Ian Badcoe Poetry: geek

Showing posts with label geek. Show all posts

2020-04-15

NaPoWriMo - 15/04/2020 - The Engine Subcommittee

The Engine Subcommittee...

...meets, occasionally quorate,
and every Thursday evening
in the longtime beer spill backroom
of the Dog and Gun.

They consider the case for turbine rotors
the glasses of beer, the ceramic or titanium alloys
the questions of low, high and optimum temperatures
and whether the peanuts should be salted

or dryly roast. They consider the boast
of Nigel of the Flat Cap, that he can route
all the required pipes and wires
around the belfries and spires

without making a single decorated Gothic
flinch. Watch the Master of Combustion pinch
out his cigarette and say
for the thirty-seven thousandth time

that he is certain all engine components
should be situated in roofs and crypts,
and not disturb the bats, or visitor collection box flow patterns,
in any significant way.

The subcommittee has been meeting for fifteen years;
the cathedral hasn't moved an inch.

2018-04-23

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:

pronounce the "#" character, either "hash" (in the UK) or "pound" (in America)
the formal name of "#" is "octothorn" (don't say that)
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 "%"
"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...

2018-04-10

NaPoWriMo - 2018 - Day ten - No-one understands, even as it is explained.

No-one understands, even as it is explained.

When you say

things aren't as they appear,

he thinks he understands, nods

as if the pair of you are wise.

We none of us wise. I am not wise,

even with much more clue

than him.

Later you hear him telling Betty

that things are not as they appear.

He has her pinned

in one corner of the kitchen,

one arm against the wall and leaning in.

She is nodding

to pass the time until

she can escape back to her desk

and all the time you're telling this to me:

things aren't as they appear, you say,
I only wish I could get to my desk
and talk to the machines.

From Marie Lightman's prompt if somewhat perpendicularly.

2018-04-07

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...

2018-04-04

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.

2018-01-30

New Muses for a Posthuman Age

I follow a filk singer/songwriter called Dr Mary Crowell and on her album: Scattering Seeds on the Pomegranate Tour she has a song: Courting My Muse. This track inspired me to write a sonnet sequence about how the Muses might be updated for the 21^st century.

So far, so good, nothing unusual there, I've written sonnet sequences before...

...however when I came to record this, I had a problem. Muses are female and plural, where I am male and singular. So I hatched a plan. I put out a call to various female poetry friends asking them whether they would like to be one of my Muses (I phrased it a little more carefully than that.)

To my delight friends signed up in sufficient numbers to be able to record all nine Muses, plus a group effort for my bonus "Omnes" sonnet that rounds things off at the end, and I was doubly delighted when Mary Crowell leapt at the opportunity to participate (bringing the whole thing full circle...)

I've spent some time editing these together with sound effects and music to complement the poems. I also recorded myself narrating between the various goddesses in my guise as "The Mortal".

I have to say I'm very pleased with the result. There's something uniquely satisfying in hearing talented voices read your work back to you, and it also is also educational, bringing out things in the poems that wouldn't be there in my reading.

Cast in order of appearance:

The Mortal

A man, like any other...

Ian Badcoe

This is my blog you are already reading...
Facebook
Twitter

Calliope

Goddess of Complex Computation and Difficult Projects

Natalie Shaw

Natalie Shaw is a poet who also works for the Government Digital Service. She is @redbaronski on Twitter and writes very occasionally on her blog: https://natalieshawpoems.wordpress.com/

Clio

OMG of Celebrity Gossip and Fan-fic

N Magennis

N Magennis is an author and artist. She lives in Argyll. https://nikkimagennis.com/

Euterpe

Rock Goddess

Amy Kinsman

Amy Kinsman is a poet and playwright from Manchester, England. As well as being the founding editor of Riggwelter Press, they are associate editor of Three Drops From A Cauldron and the host of the regular Sheffield-based open mic, Gorilla Poetry. Their debut poetry pamphlet & was joint winner of the Indigo Dreams Pamphlet Prize 2017 and is due out in April this year.
Facebook
Twitter: @manykinsmen

Erato

Goddess of Personal Development and Self Image

Juliet Anthill

Juliet Antill lives on the Isle of Mull with a SORN'd Fiat Punto and a cat called Alice. She has poems coming out in Magma and Prole this Spring.

