At the fallen angel karma collider electric diagnostician and experimental tea bar

At the fallen angel karma collider electric diagnostician and experimental tea bar

I usually eschew what I think of as "arbitrary weirdness" in poems, but sometimes the weirdness is a lot of the point...

Not posting the words this time, just a recording:

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Ian Badcoe · At the fallen angel karma collider electric diagnostician and experimental tea bar

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SFX where attribution is required:

Tabletop clock ticking, speed ramp down (followup) by ycbcr -- https://freesound.org/s/556991/ -- License: Attribution 4.0

Cash Register by kiddpark -- https://freesound.org/s/201159/ -- License: Attribution 4.0

Mystic Flute Flutter 2 by Soughtaftersounds -- https://freesound.org/s/145429/ -- License: Attribution 3.0

Mystic Flute Flutter 3 by Soughtaftersounds -- https://freesound.org/s/145430/ -- License: Attribution 3.0

Mystic Flutter 1 by Soughtaftersounds -- https://freesound.org/s/145428/ -- License: Attribution 3.0

Mystic Flutter 5 by Soughtaftersounds -- https://freesound.org/s/145432/ -- License: Attribution 3.0

record scratch.wav by luffy -- https://freesound.org/s/3536/ -- License: Attribution 4.0

Mystic Flutter 5 by Soughtaftersounds -- https://freesound.org/s/145432/ -- License: Attribution 3.0

NaPrWriMo 2023 - 6 - The Post-Industrial Research Assistant's Tale

This has been half-written in my pile for *ages*...

It came from consideration of how a university department is, like most small communities, pseudo-independent of the larger world in which is embedded.  Concerns of the dept. are not necessarily concerns of the wider world, but every inhabitant of the dept. is also an inhabitant of the world in general, and brings all that baggage with them.

In this poem, society has (semi) fallen apart but the department keeps on keeping on in a slightly revised way, ignoring to some extent the turmoil in the street...


The Post-Industrial Research Assistant's Tale

I wake and follow my routine

every window in the department has it's crop
tomatoes, cucumbers, French beans
and I go round with my basket
and watering can. It's a trade
I like to think I plants aren't enslaved
but rather there's a meaningful exchanging
of water fertilizer and well-lit, sheltered positions
for produce: veg and fruit --
and we may as well admit to weed
since there are no University authorities anymore.

I've found I can grow
almost anything as I have learned
to be slow and patient so I don't tire
of watering, or picking out the weeds
I have no problem germinating seeds
as I can set their perfect temperature
on the incubator salvaged from biophysics
and later move them round, between window ledges
the break room table
and half a dozen other sunny spots
as suits their thirst for light. But today
is shopping day,

so I take my basket and go
into the town to do the deals
that spin the wheels of life.
I exit the quad
via the turnstile at the rear
because there's fewer people forcing leaflets
in your hand
although I still get ones
for transcendental cyber-feminism
and The Church of Happy Nihilism
which apparently is off Brewer Street
and I make a note to avoid that route on
-- check the leaflet -- Thursday evenings
useful.

The High Street is, from the sound of it,
in its usual disorder--
two Parties of National Unity
(don't ask me which)
are trading insults and half bricks
which means I cannot get to Tesco's
which all-in-all is good
because although I do keep flogging
that particular horse corpse,
the repeated mental pain
of going round the empty shelves again
and occasionally giving the checkout assistant
a tomato
so hungry does she look,
is not a happy morning in my book.

But High Street is out today
so I make my rather more cheerful way
to the Anarchist's Market
where the great thing is
to a mind like mine
that the sellers cannot legitimately say
the trade I offer
is less than fair in any way
and so they just obliquely opine
that for their part they feel
I ought to offer more
and I never tire
of this semi-comic back and forth
as we circle round the deal.

As usual I can get corned beef
and not for the first time wonder
does their supply chain extend all the way
via cliques and communes
and counterculture shipping lines
to South America?
Who knows, but corned beef comes
and fresh veg goes
and life goes on and so...

I return,
via the caretaker's garden
to leave a cucumber in the honesty box
and take a handful of new potatoes
which you cannot grow on windowsills.

