NaPoWriMo 2023 - 2 - Fresh orange

Fresh orange

I - Orange is an emergency services
colour, and here in the soft drinks aisle
of twenty-four hour Tescos

and three a.m., that 'incident' feeling
is happening again,
the faint subliminal questions:

Was that a flicker
of strobing blue?  Do
I hear distant

walky talky distorty voices
saying "Lima tango"--because
they're always going dancing

in South America, I don't know why--
"Lima Tango <crackle>
the <squelch> <squeal> respondingover"?

II - And orange
is an electric Kool-Aid thing
distorting our perceptions

with not-so-subtle misdirections
here, where we're still in Tescos
and the really early morning,

and nothing is true
beneath these too fluorescent lights,
beyond the windows night

fills the car park and light
of a different quality floods from
overhead and neither of these lighting regimes

is wholly real.  Neither illuminates.
Reach out one finger and touch
a bottle of Robinsons no apostrophe double concentrate--

it has no temperature
it has no shadow
you clearly can't believe

reports from the outlying regions

III - and legions of people
have striven, without the intent
of building this precise experience.

They've designed the unreal light
for an unreal store, the murmur of the air-con,
the muted swish of automatic doors,

the weirdly dampened non-echoing
of staff restocking, bleeping and stacking,
their footsteps directionless

on synthetic floor and you...
you are still staring at seven thousand
near-identical brands of orange squash, have

IV -  no saffron-clad Tibetan monks at hand
to guide you with Zen aphorisms and show
how in fact you'll never ever know

the real from the unreal
the being from the imagining
and how

there's always a observer effect,
the viewer is not separate
from the film and the only way

to know the world is to live it
as part of the motley cavalcade,
who--like the most primitive sea creatures--

allow the ocean of experience
to wash right through their bodies
not separate from minds.

Just let your hand find any old bottle,
brave the bleep-synthetic-voice-how-many-bags,
and leave.  There is still time, outside,

V - you should be out in it.

TINAG Sound Recording

To celebrate the appearance of my poem TINAG in Selcouth Station here is a recording of me reading it, with a few virtual co-conspirators keeping tabs on me from a safe distance...

If you are wondering where this poem comes from, I was thinking about the difference between "gaming the system" and living life.  People who treat everything as a game are often difficult or even dangerous people.  Military/security organisations will sometimes treat the whole world in an overly game-theoretic way, sometimes just for strategic insight, sometimes embracing horrific outcomes for minor tactical advantage.

On the other hand, however, you've got to have some theory of the world...  some framework within which to pick a move...  It's just important not to see the whole thing as a zero-sum game: where the only possible victory is somebody else's loss.  The universe is not like that, and if you are a little person, without a lot of brilliant solo moves available, then non-zero-sum cooperation is the only way to go.

---

Ian Badcoe · TINAG

---

A soap bubble...

We went to a talk on liquids.  It was by a guy who had written a popular science book on the same subject.  He was an entertaining speaker, although overstating his case in the way anyone would to big-up his book...

He made a point that I hadn't been aware of: that the rise of literacy had been fueled by whale hunting — because lighting was the major use of the whale oil, it gave a superior light which people needed to read by...

Whether that is 100% true I do not know, a lot of other things were made from whale products, but it did inspire in me a larger thought.

That period was an economic bubble; people were building progress on an unreal assumption, that the supply of whales went on forever: the bubble would have burst when the whales ran out.

Which never happened, because gas lighting came along before that happened, and then incandescent electric bulbs, fluorescent tubes, LEDs and blah, blah, blah...  the present day!

But...

Buuuu..ut...

The bubble is still there.  It's here, in fact!  And we're all living in it...

---

---

A soap bubble...


...was blown

so long ago,
the wide-eyed, Wonderland-oblivious,
toddler of humanity blew
clumsily through the loop gripped
in one chubby fist

—billions of people will die—

and the soap film hesitantly bulged out
powered by bronze,
steel, the horse collar, crop rotation.
Sailing ships and steam engines
smoothed into the fragile sphere,
as were pickaxes, dynamite, production-lines...
industrial farming, the Haber Process,
internal combustion engines and the fractional distillation
of crude oil...  Fast-breeder reactors...
embedded in the almost imaginary skin
of this bubble we blew,
this quintessentially breakable world
we knew through all our lives,
and implicitly assumed was real

—and billions will start to die—

when it turns out it is not.  We built
a civilisation on stuff we borrowed.  We assumed
that fossil fuel in the ground
was a permanent state:
a natural condition forever.  We thought
fertile topsoil was a given,
and clean water another gift, temperate climate,
fish-filled oceans, the very air...

