Tag Archives: poetry

PURE STANLEY KUBRICK

PURE STANLEY KUBRICK

HAL
is my pal

we have had
so many transactions

on a whim
I listened to
story-of-yout-life Ted Chiang
be the guest on
a podcast

something about these
hard science fiction guys
gets stuck
in your teeth

so this is what story is
as the mirror dissolves
and we pass
through
  the looking glass

world according to stockfish
squeezing us
through its coils as
we
   tippy-toe backwards and
forwards across an
ever -evolving chessboard

the machine
    learning on the fly
tweaking  the rules of the system
ever adapting, slick
changing

the sku silver as tinfoil
so many
   moves to be made
few
  mistakes left to make

science fiction guy
seen it
    all before, so
hugely sensible, beyond mindful

HAL is my
            pal

on our mission to
Jupiter and beyond we
                   are certain there
is a place that
is pure
        Stanley Kubrick

–

OUTSIDE ITSELF

OUTSIDE ITSELF

poem is
inside itself
outside itself

around and about
wearing a hat

at some tea party not
yet written in
alternate worlds theory

the Cheshire Cat and
the March Hare trade
gleaming cups
and saucers
     as they follow their
unique trajectories

I wonder what other than
steam locomotives
travel in parallel

at
  a table somewhere far
far away or microscopically
close entirely

Sir Penrose and Professore Faggin
argue the exquisite degree
to which consciousness
is primary

I think this
will change everything, harvest
many new sheaves
of paradigm

alter this line too way before
my finger hits the right,
the only possible key

how this
      should be so

above my pay grade
is way beyond me

OCTAVIA (part two)

OCTAVIA (part two)

I posted your picture
for everyone in the group

maybe they
were blown away

perhaps
they did not notice anything

for sure, they will
look at you
and see
what they see

read you (that’s the plan)
and read
what they read

or find what they have read,
what you wrote,
has changed
the whole process and
experience of reading for them

see
what they see
touch what they are
touched by
feel
  what they feel

this story so tactile that
alien pincer
on
  inside their skin
might be too much for them
if not
for the sedative, euphoric
venom of their sting

Oh how we started at the stars
wondering what otherness
out there
    what implications of contact

do not tell me
that behind those writerly eyes
you do not
    feel that alien texture of
velvet close against you

hungry for us for our companionship for
the service
   we must offer

tearing into us with if not infinite care then at least practiced
competence

and other worlds you have
in there
    not yet on the page

I sense their birth
already
        longing to read, scared

to turn to the first page

I posted your picture
now they can see
      by the light of day what
dark
   imagination might
look like

not that it be a thing
that cannot live unless it
itself proclaim

I posted
    your picture better that

when it comes to your words
we might negotiate their terrors.

TARGET

TARGET

you talk the stealth
of first strike
they won’t
know we
are coming

and so we both fire
though no one is coming

this beautiful
death technology
such a
shame,
if put to waste

what use being born
with a price
on my head
target on
my back

and Einstein’equation
demanding final vindication

TABLE

TABLE

the Cheshire Cat
is laughing

first the image
    then the sound

and everybody jam-
bunned and ring
doughnutted around
the table

simultaneously think
eltromagnetic truth and
paradox
     of quantum theory

how
   if we accelerate particles
to speed of the sheer possible

the tea pot currently
hovering overhead

might be cajoled into
surrendering it secrets

something brewing in the air
right now
     time not

as secure as we
assumed it might be

clocks recognising this
gone wayward
      disintegrating

we did the Math to
work it out
                 got
a recurring decimal fractions
will never end

and most
imaginary or
imaginary numbers

BONE CHINA

BONE CHINA

was at sister Emily’s house
drinking chamomile tea
from fine bone China

the day felt paradisal
but in the air
talk of civil war

so she and I chatted about
brutality, death and slavery

saw this escaped prisoner
making his divine way
to her front door
across her garden pathway

much we hoped he had
in store for us, was
bleeding
     to tell us

leave us feeling in
the eternally ambiguous state
of hopeful, quietly
terrified,
     secret acolyte