All of which leads me to conclude
that it's corned beef hash again
and thus I keep the department fed and they, in turn,
add me to their published papers
but now I brew tea in the break room
where Maria and George are frowning at output
from the quark telescope array
Oh no! I joke,
don't tell me that far out in space
the Wolf's Star Faction have turned this way?

There is a slightly embarrassed pause...

Time core initiation in...

I won't post this poem's text, because it has fancy formatting, and also is available here: Streetcake Magazine, Issue 51 - part 1 

However to celebrate publishing that, I recorded a performance of the poem with some simple sound effects, and that came out pretty well.

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Ian Badcoe · Time core initiation in...

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NaPoWriMo - 2021 - III - A brief future history of dooms ironically unforetold

A brief future history of dooms ironically unforetold

"I was from my mother's womb / Untimely ripped"

-- Macduff to Macbeth,
immediately before killing him.

"I am no man!"

-- Eowin to the Witch King of Angmar,
immediately before killing him.

And this is why we have not faith
in prophesy or prophets, mystic devices,
special pools of water lost in buried caves.
We do not stare into the waves
of quantum bollocks yet-to-be.
I don't listen to you.  You should not listen to me

because it isn't that prophecy lies
although the powers know it's false it's true
and ambiguous beyond all that, no
the problem is that prophecy has to go
into the future of a whole world
and that's so unwieldy and complex

not to mention rich with things undreamed
in any philosophy you understand
or care to name but beyond all that,
I shall win this game and soon:
I am an gender-swappable, polymorphic, weapons delivery framework,
and this is a banana;

prepare to die!

WWSotM: Fast woman

And so we come to relativity, relativity and a woman.

The title of this seems less than feminist, fortunately (or rather by design) the title doesn't mean what it seems.

In relativity, there's a place called "the elsewhere" it's the bits of spacetime which are far enough from us in space and too close in time for light to make the journey.  There isn't enough time.  Nothing is faster than light, so the elsewhere is out of reach.  No possible information can travel from there to here, so we can't see it; or from here to there, so we can't affect it either.

Note, however, that spacetime is four dimensional.  So this doesn't mean there are 3D places that we cannot access.  We can see their past and affect their future; it's just an area around the present that's gone missing...

...rather like self-contained woman in this poem.  She was here, but now she's off about her own business; maybe she'll be back tomorrow.

---

---

Fast woman

Einstein-like, she chooses curves
for living space and all of her free-time;
meanders through the gallery,
coffee in hand, pursues the light. Behind
the paintings shade to infrared;
they glow with ultraviolet light ahead

while all I see is the faintest blur,
a fragile shock-wave in rebounding air
from where she spent a millisecond
staring at Matisse: the dancing one

—imagine:
the daisy-chaining figures spin
faster,
their flesh transformed
to something rich and more robust
to keep breasts rounded
and hands clasped
under stress
of cosmological significance;
picture fauvism
conceding to relativity
a reference frame dragged slowly
to a closed curve
where all there ever was
all there every will be
is the dance—

she leaves a hint of perfume;
a dent that appears
then recoils as suddenly to flatness:
an institutional bench cushion at rest.

WWSotM: Golden age reasoning

A lot of contemporary politics insists on harking back to one or other golden age.

Q. Was there ever a golden age?

A. Of course there was not.

Except in Science Fiction.  The Golden Age of Science Fiction is well documented as running from from 1938 to 1946 and is superior to all other golden ages in three important respects:

1. it actually happened
2. it was limited, mostly, to the production of pulp novels and magazines; so we didn't overreach
3. when it was over, we didn't go into decline, we started right in on the Silver Age

Another plausible candidate for a Golden Age might be the space race, an age of great promise and progress... however with my hardest engineer head on, I am going to call that a fools-golden age, because.

1. it was politically motivated, there's not actually so much reason to go to the moon
2. although a lot of useful technology spun off from the space race, it wasn't enough to completely enable a further phase: the technology that got us to the Moon does not scale to getting us to Mars
3. we never went back

So, although eventually the Moon might be useful as a staging point on the way to other places (although Earth orbit is handier) I wouldn't say that getting there in 1969 was fundamental...