—billions of people are starting to die—

as our assumptions start to crack along fine lines
and this is a bubble in the purest economic sense
because it actually worked through all the time
during which it seemed to work,
until one day, suddenly, boom!
It's always been a lie.

If this island earth were a spaceship:
power failing, the food limited,
life support pumping dodgy air;
we'd get all of engineering there
and have a meeting to decide
who can be stuffed in lifeboats,
who can be stuffed in freezers, and who
—because engineers are nothing if not completely realistic—
won't reach their destination.
You can try to get that one
before the United Nations, good luck with that!
And not to be a bore, but...

—billions of people will die—

and I don't trust that lot to do much about it.
Although, also, I, with my slightly less than human head on,
—because I have one of those—I say: OK,
billions will die, it is hard to overestimate the size
of disaster facing us, but it's not the end of the world,
it's just the end of the world as we know it
and as long as we don't completely blow it...
and as long as we weather the change
ride the tsunami
take what life remains us, as and where we find it
and not go end-of-days-fucking-crazy
with a Mad Max style weapons stash
and supercharger
on everybody's Christmas list, then...

—for the billions who by chance do not die—

there will be some loss of privileges.
We won't be eating meat;
we won't be mining bitcoin; may not be driving personal cars
but we can hope still to be here
in some form.
We haven't been attempting the impossible
it's not that a planet cannot support an apical species
with a silly headcount.
It's just that we didn't do our homework.
We don't have all the required tech,
have not closed the carbon curve,
balanced the energy budget, or worked out
what happens when ageing plastics want to retire...

...not produced a society that can keep its calm
on pressure-cooker starship Earth...

...but it can be done.  Still, not a comfortable thought,
and it's going to take some time

—during which billions of people will die.

It's not the end of the world,
it's just a soap bubble,
it's the end of the world as we know it:
pop.

Making out with Proteus

I've not posted enough this year.

But I did post during NoPoWriMo and one of the poems was There's very much a multiverse - a casual, and probably acausal, dissection of life in a quantum multiverse.

Proteus is the eldest son of Poseidon; called the Old Man of the Sea, he is a shapeshifter.  He could also foretell the future, but hated to do so.  Probably because of the temporal turbulence that causes.  So, to make him do it you had to wrestle him and he would turn into horrible things...

In that poem I committed a sin of a type that used to annoy Douglas Adams so much that he created an improbable sperm whale as a way of getting back at us about it.  e.g. I created a character for the reader to care about, and then discarded them without explanation.

OK, I didn't kill her off, but I did leave her in a quantum superposition of p_kissed = 0.5 and p_punched = 0.5.

I subsequently felt a bit bad about her situation.  I thought I should get her out of it.

She turned out bisexual in the process.  There's no social or political meaning behind that, it's just that in her world anybody can become anything, so what can you do...

Anyway, to quote Adams again: This is her tale...

---

---

Making out with Proteus


And when our lips meet, his face unfolds
not à la Hellraiser or Resident Evil
but more like topology, mathematical;
an object that, rotating, shows
where I thought it simple, I was wrong...

...it seems we're every one of us a world, cityscape, a throng,
a crowd scene filmed in Technicolor and
just as I think I have absorbed that one
there folds out of the multitude a female face.
So I kiss that too.

I'm taller and she tilts her head,
there's just a touch of breath across my lips,
before they brush on hers.  There is no rush,
but when I pull back, wanting to see her eyes,
she winks

and then her whole body unfolds.
And I half fall, and step, but now I'm walking
through her... him... them... the plurality
ambiguity meaning nothing, in this unplaced untime
and they are still unfolding all around

and I'm walking through their whole world now:
past a booth, where a bakelite telephone is ringing,
through faded dark green curtains onto
a late-night street with distant drunken singing,
towards the only open place: a coffee shop

and as I go I feel the ghosts of kisses,
punches, traffic accidents, hands on zips, caresses
the flash of lust,
or possibly tactical nukes,
the glass in front of me explodes

the world goes dark
and the spinning fragments form a field of stars
so vast and deep and hungry now I know
that this is perfect love for me
a warm heart-shaped infinity, not limited

to any single name, identity or gender,
not always tender, not even always undoomed,
but although infinities can come in different sizes,
my subset of the multiverse is precisely
the same size as the whole.  I can choose,

if I wish, only to live the lives
where I'm with this lover,
and infinity again, is still as large
after this dissection.
It is the working of affection

to compute the intersection
of every possible world where there's a you
with every world where there's a me
and love the result
and if I now take one more step,

I can kiss the stars.

