The Pain In Spain

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

So, What’s Next?

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

“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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Laika

Laika, three-year-old street dog, tough

And hardy from surviving Russian frosts, white,

Pretty-faced – chosen for propaganda and TV feeds –

Put through gruelling, cruel even, training, learned

To submit to a tiny cage, suffer rough

Shaking and centrifuge forces, was judged the right

Calm temperament for Sputnik’s untested speeds.

But innocent, trusting little Laika earned

A terrible place in history.  Not enough

To be first to circle and to log the first sight

Of earth: the first space death must needs

Be added – no more water, and rising heat turned

The cabin into hell.  In her three orbits, and slow

Immolation, did Laika bark for Moscow snow?

(25.1.26) v 1.3

Man, It’s Been A Laugh

At the end of the road of what was wont to be known
As a lifespan, I find myself still in a burgeon-
ing state of would, whose instantiations have grown
Since birth, encompassing: teddy-bear surgeon,
Tadpole breeder, epiphanic sum
Doer, about-to-burst appendix emergen-
cy survivor, 11+ scholarship plum
Getter, belated pianist, maths-besotted
Undergrad, Wrangler (Senior), dumb
Quantum mechanic, Grantchester scone, jam and clotted
Cream ingester, ham-strung karateka, horse-
Rider, journo, across-Central-Asia-spotted
Wanderer; these and myriad others, without remorse
I look back on.  And forward, now, of course.

(22.1.26) v 1.1

Bach, And Chopin’s Hands

Toying with extreme pieces by phthisic Fred

Chopin, wrapped in a shimmering sonic web,

– His “chromatic embroidery” –  showy salon-bred

Fastidiousness painfully sutured into steel

And rubato beyond romanticism, you feel

His slim, spidery hands on yours.  Seb

Bach, in absolute contrast, has no fingers:

Agility is coerced into mental hermeneutics.  But

Cancrizans or homespun, a beauty abides; it lingers,

Heavenly, bilocating among us, cut

Back to awe-striking cerebrality, heart

And mind still cleaving.  How his compostable brain’s

Cells concocted such a height of baroque art

Humbles.  Bafflingly, though adamantine, compassion remains.

(18.1.26) v 1.3

Pushkin’s “What If?”

On his journey to Arzrum (to hell with Tsarist

Bans) Pushkin left scorching Georgia, attained

Heavenly Armenia, and met on the road the bizarrest

Sight: a rough ox-cart that strained

Up a steep hill, grimly conveying

A body Tbilisi-ward, victim of a slaying

By an enraged mob in Tehran (the men said).

Turned out to be his friend, