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.

NoPoWirMo - 2017 - April 10th - A cricket ball at seventy...

From a prompt to write a portrait of somebody important to you...


A cricket ball at seventy...


...diving for it like a teen,
but even that was long ago
and the most abrupt of angels long since called
one Monday in the home which is not—
there are no homes, in the post-modern
Post-Kathleen Era, where a pad might be incontinence
or else for YouTube on the move
and at least one grandchild is married
to a MOTSS.  There is still sun
such as warmed Lino in the kitchen in the back yard
of the terraced house where the loo came indoors
in the sixties and the dog slunk off a final time
in nineteen eighty-two.
We who are yet to die...

we miss you, the cloth cap and the grin
the lunatic spin, and diving for the cricket ball
when you were seventy.  We miss that you never complained
not once
and were proud to pay the income tax—
which meant you'd earned some money.

Mother says that you made shoes
as a necessity
and reared a pig as a luxury
and a Christmas meal.

They say in time
every wound will heal
but this one
brought its golf clubs.

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...

---

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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."

Bottom dead centre

A bauble, earlier today.

I've posted this before but it is, as far as I can work out, my only viable Christmas poem.

OK, like Down time this is also in part a solstice poem, but it references enough Christmas paraphernalia to be acceptable.

As you may have gathered, it isn't the religious aspects of the season that matter to me.  It's the overall celebration of family and friendship and broad-spectrum humanity in general.

So happy festival-of-choice to all you broad humans out there!

---

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Bottom dead centre


Intake

Ice-path uncles, sliding, come
to top-up stockings, sip sherry,
be knocked unconscious by the Queen.
The old year has been dripping
through the cracks in December,
now only one festival remains.


Compression

Fewer and smaller,
the uncles left for us to visit
dribbling in their rest-homes.
What troupe remains to get festive?
To turn up, unexpected? To decorate the tree
and give you socks?


Combustion

I give you socks
to wear outside your boots
wending from the crematorium
with the path caked in icing, decoration
a drain-pipe dribbled through its crack.
We spontaneously scatter Uncle Clive.


Exhaust

All the uncles scattered once,
when you aced and raced the new sled
of younger years. Now the pagan tree
is baubed with tears, as you tear the ribbon-paper.
Another pair of socks—useful. At our age
the ritual differs. The engine hesitates,
one year unsafely dead, and drawing-in
one drawn-out breath we wait
to long-live the new.

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Also, as a festive treat, I've fixed the Search Box, somewhere up and to the right.

This box has been broken since the day I created the blog, so a certain lack of function has become traditional, but I've broken the tradition of respecting traditions and fixed the works up with a bent paper-clip, a nail and some sunflower seeds (don't ask).

So, if you've long harboured a pressing desire to know how many time I say "atom" (once) or "time" (all the time) now's your big moment.

Happy Christmas one and all.

Ian