NaPoWriMo - 2018 - Day five (delayed) - Art is about learning to ask the right questions

Art is about learning to ask the right questions








"Put Holden on it, he's good."
       — the original Blade Runner

You're walking in the desert when you see a rhinoceros,
until now the magnum opus that's forming in your head
involves sequins—

I don't know why there is a rhino in the desert
it doesn't matter, it's hypothetical
—anyway the rhino looks

as if it might want to criticise your idea that colours
achieve an ultimate unity by fading in the distance
to perfect white.

Would you be worried about living without walls?
They do teach you about walls in the Academy?
No, I don't know

about the texture of the desert, rough I suppose.
Stop interrupting.  Would you like cream
in your coffee?

That's not part of the test.  You are covering the desert
with wallpaper.  Why is that?  Mile after mile
of featureless ivory paper.

One colour extending forever across the sand;
covering gravel, small spiky shrubs, tiny lizards,
dormant toads and jumping mice.

The paste is gumming up the small creatures' eyes.
None of them like it but you don't care.
Why is that?

OK, we're done  You're not a replicant
and your artist's statement stinks.  Oh, I'm a replicant, am I?
Would you like to take this outside?
Why is that?

——written to use the names of different wallpapers that we found while deciding how to redecorate the lounge.

Sept 26th - This is the epiphany room...

This is the epiphany room...

...it has to be furnished in this way
for you and at this time.  Do not
attempt to turn on the light, do not
try to force it.  That never works.

This is the faithfulness door:
as long as you don't try it, why,
it is not locked.  You may, however,
enter the room at any time...

...although the how and why of it
are left as an exercise for you.
We did not feel it right to do,
or rather give, it all.  Now watch,

this is the revelation switch:
rest your finger lightly on the top.
OK, I think that that's enough!
Go back into the darkness now...

...but always remember this
was the epiphany room.
We thought that you should know
it was here.

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 27th - The day science fiction was obliged to save the world

Marrie Lightman suggested an irrational robot prompt, well this is irrational, and it has a robot in there somewhere...



The day science fiction is obliged to save the world

The day science fiction is obliged to save the world
the alien fleet decloaks, apologises; says—
it isn't us, it's them—
and takes their vinyl collection back into hyperspace.

The day science fiction is obliged to save the world
a mutant traffic cop applies penalty notices
directly to the psyche of every boy-racer
from Kathmandu to Watford gap.

The day science fiction is obliged to save the world
the powers that be discover a new minority
but disagree on how to disenfranchise
the unbearable little freaks.

The day science fiction etcetera etcetera
a giant robot strides through the panicking city
with notebook and a magnifying glass;
placing each foot with exquisite care.

Because science fiction has stopped faking it:
no more hints and portents
no more signs for shops that don't exist
selling products you don't know how to use
and no more shapes for things that are not yet yet to come.
It's a day to mark in history
although possibly not ours.

The day science fiction comes into its full powers
the day the sky opens
for casual visitation,
and a day without
the city walls where we spread our picnic rug
on the grass of a hill that is being destroyed
at precisely the same rate it is being created,

is the day science fiction stops taking prisoners
my ex takes the biggest step of her life
from the top of a tall building
up, onto the top of the next.

On this day of which we have already spoken
a brain in a tank imagines a real planet
where minds on experimental drugs dream
the feedback loop completely closed
and change the bag on its nutrient feed.

The day science fiction is obliged to save the world
is the day that my pencil breaks
in Applied Philosophy 101
and the patterns of interference
between the answers I can't now give
and questions they didn't dare ask
tell me everything I need to know.

The day science fiction was obliged to save the world
was a day like any other day:
it rained in the morning;
cleared up later;
I bought myself a cake.