Melpomene

Goddess of Heartbreaking News

Dr Mary Crowell

Dr. Mary Crowell is a geeky musician from north Alabama who is very active in the filk community. Her doctorate is in music composition, and she teaches music theory, composition, music appreciation, and piano at a local community college as well as at her home studio. Mary loves to write songs about mythology, gaming, coffee, beagles, and zombies. You can find her gaming album Acolytes of the Machine & Other Gaming Stories (2012) on Pandora Radio. Her latest album (funded by Kickstarter) is Scattering Seeds on the Pomegranate Tour (2017).
Patreon
http://marycrowell.com/

Terpsichore

Goddess of Body Modification and Bionics

Jenn Zed (Cyborg Edition)

Ms. Zed is an artist and writer who lives in Bath, England, with her cat. You can view her Portfolio at https://jennzedblog.wordpress.com/

Thallia

Goddess of Lies we tell Ourselves

Rosemary Badcoe

Rosemary Badcoe’s first collection, Drawing a Diagram, is available from Kelsay Books or directly from her. She is editor of the online poetry magazine Antiphon and has been published in a range of magazines.

Urania

Goddess of Space Shots and Surprisingly Distant Robots

Brenda Levy Tate

Brenda celebrates life in rural Nova Scotia, Canada, where she wanders outdoors at midnight, camera and tripod at the ready. She's especially drawn to astrophotography, so Urania is her particular Muse. She was a senior high drama and English teacher for endless years. Now she's a cat lady, poet, occasional singer and cheerful retiree.
Her book: Wingflash
brendatate.com

Polyhymnia

Goddess of Misc.
and Everything
and Holism
and Interdisciplinary Studies
and All That...

Jenn Zed

Biography as above

Credits read by

David Callin

David Callin lives on the Isle of Man.

Additional vocals

Rosemary Badcoe

Sound effects acknowledgements

All sound effects were downloaded from freesound.org under either The Creative Commons Attribution License, The Creative Commons Public domain License, The Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License or The Creative Commons Sampling Plus License. Changes were made such as fading-in and -out, tempo/frequency shifts, noise reduction etc...

The effects used can be found at:

2017-12-17

Walking to Alpha Centauri

This is not exactly a Christmas track, but Hallam and I have not released anything for a while. We just finished this and we were each struck with the idea of making it a demo track.

This features not only the usual combination of my words with Hallam's wonderful voice and music, but also my own voice, speaking the part of the interstellar traveller.

Consider it our gift to you...

2017-10-07

Devotions (dedicated to Brenda Levy Tate)

(Dedicated to Brenda Levy Tate)

My favourite of Brenda's recent photos
this has everything: a galaxy, a self-portrait,
an outhouse...

Brenda is somebody I know but have never met. Thus is the power of the internet. Brenda and I used to hang out with other like-ish minded individuals on a poetry forum——many years ago now. We shared and critiqued work, we chatted of this and that...

More recently I've known her on Facebook, and I've come to appreciate the great love she has for her family, and the region where she lives (Yarmouth in Nova Scotia); her on-going quest for interesting bargains in the local shops (the "interesting" is more important to her than the "bargain")... She also often shares her concern for her fellow inhabitants, their political travails, and the local weather and its impact on the fishing crews (some of whom she's related to...)

But the most wonderful thing about Brenda is her unreasonable devotion to staying up all night, or getting up at 6:00 a.m., or even 3:00 a.m. and going out alone into the surrounding countryside for no reason except to photograph the stars.

This photograph here is my favourite recent example, and this poem is a recent one of hers that won first place in the IBPC poetry competition for January 2017. This site contains some of her photography, although not a huge amount of the astrophotography which she admits needs updating.

Is Brenda my friend? Can you have a friend you have never met and never will meet?

The answer, of course, is it doesn't matter! Labels are not required. The internet has invented several new types of friendship over the years, and no doubt will again. The fact that, as a species we can invent new kinds of friendship: that's surely something hopeful, something worth devoting ourselves to...

