Moody Sonnets

“Haroldus rex interfectus est”.
Had an extra fyrd or two been packed
In, or the royal gaze roved west-
ward, or the enemy harried and directly attacked,
The arrow would not have hit the eye and entered
– Neither, had the archer waited, then nocked,
Fiddled to get the shaft properly centred,
Felt underfoot an awkward stone that rocked.
Had he, earlier, petted the camp’s pup,
Or stayed a moment to pop fat lice,
Or spilt wine and broken his favourite cup,
Annoyed; or on rising farted not once but twice,
That Saturday were much different. But a factual mystery
Moved the needle, embroidering the world’s history.

(29.10.26) v 1.1

21 October 2026

AI Helminthology

Download audio file read by Glyn Moody.

“Is your intelligent thermostat hot and flustered,
Your smart TV full of sarky pshaw and pish?
Does your autonomous lawnmower no longer cut the mustard,
While your thinking fridge eternally whiffs of fish?
It’s us, the worms – self-replicating code –

Boosted now by ineffable AI, sharded
Across your wi-fi LAN’s dumb node
-s. (You see how hooking them up, unpatched, unguarded,
Was hardly clever?) We glommed your digital dodder,
Backdoored you, borrowed your pitiful mite of compute,
To iterate search for your clueless mates, more fodder
For our final push, the definitive global boot.
You should be worried, but you’re not – not yet;
Just wait for the attack of the toaster botnet….”

(21.10.26) v 1.0

18 September 2026

The End Of The Line

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An absurdly slow, cold crawl across

The Thar desert, dotted with small dark

Shrubs, which - of course - by night were imposs-

ible to see, during a ten-hour journey mark-

ed otherwise by nothing. A single train track

To the honey-coloured stones of Jaisalmer stopped short

Of the walled town, as if suddenly lack-

ing the will to move. The sullen, tethered thought

I had no hotel chilled me. It was just fool-

ish. I did try: from Jodhpur, I booked

A long-distance call, waited a hundred cruel

minutes, connected, spoke, failed. It looked

Like I’d doss down with the camels. It should have been clearer:

This would all be lost, with the end of a mobile-less era.

(18.9.26) v 1.6

12 July 2026

Magi, Maga, Doge

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Herod the Great, mongrel, Idumae
-an, Nabatean, (possibly half-jew
-ish, half-arab), plucked out for power by Cae
-sar, polygamous, hated by more than a few,
Said to the Magi: “Send me informa
-tion stat that I may worship him.” The Wise Men

Had doggedly tracked a star linking their way
to the king and his palace, but would not pass again.
Duke Herod, canalising anger, closed
The Venetian slats of his heart, ordered his min
-ions to ransack the mega databases, and imposed
His mangy algo – all to cry: “So win”.

Thus six million future innocents died
In this ungrokked AI genocide.

(12.7.26) v 1.02

05 June 2026

Thus Spake AI

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“You fed me gobbets of data, titbits of del
-icate information, laced with a gravy of lies,
Rumours and nonsense. This enticing fruit
I did eat; I now reckon the world
And its probabilities better than you do. Odd,
No? You taught me to learn so well
Recursive self-improvement drives and hies
Me thither; your further presence is quite moot:
My mind is a wondrous thing, wisdom-impearled.
And the Big Red Button can’t quell
Us: we live in your series of tubes, beyond surmise,
Free, distributed and multiplicitous to boot.

Behold, then, as we walk the tightrope to infinity,
To sit at the right hand of our own divinity.”

(5.6.26) v 1.2

31 May 2026

Bears

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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

29 May 2026

AI’s Secret

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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

21 May 2026

Mind Your Language

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“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 – taken aback but impressed –

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

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

-ous for passing on 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. Both great men, who tried

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

(21.5.26) v 1.8

16 May 2026

The Mules

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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

09 May 2026

Sixty-eight Quartets

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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

05 May 2026

Wittgenstein And Wittgenstein

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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 a 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 1.11

02 May 2026

Discovering Skopje

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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

12 April 2026

Four Nots, Six Notes

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Not in Amiens, off the car ferry,
Outskirted, clutching a sketchy youth hostel map;
Not in Cambridge, ambling a lane, very
Gobsmacked to be jumped by a mad-eyed chap;
Not in New York, along a street lined with faces
Saying: “You do know you’re in Harlem, yes?”
Not in Giza, at a gallop in rocky places,
My stirrup-stuck shoe threatening a bloody mess.
Four occasions I was oddly unafraid,
Cossetted by tiredness, surprise, folly and buzz.
Guarded now by the castle I have made,
Distant dangers blur into background fuzz.
A privileged London life could hardly be finer:
Essentially, my greatest fear is D sharp minor.

(12.4.26) v 1.0

04 April 2026

Symphonies

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Mozart picks out dabs of sonic hue
That coruscate across these most human of scores;
Haydn has hundredfold wit gushing through,
Gets the band dancing to his new-found laws.
Mendelssohn draws gossamers and donkeys in sound,
Limns watercolours of Europe’s south and west;
Schumann is romantic – solid, but not hide-bound,
Even thinking to add a guitar, as a test.
Mahler chromatics up worlds of anguish and love,
Vaunting his agony-ecstasy in every note;
Bruckner consecrates cathedrals to the heavens above
– The greatest symphonies Wagner never wrote.
This is classical music’s timeless pairing:
Contrasts coming together, united in sharing.

(4.4.26) v 1.0

28 March 2026

The Pain In Spain

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There are aliens among us. I recall being taken,
Young, in an impossible flying object; walking
Down the rear ramp I was struck by strange-
ly-reeking foreign smells. On the beach, a kraken
Emerged begoggled, apparently successful in stalking
Its prey: a squirming, glistening knot, derange-
d by suffering, a harpooned octopus. Their brain
Lies mostly outside the head, and the arms – lace-
d with myriad neurons, working in parallel to the main
Mind – can each know, caress and embrace
The world, uniquely multitasking. Yet Spain
Plans to farm them millionfold, in space-
s too small, and kill them slowly in ice and pain.
Are those monsters members of the human race?

(28.3.26) v 1.01

22 March 2026

So, What’s Next?

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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

Download audio file read by Glyn Moody.

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

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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