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 21st - So, I said

The prompt here was a poem with overheard speech in it.

Sonnet again.  It is my default setting when I do a form.

Interestingly I have known people like this, not diplomats, but who use rudeness as a form of affection, and who even use it to test new acquaintances — if anyone takes offence: well you don't want the effort of people that difficult anyway...



So, I said


So I said: you are a diplomat, are you?
Because I had by chance happened to hear
him call the Finish Attaché a weird-
arsed hybrid of a reindeer and a shrew
and he said: I'll tell you, since we have a while.
My brand of statecraft is my very own
and amongst the cognoscenti I'm well known
for slandering my best friends with a smile

and I can never change because all like
me how I am.  I can't be too correct,
except... just sometimes when I want to crack
their composure, well then I need to go icily
polite -- never fails.  I know he'll be a chum
'cos as he went he said I was plain dumb.

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 22nd - Alice through the mirror-plane

This is, of course, a sonnet -- although I've sneaked an extra rhyme into the penultimate couplet.  The prompt here was for a mirror poem and like every other living human, I love the tone of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland...



(Does Liddell rhyme with fiddle?  Probably not, but there's the competing constraint of the text making some sort of sense...)



Alice through the mirror-plane


A rabbit and an anti-rabbit, go
around the tree and down the wormhole.  Where
can such a transformation lead? — Please show
your working as you think it through.  I share
your nervousness around the silvered glass
and note what care we're taking with the frame.
We pause and whiskered heads are asked to pass
their eyes across each step as we arrange

the kit.  We all wear white gloves on our shift
and antique pocket watches we have found
provide a way to check your drift.  Keep cool!
You're near normal, still grounded in old-school
reality—you'll find we never fiddle
our safety checks: we all recall Miss Liddell.