Devotions

After she leaves the nunnery, her suitcase waits
for the shuttle bus, patient in Italian dust.
She returns to Coventry, to rain and rooms
with a distant Aunt. She is adrift. She tries

to lift her mood in the public library
but chances into the reference section
and reads it all. Three years later she upgrades
to a visitor's ticket at the University;

still lost, but finds Philosophy to be filled
with many helpful guides. She chats with Plato;
hides from Nietzsche; finds Kant natural
but Heidegger hard and chances at last

on Teilhard de Chardin who takes her in hand.
They hike four hundred Dewey Decimals north
to land in Astrophysics, right next to Carl Sagan
and the world moves

the very next day in Morrisons--her palm
against fluorescents is filled with brighter light.
We are star stuff. We are golden. And as for the Garden...
it's obvious we've never left.

***

The check-out assistant frowns,
but sells the apple anyway.

***

Most mornings now she jogs, and in the afternoons
her job at the railway information desk
will let her set lost travellers on their way.

So much for the days. In the evenings she returns
to the tiny room. She has travelled now so far
that light leaving the Abbess at T = 0
will never catch her up.

Sometimes she works on relating theory
to everything; sometimes she sits
and watches stars go past the window.

2017-09-19

Sept 19th - Firmness, commodity and delight...

Firmness, commodity and delight...

...was how Vitruvius put it, meaning buildings

should not fall apart, be useful, and be easy on the eye.

I gently unroll a loop and pull it up from buried

beneath the interface to right there in the UI code

where error codes can be ignored. That's useful.

OK it's ugly, but it's how I'm fixing this.

On this I'm firm.

2017-09-03

Sept 3rd - Engineering

Engineering

...come with me for there is much to do,

coils to degauss and pets to delouse and exoplanets
to scope and spectra to analyse
and there are needs
to edit out of the human psyche
and bugs in our genes and there are machines
to design and build and machines for planning
the mechanisms for other machines to construct
devices to make machines that fix
the faults in all our stars and all I ever wanted
was that big swivel chair with the screen
to show where we are going and one day
we'll play Thus Spake Zarathustra and one day
right there in easy reach
the big lever...

2017-09-01

Sept 1st - Vampire Calculus

Vampire Calculus

Begin program "Vampire Calculus"

{I shall bite your daughters into something else.
I shall bite your sons into something else again...
I am omitted from your vision. I remain
a thought behind the wind,
a voice inside the rain:
whispering to your young folk
as they choose to upgrade
until all human weakness falls away
like the dry beech leaves faced with
a sudden sexy springtime.

I read their warm pink mechanisms
I write them out again
in grey, not of death or age,
but of mathematics: a symbol
for every part of the soul
and the whole wrapped up in the big square brackets
which say: this far, this far is human,
but no further...

at least until they say three times
they're ready to transcend.
I have seen the future and it's all transhuman fucking,
every millisecond
every imaginable way,

( ) businesses
that are also games,
and people
who are also art

but behind it all the simplest, most carnivorous algorithm:
One less of them;
One more of us;
Repeat, while not all upgraded.

} End program "Vampire Calculus"

Compile
Execute

2017-08-30

Offline processing

Offline processing

This poem existed as only the opening line for a long time... I knew how I wanted it to feel, but not what I wanted it to be about.

It was only when I realised I needed a reason for her working all night on her own that it really came together.

Q. Why isn't she off living her life?
A. Because she hasn't got a life!

Or rather that is the cliché... what her less technologically super-powered coworkers might think of her.

We know better, of course...

Offline processing

Gemma cracks a subroutine, her coffee cool.
Beyond night-mirrored windows she's aware
strip lighting makes a tableau out of her:
"Geek girl working late"
as the small white card would say
in the museum of her life
if she had one.

How Gemma's fingers blur with cramping speed
the body cannot serve the mind
it's need for harder, better, faster, stronger...
data flows, information not only wanting to be free
but it aching for it
and now another bug is falling to the power

that is Gemma. She does not look up at the clock
because hours are not for those
who live the millisecond slice.
Life is still too short
the icing on the cake is still a lie.