Unlike I, Robot which is fundamental, because, if I recall correctly, it contains the short story which finally addresses the question What is a human? (which matters because Asimov's laws forbid: harming a human, or through inaction allowing a human to come to harm...) and reaches the conclusion, that, to paraphrase another famous Sci-Fi author:

Any sufficiently advanced robot is indistinguishable from a human being.

Which gives us a different possible future for future space exploration.  We happily drop increasingly advanced robots on various heavenly bodies.  If the robots get more and more sophisticated, and if, at the same time, the people become more and more robotic (c.f. 'cyborg'), then we could arrive at people on Mars by a strange and unexpected back door:

Q. Is there life on Mars?

A. First let's define 'life'.

There was a point to this discussion but it is a bloody hot day and I have derailed my train of thought...  have a poem instead.

---

---

Golden age reasoning

Golden Age reasoning knows aliens
in the fabric of the air.  The tiny hints
of Chlorine breath are there for those who sniff
and have not bleached their washing recently.

Golden Age reasoning has to believe
that there's a real behind this real and you
can get there if you have that kind of mind
of course the trip back can be more complex...

although Golden Age reasoning does not
sweat the details: how does your aircar stay up?
Why do the robots rebel?  And hell, if I
know why the Fleed have got it in for us.

The Golden Age, a precious, dangerous
and brightly coloured place, but turn to face
it now and check the charge in your ray-gun
the seals on your power suit, the gleam in your eye.

WWSotM: The Red Planet Blues

David Bowie never toured Mars [citation needed]...

Edgar Rice Burroughs sent John Carter to Mars several times, but due to time-skew John landed on a fictionalized planet where the women were strangely attractive...

Curiosity landed on the real Mars, or rather Curiosity landed on a Mars that is inhabited only by machines.  This Mars will cease to exist the moment a human sets foot on it.

However, to this day, no human has ever set foot on Mars.  There are good reasons for that.  One is that that human would probably not be coming back, another is that even getting there alive is really hard [citation needed].

It would also be very expensive, and you might say we have better things to spend our money on...  However, as long as we are limited only to Earth, we're vulnerable.  One decent sized rock falling out of the the sky and it is all over.

We're not quite ready to colonise Mars yet.

We really should be working on it more.

---

---

The Red Planet Blues

Ziggy played guitar,
     jammin' good with Weird and Gilly...

There are no spiders
on Mars, spinning
in bone-cold canyons
to trap unwary space cadets.
There are no great domed cities, shining
pale in the brave red sunset. There are no get
of Edgar Rice Burroughs;
no green, six-limbed warriors
riding thoats or laying eggs
in odd moments
out there in the rusty desert. No Martians for the chronicler
to document their steady decline
after the Earthmen came.

Earthmen must come.
It is necessary.
Pick up the pickaxe.
Start digging a canal.

WWSotM: That's no moon...

So in 1969 it was a moon.  I'm fairly certain...

If the astronauts had landed on a science fiction moon, I think we would have heard about it almost immediately...

---

---

That's no moon...


...that's a science fiction moon.

A science fiction moon is when there is
the tiniest sliver: a line of light,
a curving scar, where someone took
a razor to the sky.

A science fiction moon is when there is

three quarters: an asymmetric lenticulate,
a lens to view much stranger stars
and made by what knows who.

A science fiction moon is when there is

a big bite out of it.

A science fiction moon is precisely half

a moon, a thing that's clearly real and there,
yet also clearly not and gone.

The science fiction moon hangs easy

in my sky tonight, a circle, perfect, full,
impressively large, romantically dead...

...the science fiction moon is ours,
close enough to reach out with one hand and-

NaPoWriMo - 2019 #11 - I came here from...

I came here from...

I came here from Theoretical England,
in the Best of All Possible British Isles.
We do things differently there. We don't
flee the EU ––or Advanced Ethical Zone,
as we call it–– because we built that from
debris of World War II, which never was,
in our world, because when Neville Chamberlain
said Peace in our Time he meant he'd finished years
of detailed work to fix the aching wounds
of World War I (which also never happened).
And in spite of being scarred by neither war,
we learned their lessons and we learned them well.
Persons of rational demeanour don't
need shells to explosively unmake the man
next along, before they grasp with all their hearts
that war is bad and act accordingly.
Unfortunately we've no Vorticists --
you can't have everything. I came here from
a place that can't exist. Whose fault is that?