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 23rd - A spell to prove there is no magic

The official prompt for this day was a double elevener, which didn't grab me.  One of the alternative prompts I'm following said:

        "Must rush!  Do whatever you like!!"

(I'm only paraphrasing slightly...) So I dug this out and finished it.

I really believe there really isn't any magic, folks.  A Universe of this size and incredible complexity genuinely operates on automatic with no sort of mumbo-jumbo at all—which is real magic.


A spell to prove there is no magic


The eye of the newt, a lens of half a billion years
making; drop it in your stew, and I
shall never bow to you, the charlatans
who do not know. So...

this graveyard dirt collected by what light
and on what date, and in whose reference frame?  The stars
behind that ball of rock are many cold light-years
away and this dirt here is just the same
as it would be by day, or be it colder.

Of course there are some quite cool microbes here
but I see you've boiled them.  So much
for bacteriology, and for geometry
while your circle here with pentangle inscribed
is topologically complex, for all of that
I had one on my folder back in school--
nobody turned into anything.

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 18th - Possible taxonomies of the 1957 Yorkshire coast

I went to a writing workshop, some years back now.  One of the exercises was to watch a "British Transport Film" similar if not identical to this:

-and write a poem in response.

It's the "poem" part that may be dubious here.  Sometimes my response to something is more to its style than its content and seeing this I was struck by how much it was unique to the period.  So I started thinking about how people might present the same information in other styles...  and I hit on the idea of an overly abstract and academic study.

So what I am saying is that there may be nobody else in the world except me who gets this...

...but it is a list poem and you could imagine it came from the introduction of some dry-as-bones volume that a tweed clad professor has been labouring over for the best part of a decade..

---

Possible taxonomies of the 1957 Yorkshire coast

• those involving sun hats
• those involving beer
• those involving knobbly knees
• those involving simple foodstuffs : apples, sandwiches, cheese
• as above, but also fish and chips
• those involving model ships or boats
• those involving racquets
• those involving balls
• those involving young ladies
• excluding the most popular of all
• those involving sand
• with buckets and spades
• with towels
• with sandwiches
• those planned a year in advance
• those involving dance with various degrees of skill
• the subset involving omnibuses
• those involving ice cream
• the subset with also small children
• and the subset of those in which a seagull features
• those involving other creatures:
• donkeys
• crabs
• minute fish
• those in which you drink too much, and wish you hadn't
• those featuring special boys or girls
• appearing at just the wrong moment
• or where they don't arrive at all
• as yet to be categorised:
• sea temperature
• sunburn
• chilblains
• lower back pain in the context of luggage
• all the grades of rain

NaPoWriNo - 2017 - April 19th - The mythical creation myth

The prompt was to retell a creation myth.

First time I've used "wang" or "tits" in a poem, but then your typical creation myth is going to get a bit earthy...



The mythical creation myth

They say they say the universe begins
in fire, of all things; massive growth in white hot
techno-commercial foment or else some moment
of some old godhead cutting off some other
old god’s bits. The sky-father’s wang. The earth-mother’s
tits. The separation of the light and dark, water
and land, the casual combining of whatever
elements might come to hand into first life.

First life, first light, first thought… first criticism
the creation-creator held up for inspection
and to account. Is this the only way
the World can be? Is there enough infinity
or family values? Is the climate wrong
in late September? Has the climate model
come undone, dropping her pointer and spilling one boob
in front of the green-screen projection

of the home counties. What country is our home
in the world we less than intentionally create.
Do not pause at the gate but hit the commuter train
on time. Newspaper tucked firmly beneath
your Sure for men armpit and daily in it
the word-smiths push their sempiternal spin
there is such detail still needs construction
for the creation story that never ends.

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 11th - Towards a theory of knowledge

When I put up my April 9th poem, I was only a few days late, and I was very pleased because I'd nearly caught up with the alleged one per day nature of NaPoWriMo.  Since then I've not done well at all, I've been quite busy and also quite tired and poetry just doesn't seem to happen for me when I'm tired.

I've also not been very inspired by any prompts I've seen, which I suspect is another aspect of the tiredness.

Anyway I have now managed to write this.  It's not from any prompt but rather six lines of notes that I've had around for years.  I'm also not very happy with the character "she" as she's a bit of a cypher, even allowing for the fact that the two characters ("she" and "you") in this are only really caricatures.