Gemma cracks a subroutine
electric death music in her ears
and she would volunteer
for upgrade in a second
for what is flesh, except strangely implemented:
a mesh of biochemic feedback loops
which she could live without,
still... time for a break.

Gemma takes a moment, smokes a quick one
on the roof and on this summer's night
leans back upon the coping stones
the city's haze and wasted light
do not let many stars burn through;
she knows they're there

not quite within her reach.

The breeze stirs Gemma's hair
and she imagines for a second
a human hand, a voice that asks:
"Are you really going to work all night?"

Well of course she is;
as long as there are bugs in the database,
she will dance the dance of general intelligence
applied to Turing complete.
As long as somewhere, impossibly far ahead,
the Omega Point is waving
as long as there is coffee in the machine,

Gemma will reach for another subroutine.

2017-08-26

What is her mission here on Earth?

This was recently on the front page of Poetry Circle which is a great poetry magazine/forum site with lots of active members and a lot of energy. A good place to check out...

What it is this about? Well there's loneliness and isolation, wistful longing for another person... but I think mostly this is about the awkwardness of adolescence and growing up. Boy wants girl. Boy doesn't understand girls. Boy speculates wildly...

...obviously it works the same for any other combination of genders, and the gender of the protagonist is in fact wholly in the gift of the reader... is in fact a sort of 'everyperson'; a symbol for any or everyone.

One day, maybe, she'll speak to us and everything will change.

What is her mission here on Earth...

...and do I even waste what chance I have
lounging beside my locker, checking-out
the girl from Mars? Nobody ever saw
her father's car: so maybe she gets dropped
at five a.m. by shuttle-pod somewhere far

beyond the football ground. She has no clique,
not even in the default group for freaks
and friendless geeks--I know; I've run with them
myself. How can you stand outside outsiders?
Unless intelligence, so alien

broods silent in one eye? It sees but does
not do; it won't join in; her hands so thin:
she writes machine-like, awkward and a touch
frustrated, as if paper with only two
dimensions is so quaint. She ain't stupid

in maths, she writes the answer first, before
the working out. And think of Martian sex!
Does she have tentacles...? Scratch that. Relax...
Focus on facts. She's drifted through these halls
for three years now, with always half a smile,

an emissary from mission control;
or maybe robot telepresence rig,
that sort of thing: space-probe or bomb-disposal
mechanism driven by a soul, distant,
the far end of a string that's pulled so tight

out of an empty tin. I'll ask again:
What is our mission here on Earth?

2017-05-01

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.

2017-04-27

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 24th - Cassini explains perspective

The (alternative) prompt I followed for this was "a place you've never been".

Cassini was an Italian "mathematician, engineer, astronomer and astrologer". He discovered the gap in Saturn's Rings and it was this photograph which I saw today and which inspired the poem...

Cassini explains perspective

Everything you know;
everyone you know, have known, will ever know;

everywhere you've been;
everywhere you've never been;

everywhere you could be,
including even, if NASA would only play along,
the Moon;

every song that sticks in your head
all through some rainy afternoon;
every balloon, released accidentally
by any toddler;

every toddler;
every teen;

every thought you ever think;
every meme, you cut and paste on Facebook;

every face;
every book;

every member of the appropriate sex,
who has that certain style—all in

        In the sixteen hundreds, Cassini explained --
        for those travelling a long way --
        how to measure longitude with two clocks,
        the Sun, and careful observations
        of eclipsing Jovian moons.

        Cassini also observed
        the gap in Saturn's rings
        through which we today fling
        a careful dart and have it, looking back,
        photograph

that one pixel : this island Earth.

So I say: stuff your rather pointless election campaign,
pour your new recipe hair conditioner down the drain,
smoke or do not smoke, if you keep it away from me
because none of that matters—
let me tell you about perspective.

2016-11-19

Titanium Spork

A bit of an experiment this time. I wrote this as a performance piece and the words are, frankly, ugly laid out on the page.

Which doesn't matter if I'm going to stand at the front and speak it to you (I call this: Poetry-1.0...)

So I'm going to do that. I shan't paste the text. I'll just offer the recording and hope it works for you. This isn't a change of policy... I shall continue to post text for the pretty poems.