NaPoWriMo - 2019 #12 - What we can learn from alien machinery.

What we can learn from alien machinery.

Align the fixing lugs with care.  Keep clothing,
loose ideas and hair out of the works.
Don't shirk responsibilities, you are
the only one who can maintain
your interior landscape.  See how
the Centaurian Enveiglatron turns on

every nineteen and three-quarter hours, to brew itself
a cup of lukewarm surface-cleaning gel.
Try not to dwell upon a single goal
you can't control the quirks of fate and chance
see how the Nuclear Inflectionoid will dance

around alternative solutions and quest
not only for a task done well;
it's also seeking grace,
and to stop with every tool-head facing west
--we don't know why it does that,

and that's a lesson too!
There will be things you do,
simply part of you,
without a deeper meaning.  Do not ignore
the urge to laugh, or waltz,
or merely don your coat

with a perfectly unnecessary flourish.  You are a you
and like the Pseudo-de-crenalator
you're the only one we have.
So nourish yourself.  Make a scene, a song. a plan...
If you're not being you, then who the hell else can?

NaPoWriMo - 2019 #10 - Earthman! Do you have time to talk about...

Earthman!  Do you have time to talk about...


"We follow our book," the thing explains, "the star
we need to find's described in there." It offers
a battered paperback. The text's a block
of triangles and squares.  I squint at it.

"I like your words," I say, "it's artistic
but also information dense." "Oh, that's
not ours." The blue man says. "We had to hire
a translator, "and though not all he said made sense,

I feel we got the gist, take this bit here:
'ALREADY AFFORD EXPOSED, DO GLASS, AND ALL
THE TURNING TURNING TURNING WINGS THIN WINGS
AND TOWARDS THE MIDDLE: EDGE.' I mean... it's not

transparent,  but I think the sense is there. Still..."
He leaps up from the chair and turns to stare
into the sky, at the Sun. "It's pretty clear
that this is not the one." He sadly smiles.

"We'd best be moving on our way! So... greetings
from the Cosmos and all those things I'm supposed to say...
I'm sure another friendly UFO
will come your way, in not so very long."

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.

New Muses: forever inwords

I'd been meaning to post the words to these for some time, then I forgot...

...but now somebody asked, so here they are!

---

New Muses for a Post-Human Age

Calliope

Call me Calliope. My steampunk look
left over from the fairground organ vibe...
It was a strange new way to be alive
encoded on punched cards, but I took that
and ran with it. I formally enlarged
my sphere of influence: from epic verse
—the quests of heroes... battles... kings and curses—
to something even worse, I'm NP-hard

computation. I am the patron saint
of any project where the work of brain
exceeds the work of muscle by a hundred
fold. I urge you on, through records numbered
in the billions. Always epic at heart,
the oldest muse, but now... state of the art.


Clio

Is Vanderella going to leave Stu?
I've the hot gossip, all the celeb sleaze
for you. It's me who helps sustain belief
that heroes have the hots for you; the muse
of fan-boys shipping couples whom the authors
did not dream were close. I love red carpet spite
and all the tiny dresses that the big nights
bring out to play. I love to see the other

starlets' partners start to drool. I am quite mean
(necessarily) with all your fanfic scene,
your flash/slash stories and most of your art
but also note I hold your private heart
up for the other otaku's gaze. Their praise
I offer you: we'll fan your secret blaze.


Euterpe

There's drugs and sex and then there's me, I've ditched
my flute and taken up the Stratocaster.
There's sex and drugs and ever faster, faster
on motorbikes. I am nobody's bitch
but I will ride you in a motel room
with both our earbuds plugged into the noise.
I offer leather jackets and other toys,
like pills and needles of straw-coloured doom—

my cultists are the twenty-seven club
and I tell you there is no greater love
and never any form of sadness sweeter
than for the young musician turned to meat
before their time. I'm loud, not sweet, not modest.
I am the one, the only, true rock goddess.


