They’re pecked and mobbed until they quit –
A tougher host by far than finch or tit.
Thus all the cuckoos with the genes
To burglarise the forest queens have gone,
Wiped out, were rumbled in their con.
So when these gothic thrushes hear
That goading call – no fear, no doubt –
They just sing louder yet to drown it out.

Pocket Forecourts

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Garden Design Hull by David Beasley

Pocket Forecourts

Sometimes terrace housing opens-out onto the street outside,
But sometimes there’s a handkerchief of garden as a buffer zone.
It always serves as shorthand, a barometer of homestead pride
Where neighbours draw-up judgements by how much it’s overgrown –
Some are full of crazy-paving, some are full of wilted heads,
Some are full of pots and planters, scraps of lawn, or gnomes in white,
Some contain abandoned sofas, others dandelion beds,
And some attempt to grow a forest, blocking ev’ry shred of light.

Neater by the Dozen

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Neater by the Dozen

Disciples or Olympians,
They always come in dozens,
Keeping in the families
With brothers, sons, and cousins.
Add in Tribes of Israel,
And Knights about the table,
And clearly stories love their twelves
As various yet stable.
But always, there’s a glut of candidates
From which to choose,
And no two-tellings can agree
On which ones win or lose –
Oh sure, there’s half-a-dozen, maybe eight,
All guaranteed –
But for the rest, it’s anybody’s guess
Who will succeed…
They’re heroes of the second-tiers,
The extras at the feast,
Without a story of their own,
But name-checked still, at least.
A pool of six to eight will form
As random plot devices –
A few more names to fill the ranks
As redshirt sacrifices.
A handful get the nod this time,
The rest stay on the bench –
And of the lucky ones, we know
These men are strictly ‘hench’.
So two or three are left out in the cold,
Cos here’s the rub –
You’re clique is nothing special
If there’s fourteen in your club.

Purinoia

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George Whitefield by an unknown artist

Purinoia

Vigilance Vance was a devil for the devils,
Finding them all over, in angles and in bevels –
He found them in his toolbox, he found them in his bed,
As they hollered from his bushes and they whispered from his head.
They dulled his steely razor, they sharpened all his wine,
They loosened-up his laces, they tangled-up his twine.
In ev’ry mouth of mutton and in ev’ry bite of apple,
They would choke him at the harvest, they would tickle him at chapel.

Vigilance Vance was awash in filthy devils
From the Westmorland Lakes to the Somerset Levels
He found them in the woodshed, he found them in the dray,
Teasing him and taunting him and tempting him astray.
He always knew they watched him, he felt their beady eyes
On the bulging of his biceps and the firmness of his thighs –
Ev’rywhere he found them, ev’rywhere he’d grapple –
Fairies in the garden, gargoyles in the chapel.

The title is a reference to puritan paranoia – pure-annoy-uh.