Moody Sonnets

Once upon a time, I sang – yet
Again – of word processors, spreadsheets, data-
bases, comms (though not the Internet,
A concept that emerged many years later);
And alongside the boring Big Four some-
thing new: artificial intelligence,
The fifth digital horseman, still to come.
It’s now – what? – forty years thence,
And that hoary old tech is transformed, choosing
Like an ancient bard from the heroic word-hoard,
Or like trouvères and troubadours musing
On the mot juste to please promptly a lord.
Art and AI both try to answer the vexed
Eternal question: “so, what’s next?”

(22.3.26) v 1.0

18 March 2026

“Lack Of Light” By Nino Haratischwili

In Tbilisi zoo, an astonished monkey sits

And watches naked apes in their world-wide

Cage kill. Two passing girls see bits

Of brain, run off. But one, Dina, decid-

es to return, to save a random, red-headed man.

She gives others’ money, promises amends.

An unrefusable miniskirted offer to her secret stan,

A drug boss, fixes it, and thereby sends

Her lover to gunplay, madness, and death. A rope

Cut from Chekhov’s improbable gymnastic rings

Chokes this bravest of women, drained of hope,

Done in by the gross unfairness of things.

This masterpiece’s moral – “no good deed

Goes unpunished” – is just the one we need.

(18.3.26) v 1.3

14 March 2026

The Final Touch

Heads down, they tap, squeeze and slide
Themselves through equally zombified crowds, thumb-
Typing away, doomscrolling; some
Just stop and stare, horror-happy-eyed
At the wonder of this, their talisman. It’s
A wallet, camera, map, clock, translator,
TV, computer, torch, calculator,
Ebook, calendar, and boom box in one, which fits
In your pocket. Twenty years ago, much
Effort was squandered on styluses, wheels and knobs
That failed to turn phone into platform. It took Jobs
To add that “one more thing”: a god-like touch.
Today’s ubiquitous, magic, confab-
ulating wand is not a stick, but a delicate slab.

(14.3.26) v 1.0

07 March 2026

Ludwig In Lisbon

Venice on a hill, azulejos-bejewelled, a bobb-
ing sea of red and orange roofs; smok-
y fado, a ‘44 port, half a poor lob-
ster with its special hammer: these superficially evoke
My spring in Lisbon. Far deeper the impact of a night
Concert in the improbably huge, perishably wood-
en Coliseu. Ringed by the firefly specks of light
From burning cigarettes, I waited. Could
He really be there, the “Prince of Darkness” – Miles –
Who rushed the astonished world through bebop, cool
Jazz, third stream and fusion styles,
Breaking and remaking each jaded musical rule?
Yes: stern and limping, a latter-day Beeth-
oven, uniquely original, supremely great.

(7.2.26) v 1.1

02 March 2026

Wrong Time, Wrong Place

Shakespeare, born a thousand years too soon,
Lacks the later tongue’s mongrel boon.
Rembrandt, green apprentice at the Black Death’s start,
Finds a dearth of readies for vain, superfluous art.
Bach, arriving a sesquicentenary after,
Displeases Saxon delight in froth and laughter.
Shakespeare the Soviet needs Stalin’s nod
For every word – if not, it’s...firing squad.
Rembrandt, cowed by the Taliban in Kandahar,
Fears all save geometry goes lethally too far.
Bach, at the Mughal court – its culture most fine –

Struggles to fugue with the sitar’s single line.
Shakespeares, Rembrandts, and Bachs live among us today;
But genius, in the wrong place, just wastes away.

(2.3.26) v 1.4

28 February 2026

One Thousand And One Nights

When once more it was the nth night,
The incomparable Shahrazad continued (that she might
Live.) She told of a Baghdad porter, fine foods,
Beauties; three half-blind dervishes, each
With a story: first, fifty steps down from a tomb,
Charred, sinful siblings; second, eye-
brow talk, death from a pomegranate fruit;
Third, a magnetic mountain, a ram-skin suit,
The forbidden last door. A grateful fly-
ing snake doles out to treacherous sisters their doom
As black bitches; at the caliph’s command, the creat-
ures are reverted, and with neat marriages, the fun concludes.
Whether of love or sadness, mercy, rage or fail,
Our lives are all a tale within a tale within a tale.

(28.2.26) v 1.2

22 February 2026

To A Poet A Thousand Years Hence (After James Elroy Flecker)

Like a faithful dog tied up outside a shop,
Flecker’s quatrains wait across the cent-
uries for an unborn, laggard millennial to drop
by. Burnished transport arches bent
Over oceans, high drone squadrons, out-
Burj-ing skyscrapers in a new Sam-
arkand, James cares not for - no doubt.
But alongside such obvious projected analogue glam-
our, a bit has flipped that changes everything. Books
DRM’d to files, future-inscrutable (it’s hard
To read a floppy even now), and it looks
As if literature could be sloppified to death. Marred
By this thoughtless tech, who then can know it?
Will anyone be able to say: “he was a poet”?

(22.2.26) v 1.1

15 February 2026

The Annex

Behind the bookcase, in a precocious Tardis, eight
People hid. Who were they? Beleaguered Jews,
Forbidden to ride the trams, helped at great
Risk, boosted by the BBC one o’clock news.
You escaped by delving deeper, gladly forsook
That mere space for a patch of blue sky.
Noting, Proust-like, every moment’s tic,
Now joyous, now tedious, fierce you would brook
Exactly zero lack of frankness, pry-
ing into yourself, never missing a trick.
Two years later, not yet sweet sixteen,
The SS entrained you eastwards, the wrong liberation.
A bald and scabified body then, you could have been
Old today but for time’s cruel annexation.

(15.2.26) v 1.2

01 February 2026

On Stupidity

Why am I so demonstrably stupid? To wit:
Of the myriad Middle Welsh words I once
Learned, I remember only “arglwydd” – a pit-
iful reward for serried hours of study. Dunc-
ified by time, I muddle now through new
Topics, build on dodgy cerebral sand,
And hope for amelioration – although a slew
Of disproven past optimisms stand
As merciless slapdown to that. If only we
Could slip into wanted knowledge as a pelagic fish
Glides frictionlessly into the deepest sea;
Lordy – what a colossal mistake would be this wish.
Every “aargh” from stubbing your mental toe
On the rocks of incompetence brings wonders to re-know.

(1.2.26) v 1.1