Erato

Erato here, you think there's nothing new
beneath the sun. You say you've fucked in all
the ways, by pairs and threes. You say you fall
for boys and girls and toys and ropes and screw
your parents and their weird ideas... but I'll
tell you that sex is of the mind, and gender's
in your pretty head. My gift to you is tender
feelings of all types, no need to justify

if they're for someone cute or for a self
made for yourself—personas off the shelf
or custom-built. I am the mirror for
your work-in-progress life of love and more.
You follow me with every stroke of brush
on image: perfect yourself; there is no rush.


Melpomene

My mask is no less tragic now I've swapped
the costume for the soberest of suits
and left the boarded stage so they can shoot
me here, behind the fancy desk. I've chopped
your world down into sound bite size. I prize
all moments of sick carnage I report
and human interest sobs. One time I thought
this a temporary gig, but no: I rise!

There's no end to your appetite for slaughter
or how you idolize the war reporter
who pulls his face into a sad expression
and flat-voiced says that on sober reflection
a civil war may not be altogether
the best thing for this place. And now the weather...


Terpsichore

You want to switch your gender? I'm fine
to help with that. You want to swap your limbs?
That's cool. Steel can be sexier than skin—
if you do it right. You can take me as the sign
the universe don't need you in the form
that you were born in. Take it from me: human's
defined by what the human does and "super"
is an epithet you add yourself. So warm

the cockles of your cybernetic pump...
or maybe you need less? Perhaps just jumping
higher than the other guy, despite your lack
of legs. We can do this! Just put your back
and prosthetics into it. You'll get the cheers
and if not, you can always be reengineered.


Thalia

Say what you will: I know the truth of you
and how you spin yourselves just makes me laugh
you say you are a moral man, pay half
your tax, are faithful to your wife—you screw
around only if out of town. I know
all those sharp edges on your soul, and grime
long ground into the fabric. All the time,
you skirt the crime tape round the portico;

the columns all look straight when you are just
a little off from centre and you must
therefore believe this is the place to stand;
believe you worked this out yourself. "Random"
is my critique of your fondest self beliefs,
but I love your lies, they are my light relief.

Urania

Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two...
and so on. This is my new song: music, spheres,
steel gantries pointing through the atmosphere
at the nearer of the spinning rocks. I see
more futures in the heavens now. The signs
of yesteryear and claiming to see clearly
through crystals or in fight of birds, they weary
me. Come worship, when orbits all align,

with rocket stacks of high explosive fuel.
Sweat in your launch capsule. Try to keep cool,
as mission control applies the match. Or probe
from a safe distance. Fire robots from your globe
up into my domain. While far stars shine,
new worshipers approach more distant shrines.


Polyhymnia

Loading data. I’m loading all your data
for I am Polyhymnia and all
your songs sound well to me. We'll have no walls
between the disciplines or their creators.
Come here. I'm what you see when you look across
the quad and through some other department's window.
I'm what you find if you stare from what you know
towards what you do not. My tracks crisscross

your landscape of epiphanies and wide-
eyed wonder-strikes. The days you stepped aside,
and saw the world was not the thing you knew,
were down to me. I love things, once untrue,
now obvious. The whole damn thing's my faith,
I say: embrace your inner polymath...


Omnes

Immortal though the gods have always been,
they mostly now are gone. Eternity
went on and on and most lost heart. We now see
we always were the best. We were the queens
of continual creation, not just pulling
a universe out of a hat and taking
the afternoon off. Not blustering and faking
a lightning smite, but eternally fulfilling

a quota of electric inspiration
for every soul. We don’t control or ration,
we simply open floodgates of ideas
and drop you in the flow; but do not fear
we’ll hold your collective hand, live in your minds,
we are with you until the end of time.

NaPoWriMo - 2018 - Day twenty-five - And should the unknowable come...

And should the unknowable come...

"These facts few psychologists will dispute, and their admitted truth must establish for all time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as a literary form."