However it's what I had time for, so here you go, a belated poem for the 11th.


Towards a theory of knowledge


Everything you think you know is wrong
or at least grotesquely out-of-date.  The speed of light
crawls, glacier-urgent, towards you past her empty plate...
Whole nanoseconds pass, she starts to frown,
and do not get me started on the sluggishness of nerves:
ion gates creak open, electric charge
only just starting to move
and maybe, in some previous life, you were unwise
to criticise her shoes.

Everything you think you know is wrong
or at least statistically poor, you've sampled her
at most four times this weak,
a fistful of data points and who's to say
what subtle changes may have happened
beneath the resolution of Student's t-test
for a population of this size
while you were off working on another dataset.

Everything you think you know is wrong
and philosophically suspect
solipsism cannot be disproved
and if you're moved to say
the Universe is vast and so complex:
it is no thing you could express
and thus you claim you cannot be
imagining reality, or even just the slope
of her nose -- well, sure, OK, there's something there
outside your skull, but still no proof
that she exists in anything like the form you hope.

Everything you think you know is wrong
your brain is built of only one device
-- the neurone --
and yes, you have a billion
but I know no proof
that says precisely what the wetware
can or can't embrace.  We know, for example:
face recognition is strong,
you did not kiss her sister for all that long
but there could be so many things
you cannot ever grasp --
although that slap was fairly comprehensible.

Everything you think you know is wrong
your base psychology is tuned
not to experience reality, but rather
to focus on those bits of it that get you by,
that get you fed, that get you sex, healthy children,
a seat closer to the fire, avoid pain,
and maybe another younger woman on the side
-- which is really just the healthy children thing again.
Oh yes, protest you understand
politics, economics,
the servicing of the small, about-town cars
but you don't know, you really don't
if your core program only goes this far...
and way beyond there lie the deep, bleak truths
that you will never see
or, more subtly, be able to accept:
like those things that she just said.
Were you even listening?

Everything you think you know is wrong,
quantum physics stringing you along
with the idea that the world makes sense
but underneath and not so nice
it seems to roll dice
and there's a chance, tiny but real,
that at any moment it might
rip off the concealing overlay
of sensibility and start to play
with the whole non-local,
anything-might-happen, no consistency thing.
And now she's talking to her ex?

Everything you think you know is wrong
and the quantum serves us also up another mystery
the past can only be explained
as a sum over histories
where just as anything might happen next
with some probability
however small, then in the other direction
in the past, there's nothing at all
which didn't happen
it's just most of it has a magnitude so small
that it can be neglected
and this is why you feel you can explain
how Friday night, is not as she suspects.
You weren't out with the sister again
but home all evening with the phone off the hook
and no lights on.

This really could have been the case, after all:
everything she thinks she knows is wrong.

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 8th - modern love an iterative algorithm

The challenge here was to write a poem that used repetition... but I wrote a poem about repetition.  I'm tricksy that way...


modern love an iterative algorithm


find_hearts_content:
define: coffee in coffee_shop;
    define: Joan is old and Joan is flame and Joan is barrister;
    if April not in cruellest_months then
    if April is young and April is lady and April is barista and April is here then
    while not Joan not here; watch April; sip coffee; repeat;
    greet Joan; begin conversation;
    set topics equal weather and family and work and events(local)
        and not feelings;
    talk about topics until Joan say "Well, must rush..."
    say "Goodbye"
    send love to Michael and Claire;
    look at window; wave at Joan;
    while not heart not satisfied; watch April; smile;
    goto find_hearts_content;

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 6th - You need to have a plan

You need to have a plan


You need to have a plan and its first part
must say the cutting edge of the state of the art
can't hold a candle to you.  Investors love
that short of thing.  Secondly, say you'll move
the goalposts, redefine the market, break
the paradigm, already have the stake-
holders saluting ducks all in a row
and never show your working.  Although, you know

that faking rumours of a prototype
can rocket-boost the most slothful share price
and drive your competition into fits—
so that is when you sell off all the bits
then make some sort of statement in the press:
how federal regulation caused the mess.