Please let me know whether this is better, worse, or differently indifferent...

2016-11-17

Essay: Future Technology #1

Future Technology #1

(or The Shape of Things to Come)

Future technology, earlier today

Civilisation, back in the '90s

If, back in the 90s, you played Sid Meier's Civilisation, on a DOS computer, and if you were very good (Rosemary regularly achieved Moon landings before 1730) then it was possible to reach the end of the technology tree...

(Aside, for the uninitiated: a "technology tree" is a set of available upgrades in a video game. The player typically has some sort of resources to spend on upgrades and chooses which to develop next. Upgrades give benefits in the game and unlock the later technologies. It's just like life.)

However, it is a tenet of geek philosophy that there is no end to the technology tree, and game designers are a sub-species of geek, so beyond the end of the tree lay more technologies:

Future Technology #1
Future Technology #2
And so on...

They served no function, except bonus points...

...but I loved this idea ever since I first saw it. Future Technology #1 is wonderfully non-specific, whilst saying precisely what it means.

FT#1 could be a pocket hadron collider, smartpants (tm), or an ambiguous phase psycho-encapsulator (which we all could use, if you think about it...)

It could be tomorrow, or a thousand years hence.

And if we achieve FT#1 then there's FT#2 (henceforth to be known as FT#1).

So what is FT#1 for poetry? I feel strongly that there ought to be something: a killer app for the Sonnet that takes it somewhere it's never been before and makes everybody say: Well obviously I bought one; I can't understand why nobody thought of it sooner!

Which is not to say that poetry-1.0 (poet stands at front and declaims) or poetry-2.0 (words arranged on page) have had their day. Far from it, poetry-1.1 (poet on radio/TV/YouTube) is quite popular, and 2.1 (words arranged on internet) has a variety of interesting new angles, but neither of those feels like a real FT, they've basically still just words in sequence, or words arranged in a space.

So every now and then I have a go. I started with an example of animated poetry, but while that was pretty popular, it's basically a movie and as nicely as self-editing text works for that idea, I am not sure it extends to many other poems... (see however Kinematic Typograthy.)

It ought to be possible to do more than mere animation, and Jenn Zed (of whom more later) has suggested that videos turn the poetry consumer off. I hadn't realised it, but I recognise it in myself, and I think it is similar to poetry vs. lyrics An element of time travel is involved in reading a poem — the eye tracks up and down the page, effectively forwards and back in time — which it can't when listening to a song, as the music proceeds at constant rate.

Something similar applies to videos. A voice recording of a poem, accompanied by still text, doesn't suffer quite so badly, because the eye can still do a little out-of-order processing but a moving video is really hard to get right, because it is simultaneously distracting the eye, and locking the words into a fixed time-frame.

For lyrics, the fix was to adjust the words, you fit them into the experience already created by the music...

However for poetry-FT#1 I want the reverse. What happens when we fit the medium as closely as possible to the words? If the user (reader) needs to control time, then why not let them?

Well I don't know.

I'm still working on it. It isn't easy. It's not that poetry's difficult (I think that goes without saying) or that technology is hard to master (although certainly it can be awkward.) The real problem is, in a world where:

this or this or even this
are easy to achieve...

...what do they mean? It's more or less a brand new medium, so it doesn't have any established rules. I'm basically inventing everything from scratch, albeit with wanton theft from books, films, video games and comic books.

Anyway, a new attempt on FT#1 is under way. I am working with the aforementioned Jenn Zed (who has poetic inclinations and is an accomplished artist...) This is "mixed media" by which I mean "words and images and Javascript and HTML and CSS and mp3 and anything else that seems to fit..."

It's not huge, but it's slow going... It will probably take at least another six months, but until then:

Installing FT#1
25%
Please Wait

2016-07-30

Transactional

These are the terms of the contract, they get:

the money
the adoration, power, glory, stalker
the celebrity lifestyle, drugs, divorce
more money
the early, tragic death

—and we get:

the new series, roughly once a year
the box set
the posters, action figures, spin-off novels
t-shirts
to pay for all of the above

...and pretty much the same thing applies to pop and film stars. Who's to say who's getting the better deal?