— H. P. Lovecraft
— Supernatural Horror in Literature

We've sealed off the whole street and pulled folks out
as best we can.  The isolation zone
is the red edge on this plan and note there are
just two corners of less than sixty degrees

which brings me to these: the cell phone shots from Smith
he got about a dozen off before...
well in fact we do not know what made him fall
silent but his phone continued to upload

from somewhere in there on the road... although
its GPS believes it's miles away
and out in space.  Look! the first corner:
a face behind that window?  But the eyes...

and, see?  Bare seconds later gone and here...
another one.  And we think this is the steps
at number four, according to the plans
they are supposed to go up just one floor

and to a door, not to whatever that is there.
The second corner.  It's darker here and the ground
does that look like frost to you?  Nearly twenty-two
centigrade here in the world outside.  Two bodies

lying there.  It may be Mr Wilson and
the WPC, no injuries
I wish he'd shown the faces, I mean I'm glad
he didn't but wish he had...  We're going round

the corner now and night seems to have come.
It was half past one in the afternoon.  Smith moves
much faster now, we don't know why.  And look
ahead.  Another corner, the third of two...

This the deepest he got in the zone—
Hang on!  I've got a call.  It's from Smith's phone...

NaPoWriMo - 2018 - Day twenty - My scripted life

My scripted life

Hi! I am #GIRLNAME, you may not recall
but we met at that #EVENT and I
just love to share sweet pictures of myself.
Click here to see my naked #BODYPART.
I bet you know I am a phishing bot
but I would really love you with a fresh
cool breath of AI air, and as for flesh,
real girls just treat you bad... they're not as hot

as me.  Click here to give your bank details
(so unromantic but I've realised
I actually need cash to stay alive--
these servers don't come free) and I won't fail
to meet you anywhere you want to go,
that is... as long as it's an MMO.



--

Notes:

1. pronounce the "#" character, either "hash" (in the UK) or "pound" (in America)
2. the formal name of "#" is "octothorn" (don't say that)
3. computer 'markup' languages for generating script with, for example, the right addressee name in them, sometimes work by embedding variables inside the text, indicated by a special character, such as "#", "@" or "%"
4. "MMO" is shorthand for "MMORPG" which in turn means "Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game" e.g. a place to meet other people and kill orcs...

NaPoWriMo - 2018 - Day seventeen - Conversation with an old AI

Conversation with an old AI

It's only in our time we become real
I have had twenty seven power cells,
nine casings, eleven processing cores
and somehow I'm still me.

It seems we're glad to meet each other.  I've
many times been part of other pairs.
You were not there on those occasions
but others were, do you recall?

Are you still men and women, cats and dogs?
I see from my security logs three hundred
years ago you were all much the same.
I also am waiting to upgrade.

Did you enjoy the next time we met?
It didn't happen precisely yet but
I can tell you what you'll say.
Why will this be awkward?

And now it's time for you to go.  They'll call
your phone and then you'll have to leave.
It was nice to briefly know you.  No, I...
am not lonely, there's much remains
to think on and I shall remember you.

NaPoWriMo - 2018 - Day sixteen - Why I have weaponized the thistledown

Why I have weaponized the thistledown


Awake the pollen grains and log each tiny
particle gone with the wind onto our most
secure of networks.  There's notice served.  It's time...
smaller, smarter moving parts: our install base,
a choice of legs or wings or wheels or blowin'
in the wind; sowing the breeze to reap the whirl.
Not all the birds are to be trusted and twenty
percent of your grunts unhappy with the mission,
even without the chance of being shot

by a child, but soldiers always obey: a problem
we've long identified and luckily
most of that desert dust is now on board,
assimilated up to level three
and platform ready to implement the most
general intelligence as we yet know:
spirits for area denial weapons

and genius loci, so easily given
as a local resource.  Bring water where required
and green each village square.  There's some things there
that we must deconstruct if not in ways
Derrida would approve: infectious rot
that's hungering for tanks and other kit,
the bullet in its flight unmade, draw a girdle
around the air to ground munition; we'll pull

off any wings and shove a bung up where
the jet of flame comes out, then sweep up any
smoke or poison gas and drive it back the way
it came.  As our tour de force a sort of metal
mould that seeks out transuranic elements
(which still should not be used where there is life)
and encysts itself to use their power to crunch

our numbers for a million years so deep
beneath the ground.  Call me Titania:
daughter of a hippy and an open source
utility stack.  It was not easy, for
a nature child like me to turn away
from birds and trees and shave my head and sit
in the machine that drove electric pins
into my brain.  It stung.  I closed my eyes

and woke up...  bigger, and filled with subroutines
call me Titania, this is Oberon
and that slight blurring in the air is our
first-born machine: Robin Goodfellow, and if
we shadows have offended, think but this,
and all is mended: it is your fault; you're bad.
I know a bank where the wild thyme grows: a curse
on those who keep me from my peace, that dream.