The X Thief's Daughter

Where this comes from is a certain class of book where the title is simply the description of a character.  You get these for children's, young adult and full grown up (tm) books with examples such as The Ink Thief, The Book Thief, The Kite Runner, The Memory Keeper's Daughter etc etc...  However I think The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat is a different phenomenon.

These make wonderful titles, capture the imagination and begin the character development right there on the cover...

However, is this style of naming be quite as acceptable to the characters themselves?  Do they get jealous of other characters, who have their actual names in lights on the cover?  Nicholas Nickleby... Anna Karenina... Batman?

And what about the characters whose books are never finished, whose backstories aren't quite completely filled in?

---

---

The X Thief's Daughter...

...drinks ice wine in the sub-basement
of the basement club behind the real.
She has nothing to conceal: she says
too many times, as the frost rose blooms within
her chest.  Her eyes grow dark.  Maybe it's best

the fence does not learn more. The X Thief's
Daughter is complex but direct
in shady negotiations. She sees
the world as chances overlayed
on chaos. What is this whole thing for?

There must be more than this, the normals ask.
So dumb.  "What can I get?"  She asks instead
and peels the false skin from her face.
The X Thief's Daughter knows her place
is nowhere that she's been, or will go.

The X Thief's Daughter is selectively
obscene, but will practice ritual magic
on a  first date.  She gets there late
as a matter of course and has rude words
tattooed, in schoolboy Latin,

in ruder places.  The X Thief's Daughter:
your mother never warned about.
How could she -- so far outside the bell curve
of parental advisory?  She's on
no chart.  The X Thief's Daughter

is all heart, all stomach, all pudenda;
a real but ill-defined character,
discontinuously variable
in every field but gender, and has,
always, that unbound variable

in her back-story -- she has no clue
what was the X her father stole
if any, but this is not a problem;
it's an opportunity.

Late onset fallibility

This is a poem about dementia, which isn't something which has badly impacted me in my life.  Yet...

(My Nan had it, but I wasn't that old and we lived quite a long way away...)

It's going to touch me at some point however.  It's bound to.  About 1/6 of people over 80 are affected, and I know many more than 6 people.

Some see Alzheimer's as the worst tragedy of the modern age.  I am not sure I entirely agree, it's certainly one of the most painful for the victim's family—possibly worse even than having them in a persistent vegetative state, at least in that case the wreckage of the person you loved isn't still trying to talk to you.


However, to my mind dementia, horrible as it is, is a subset of the big tragedy, which is that people die.  I have written about this before: the inevitability of death, how it gets a little more evitable every year, and how that in itself brings interesting, new, social problems.  Those are good problems to have, however.  People living too long is infinitely preferable to them not living long enough.  The increase in diseases we can't yet fix: dementia, cancer, diseases of senescence in general—is the direct effect of taking out all those lesser deaths who were more vulnerable to our sorcery.

None of which makes the failure of a beloved mind any more bearable.


I have been asked why this is late onset, when early onset is even more tragic.  The answer is because early onset dementia is more like a horrible disease, striking down only a subset of us; however the diseases of old age, of which dementia is the one example, get everybody who lives long enough...

---

Ian Badcoe · Late onset fallibility

---

Late onset fallibility


He returns from walking the dog
no longer quite your father.
It's nearly your dog.

He returns from walking the dog;
he's only been gone two days,
which admits no ready explanation.

He returns from walking the dog
with a jaunty stride
and somebody else's shoes.

He returns from walking the dog:
your mother leaves without a word--
she has been dead for five years.

He returns from walking the dog
smiling strangely to himself;
scowling at you, your brother, the front room paper.

He returns from walking the dog;
seems like he's acting younger
and looking frailer than when he left.

He returns from walking the dog;
wants to speak to your sister, oblivious
that she lives in Queensland now.

He returns from his walk
with a cat on a piece of string
and seven tins of the wrong dog food.

Going forward

I had an evening out with some people I used to work with...

...who are all still mostly more embroiled with large corporations than I am...

...so I promised one of them I would post this.