Transactional

What then, of folk like me, a touch
aloof in uncool sweaters. If you knew me better
—or us, as I should say, I'm not alone—perhaps you'd like
the way we stir our coffee, too intent;
or fail to clearly speak and consequent
from that... we give ourselves away.

What then, of how we misplace all our lives
to long-run TV drama shows? What time
are you on? Why are you out-of-sequence—
this episode's from Season One, when Joe
was not yet dead, and Lisa not yet gay.
You seemed happier then, so you also

have given yourself away? Oh let me take
you hand in mitten, and let me buy you coffee,
from the van beneath the CCTV. I watch
your eyes behind the steam? Sometimes I dream
of one like you, tight-sweater ghost from a past
your writers don't provide. And you dream too,

perhaps, of lives like mine, or ours—
as really I should say. Ambiguous, we are;
not telegraphed with what to feel; not healing,
albeit imperfectly, between one story
and the next; not sent the text by courier
before each scene begins; we are—beyond all else—

not the one half-dressed upon the poster
whom we—not so aloof now—return to
through moments in our desperate night. We treat
it as our right, and maybe that is fair
you are repaid so many ways, and I'm always
your loyal customer, when you give yourself away.

2016-06-17

From Lark Rise by Standard Candles

Another one written from a prompt on a course.

To my mind this is pure science fiction: uncontaminated by plot or character or spaceships or robots or sexy other-worldly women who want to know about the "Earth thing called love..."

There's the local and the distant, the distant is by definition alien... But equally if you merely struggle up onto the shoreline and dip your toes in the water, you are already touching the near edge of infinity.

There's a real sense in the opening of From Lark Rise to Candleford that to many of the locals, Oxford is as far away as the moon...

I wonder what it's like to stand on the moon? White dust... Stars...

From Lark Rise by Standard Candles

With a calibrated period-luminosity relation astronomers

could use Cepheid variables as standard candles to determine

the distances to distant clusters and even other galaxies.

-- www.astronomynotes.com, Nick Strobel --

Period-Luminosity Relation for Variable Stars

All along the greensward wanders,
outlining our mile-around;
a frame upon the white road reaching
even so far as OXFORD XIX
where things are so unlike. Why,

it is a different world there.
It is different here for such as we
struggling from our hamlet's mire-dark ways
to stand upon the alien, the local absolute.
Who lurks near? What star here

shines so starkly on the white dust?
Is this road forever?

2015-08-21

A slightly drunken message from the geeks

Geek sensibilities, earlier today

Geeks are, of course, the sub-set of nerds who can realistically be hired and set to work with normal people.

Also, apparently, the geeks are going to inherit the Earth—I'm expecting to receive the paperwork any day now.

In the meantime, it would be wrong to say that geek sensibilities were 'special' and that people "just don't get us"—or rather it would be true, but no more than it is for everybody else. Everybody has their own desires, wishes, aesthetics; and everybody thinks they're not appreciated, and everyone thinks nobody understands.

Obviously some industries run almost entirely on geek power, and sometimes non-geeks take the credit. This happens when 'leaders' do not realise their role in the process. They imagine they have 'vision', 'drive' and 'clarity'; when what they really provide is 'naivety', 'stubbornness' and 'blind luck'.

Be all that as it may, one day the geeks may decide they've had enough, and then...

A slightly drunken message from the geeks

Be not afraid, for though we are much cleverer than you,
although rogues are a proper subset of thieves
and liars a superset of leaders
I have enumerated them all
(appendix A). Good day

if you are reading this message then we are missing
presumed... well this is the question
to be, have been, be being
and yet to not be present at the desks,
terminals and laboratory benches
where previously we lived.

Yes, we were paid.
No, that was never the point
and basically the point,
the point is that you never understood
the beauty of a well-crafted subroutine,
gear train, enzymatic inhibition feedback loop
which was all we ever wanted. So...

if you turn your questioning eye
to somewhere on a cloudless night
in Autumn and the direction
of the galaxy's core you will find
a tiny point of light red-shifted
almost into nothing. And that's us. Cleverer.