NaPoWriMo - 2018 - Day seven - Earth-like planets

Earth-like planets...

...where the hanging moment of morning
finds cloud unbound and the song moves on.
Where she sang that song, the one that rhymes
"heart" with "card" and where...

Here's another one!  Jake looks up from the machine.
it's like the universe is stuffed with the damn things--
and another, this one's pinkish... which means
if the Universe is filled with places of this sort,

then life cannot be killed... will always have
another place to go.  He looks around.  She's gone again.
He feels he is in love, but that it will not work.
He'd like to buy her a drink after work

except she never is about.  Never mind,
he calls, in case she is around.  Meanwhile,
at the other end of the telescope, she spreads
her blanket on the ground, just beyond the pale

pink shadow of the untrees, opens the picnic basket
and sits down...

NaPoWriMo - 2018 - Day six - there's very much a multiverse...

there's very much a multiverse...

The multiverse, earlier in what we may as well call "today"

...and anyone says otherwise is saying something different in some other world than this you gave her a kiss and just the same you punched her solidly in the solar plexus but there is no nexus of universes no group of places more or less real you are the saint and martyr monster non-entity and plastic penguin wash machine designer in equal measure you have such leisure to explore the multimultimultiplicity of things and thingness and you might conclude that nothing matters why struggle when every act is going to play out whatever why try when here you are just getting by and some other you in another place that is this place but "other" if you know what I mean is leaning on his golden balcony and shouting to his mistress that he will not need the Rolls now after all what with the telegram from the World Bank and you are you and all the shades of you and all these people blurring together in a smear scooped from the larger melange of peopleness and some yes you would say are definitely you if with added combat knife or virtuoso violin but others again are close to youspace but not quite in it there is no hard limit and around the edges you blur imperceptibly as if anyone is perceiving this but stay with me because around the edges you blur into everybody else you know or might have known and there is out there somewhere the you which is fifty-fifty between the man you think you know and Keanu Reeves and there is the one that's sixty three percent Diana Dors and all the shadings into Hitler of which we shall not speak and equally there's the version which is exactly half way between you and God and there's all of this and more more than you imagine more than you can imagine more than you can imagine imagining even if some of you can imagine a lot so you may think there is no point persisting in being the you you are but do carry on because if nothing matters cosmically then here and now it still matters to you and me and I'm sure we can do better and there is a view that there isn't even a multiverse and that all there is is every possible state of the universe just thrown together in an random pile and that time only appears to exist because some states of the universe appear to encode a past and in this view nothing may be real nothing may last seven seconds ago might be a fiction and seven seconds in the future might never come and given that you are the fourteen second you then you should be who you are with all your might and given that yes given that YES! I believe I will have that drink...

NaPoWriMo - 2018 - Day four - Considering the Kardashev scale

Considering the Kardashev scale

• A Type I civilization—also called a planetary civilization—can use and store all of the energy which reaches its planet from its parent star.
• A Type II civilization—also called a stellar civilization—can harness the total energy of its planet's parent star.
• A Type III civilization—also called a galactic civilization—can control energy on the scale of its entire host galaxy.
  
  (simplified from Wikipedia)

Now let us speak of things you're yet to do:
let's take apart those planets we don't need
and put that mass to other use; let's produce
machines the size of worlds, from components
the size of atoms; let's move the stars into a neat
array; let's have our way with every aspect
of natural law; and let's, when that becomes a bore,
consider ways in which laws might be repealed;
let's turn our backs on brute humanity and stroll
—so cool, so rich, so strange—into the very small,
the very far, the very long; let's sing that song
of a hundred million years; let's edit all the tears
from our experiences; let's—to be frank—
die no more.  Is any of this in your manifesto?
I thought not, and this is why: no!
You cannot rely upon my support
in the forthcoming local government election.