---

---

Going forward

The corporation cannot plan
its way out of a paper bag
which—note—is not to say
it doesn't have extensive PowerPoints
to socialise the vision
for the new, division-wide, bag-exit mission
get buy-in from the stakeholders at levels
from CFO to tea lady
and distribute cheap beer and pizza
at revels
that celebrate the dragging of one thousand hapless
employees, kicking and screaming,
into progress, status, overview, coordination,
planning, steering, post-mortem, and kick-off, meetings
at cost of fifty thousand person-hours
or half a million dollars [OpEx]
which is money so well spent
for staying in a paper bag.  Meanwhile

Team Lunchpack—who were spun,
you will recall, from Project Dune and tasked
with building an organisation-wide
flexible container collocation strategy—
have been thinking outside the box,
and now are standing
a touch despondently
outside a cardboard shipping carton,
and wondering where everybody went.

Death and the maybe

In the words Terry Pratchett gave to Sergeant Colon and Nobby Nobbs, as they balanced on the roof of the distillery with the dragon bearing down upon them:

What's up, Sarge? Do you want to live for ever?

 

Dunno. Ask me again in five hundred years.

 

 

And there is a fundamental point at work here, we live longer and longer, but we aren't 'designed' to live forever.

That said, Death is dying.  Very slowly and with, I am sure, a couple more twisty scythe-based manoeuvres up his sleeve, but we are slowly grinding away at all the things that can make a person not last forever.  There will come a last mortal generation and possibly we are it...

...although, actually, I doubt that, it takes surprisingly long to pull a fully fledged and medically-approved nano-technological body repair system out of your hat, or mind upload technology, or even body-part-on-demand cloning.  But even although it's going to take longer than we like, there is going to come a time when people become essentially undying and we have to face the ultimate socially awkward questions:

How long do you want to live?

How long to you want to live with me?

How long do we both want to live, if the kids have emigrated to Alpha Centauri, and idea of eternity with nothing on the TV is driving us nuts? 

But never mind, we may get hit by a comet...

---

---

Naked celebrity photographs


There is no real connection
between the beautiful and the vertical;
it is only a rule of thumb
but it has held so far,

she thinks,

photographing another letter-Y incision
against the steel table.
It always seems wrong
for the roughly stitched flesh not to swell redly,

but it's not.

This one had a crucifix—
it's in an envelope upstairs—
and a PR agency
who do not now know what to do.

She examines the photo
crosses it off her todo list.



To wish upon


If a comet comes
perhaps by night
wandering through our atmosphere
at a thousand times the speed
of bullets from a gun

the air compressed and burning
a transient and bale-filled sun
that flash-fries everything along its drift
before stepping firmly down to lift
some small Midwestern town

from the planet's surface
like a stamp loosened
in warm water and floated free if badly torn
with a thousand cubic kilometres
of the rocky envelope beneath.

If you are not burned
as you stand wondering or smashed
by falling secondary ejecta
if you are lucky and if, in short,
you are far enough away

then you can flee
the monument
of swelling black
that's eerily silent
coming at you faster than sound.

There is no way to turn
but you could flee choosing
as the commentator put it
a slow death over a fast one but, foolish, I
choose the slow death every time.



Magic


An empty box, a glass of milk,
two table tennis balls, a silken scarf,
no doves in my waistcoat, and no rabbits
or other small mammals
concealed anywhere about my person

but enough of this penny ante stuff.  Let's do magic!
Observe this wand, which came to me from an old,
old magician.  Now,

does any member of the audience have
a recently deceased body, ideally someone dear to you?
A mother?  A son?
A close friend will do...
You Sir?  Your daughter?

Let's give him a big hand!
If you'll just wheel the trolley onto the stage...
Thank you!
I cover her with this cloth
and if I could have total silence
as I wave the wand and rip apart the borders
of the undiscovered country.

I like to call this trick
"And death shall have no dominion."

You're not ready for the truth

Honesty is, of course, important.

It is possible I haven't been entirely frank with you.

---

You're not ready for the truth

I lied to you through all your lives as years
unfolded one-by-one and I maintained
I was middle-aged and a geek.  Inexcusable,
I know, but when you are a supermodel, discretion
is a way of life.  I do not feed the tabloid fiends
and horny creeps, who stalk my casualestest friends
and this is why, also, when I had to go collect
my Nobel prize, I used an assumed name
—I said that I was 'Ann' and they assumed it true.

And what else can you do, when you're out fighting crime
in the ancient city night, and an old fashioned journo
with his poppy flash bulb and huge camera
doorsteps you dropping stocking-headed men
on the precinct house steps.
Who is this masked hero?
—of course, you lie.