Bears

We love bears.  From Shakespeare’s imposs

-ibly exiting bear, Byron’s not-quite-forbid

den Trinity bear, Pierre Bezukhov’s toss

-ed-in-the-river bear, Goldilocks’s perfectly-in-the-mid

-dle bear, to Rudyard Kipling’s Balou the sloth

Bear; from Roosevelt’s poor animal (now i

-conic), Winnie-the-Pooh, and Paddington (both

Inspired by that Ted’s very teddy), to the wry

Rollicking Yogi.  And blind, dancing Grac

-ie, Indian, muzzle pierced by a red-hot rod

To insert a coarse rope through the face,

Teeth smashed out, a standard mod:

What has she borne for years?  Who cares?

What matters is we really love bears.

(31.5.26) v 1.3

AI’s Secret

The proof uses “an infinite unramified tower
Of real number fields with 3-power
Galois groups of growing degree”, the ab
-stract says of the lush maths in AI’s fab
-ulous and first refutation of an Erdős guess.
The chain of thought runs to no less
Than 125 pages, as the LL
-M chugged away in a pell-mell
Orgy of random logic, until the chasm
Was bridged.  Undaunted by the human phantasm
Of failure, undistracted by feelings, immune
To dying in a pointless duel far too soon,
AI's galling secret that will make it our lord
Is a patient digital doggedness that never gets bored.

(29.5.26) v 1.1

Mind Your Language

“Piss, grandfather, in this hole we have dug in the dung-

hill, to gauge your virility by dint of the froth it imparts.”

Thus, more or less, spake the brothers, twin young

Toughs in the ancient Caucasian tales of the Narts

(The Ossetian version; also found in West

Circassian, Abkhazian, Georgian – even in Svan.) 

I learned about this – bemused but evidently impressed –

From "The Book of Heroes", bought ages ago, in Dan

-te’s land.  The author was Georges Dumézil, fam

-ous for setting down the essence of the Ubykh tongue,

– Its eighty-four consonants and benefactive verbs – which came

As a gift from Tevfik Esenç, last speaker among

His people.  Two great men, who tried

To capture the soft howl of a language as it died.

(21.5.26) v 1.6

The Mules

Tensors, statistics, and differential equations

Predicting elections, wars, the decline and fall

Of galactic empires: these extrapolations

Form Hari Seldon’s “psychohistory”.  All

Assume the trillionfold aggregate of data

Where details blur, and the deep currents emerge.

Asimov’s genius plot-twist: throw in later

The “Mule”, an ignorant clown  – “Magnifico Gigant-

icus” – able to amp up a kind of emotional splurge

To trump the maths.  Today, his heirs’ cant

And lies have won numberless fools’ hearts

By creating illusory tensions and sowing cruel

Hatred.  Who now has the clout and smarts

To counter the random illogical acts they fuel?

(16.5.26) v 1.01

Sixty-eight Quartets

How do you do, Herr Haydn?  Lazily referred
To as “Father of the Symphony”, on the Esterhazy team,
In truth you put more into the seemingly easy slog
Of the string quartet – your true masterstroke.
An expository movement that could twitter and lark like a bird,
Contrasted with a slow, gentle, fathomless dream;
Next a subversive minuet that bops like a frog,
Rounded off by the finale’s trademark joke.
This is four-part harmony not just heard
But seen in the mind, glass-like, an explicative gleam
Of this art’s every ratchet, spring and cog,
Classical music’s engine in glorious uncloak.
It takes twenty-four hours to play
All these works; what a matchless day.

(9.5.26) v 1.2

Wittgenstein And Wittgenstein

The facts: second-richest family in the Aust
ro-Hungarian empire; eight children, seven
Grand pianos, three sons lost
To suicide, seeking an unarticulable heaven.
Ludwig lived, as gardener, don, hos
-pital porter, wrote the austere Tractatus - that lan
-guage mirrors reality, a proposition is a picture of a state
In the world, and the rest is just of waste of time.
Paul thrived, until an unspeakable loss
As a world-class concert pianist, and as a man: 
In war, his right arm, wounded, was amputat
-ed.  One-handed, he continued.  A perfect rhyme:
Ludwig tried to say what was unsayable,
Paul tried to play what was unplayable.

(5.5.26) v 1.1

Discovering Skopje

The focus of identitarian antiquisation,
A dench bronze Alexander sits on a beast
Of a Leonardesque horse, a mighty creation
Designed to fake the ideal city, at least
On the southern bank, as non-London red
And dirty Chinese double-deckers course
Through spiffy office canyons, erected instead
Of bleak communist flats built perforce
Post earthquake, a moment forever caught
On the half-ruined ex-station’s clock
At 5.17am.  What suffering it wrought
I did not know, a fact that made a mock
-ery of my weekend attempt to unravel
The mysteries of this place through trivial travel.

(2.5.26) v 1.02