future

V.89

Pain in my hands as I hold them
grasping a book, obsolescence
staring me down across thirteen
futures, just those from that second –

Le Grande Chartreuse chants ply away
in chorus across the copper
and fibreglass, a chant of years
of imaginary journeys.

I can hear imaginary
thoughts of those who would use oldness
to justify anything new
they fancied the look of. Silence

for example. A lost image
which is strings of words and phrases
and none of it uncreated –
it was sung in old emotions

we learned (and we is a loose term)
in ages past (every term is)
when we were openings among
the trees. I mean to say that no

singer can by their song undo
hope, though the lost hope may argue.
No dice throw can abolish chance.
The new world will come regardless

V.85

The cold warriors are dying –
amongst events they slip away
like the crackle of a spray can
and its hiss which turns to a roar

The cold warriors are dying –
the second movement of Dvorák
lingers in the musky swampland
of Florida, among torn flags

The cold warriors are dying –
falling away one by sad one
like mist withdrawing from windows
leaving thin dilemmas for drips

The cold warriors are dying –
their children are melancholy
unsure quite what this means to them,
despite, of course, that soft fizzing

The cold warriors are dying –
for arguments cannot outlast.
The eyes of history open
and see streaming neon glazes

The cold warriors are dying –
gears that have not turned for long years
shift and let off streams of gold rust…
Things are glowing with potential

Zodiac

I

Your week this week will go off
like a rotten egg. Such is life.
This fragment of a year will crack
and spill all over you, achieve

new heights of boredom and disgust.
Why? Do you ask why the fungus
grows at the tree’s base and grows
rotten? Come on. Just accept it

like you accept that your eyes
will look where you decide
and not just swing around like
billiard balls in a washing machine.

Next week brings with it new challenges
as exactly the same thing happens
for the hundred and eleventh time.
But this one, this is the one, I can feel it.

II

The stars are spread out in the orrery
like thick yeast extract on toast.
Things are everywhere finding it difficult
to connect. Take Bellatrix

for example. A salty taste on the tongue
just don’t let it touch an open cut.
Inside this emptiness of pain feeling
there is another expanse of tiny stars –

from each new star, we see new constellations
and the red bloom in Orion
is aching to reach them.
Close one eye for a while and things look flat.

There are an endless array of bears in the sky
clouds, atoms, birds, planes, galaxies –
all of these are bears if you look closely.
This week will bring bears.

Continue reading →

V.63

The future doesn’t exist
only the moment exists, and the moment
is the moment of despair that the future does not exist.

There are no hopes.
There are only desires and deepest of those
the desire to have hopes.

I ride the bus back from town
having achieved a slight melancholy

and bought things I did not need
when I ‘should have been saving’
for the future I do not have.

Love once tore my head open
and everything inside fell on the ground.

Now, I feel no love.
And my head remains empty.
such is time’s slow dripping
and the cloud moves toward the horizon.

Should I be angry? No.
Should I want?
Should… faint red lines iterate upon the past and build to a revolution where hope is reborn as weak as it ever has been that we could one day find a place among things

[Beyond Literature]

Beyond literature
crystal latticed books
interface in halls
so vast the humans
have been lost, always.

Every sentence starts
and ends with a whole
life, a human life,
short simulated
and in the centre

the books turn about
a spine – which is real
human spinechord cut
and spun from the tears
of ancient servers.

You do not ‘read’ books –
you must choose but one,
and it only seems
that way – in cold fact
it was built for you.

So tear your heart out
at the plug – thousand
eras dawn and die
to build its climax;
it is perfect life.

V.60

In the background things pass away
making a noise like dark fire
crackling. We go around nudging
remains into the embers with

our feet. There, fragments of wire lie
where authoritarian
structures once rocked back and forth. Life
burns and brings sadness. The brambles

are so green but in the fire, lines
of red-gold crisp light steam and curl
around the blackening leaves. Feel
the substance behind beliefs fall

away and reveal the golden
embers and their heat that can sting,
as the smoke curls up around you
wherever you walk round the flames.

On the drive home, it turns out that
the universe conspired to build
Nick Drake so he could soundtrack this
night. I feel complete in the car,

with the moon, moon, moon, moon, and me.
As I turn the corner to home,
I see the subtle moon, pink haze.
The record sleeve hangs in the real.

V.4

No matter how hard we all try
the future will remain unknown
soldier to the past’s graveyard.
A singularity. Is it not

trying hard enough. Is it not
easy to imagine the move
beyond. To imagine grass green,
a massive overproduction,

see life changing as we stop, give
out. And the computer’s structure
being where the strong motive force
is in fact the human motion

blur. It is hard to describe what
a piece of work are machine life
goals, intentions and what drives them
mad. We are likely to end up

selling trillions of useless things
so called objects the ‘first A.I’
so called, produced, mistaken that
process was all it needed and

then saw god as a nicely phrased
meme. A ladybird landed here
and the sun, appropriate to
these four kinds of full-sun musings

Jedi

In thought, light takes the place of the sword.
Through each corridor of plastic – flows
this thing we call our movement but is one;
the blue and the red cancel out here
and everything bathes in sparks and pastel
glow. Years of training, tribulation has led
to the point where each prediction unfolds
hyperdriven stars of prediction. And she knows
all coordinates in the force indicate this one point.
Where time moves and vanishes. It is life.
Or the end if you want to call it that. This light
side her opponent cannot grasp, snapped in
on the concrete moment and the feel of sword
cutting through metal and skin. There is more
to a fight than winning it. That’s the dull phrase
but more. Gaining from this loss all power
by choosing to elevate choice into its finale.
To a watcher this fight is not spectacular unless
you know each feint, each test contains millennia.
This is the secret the ones in black cannot grasp
confined to the red of this world by greed
fear, anger, hate, suffering. The light side has this
but not just this. Watch as the robe hits the floor
and a million new hopes unfold from it

Push

You wouldn’t perhaps have thought it,
but when the world ran out of fuel
there was a beautiful moment –
when, like bluebells emerging
from behind a rotten log
in the sunlight, skateboards, bikes
scooters, wheelchairs, wheels
of a different kind could be seen
enjoying a bright discovery
feeling the wind in their shirts, skirts
and the sweat, cold on the back;
Where the snap of wheels on tarmac
was like applause for a spent era.
They sped down natural speedways
and the flatland, their adopted birth
right, was finally theirs, they ran
from here to there never touching
the floor, and to the footbound were
the world they never quite could see –
something flashing in the daylight
amongst a quiet field. They bled speed
until electric hums seeded and the world
wasn’t quite as theirs as before;
Still they travelled, and never forgot
the days that had been their sport
hurtling along in the faint breeze
feeling the beach beneath their street
shedding a tear at quiet music

Two Fragments

I –

The rain sets a gradient on greens –
old lithograph fade, with yellows
as if cloud, slate-dark depressed
is mindlessly flicking through filters.
Only at twilight, such a light.

After, the streetlamps, pale as soggy
worm corpses, settle on the streets.
I miss the phosphor orange glow
of the days when I was younger.
Today, I miss it. Maybe not tomorrow

II –

Pylons grew out of the flesh of the land.
Iron bones of blood-rust thrust through
scaffolds to hold up the sky – how
insufficient were the rocks, now
heaven had grown heavier and heavier –
only metal and electrics could halt it
as it dropped off hurtling downward
toward the cold earth’s plates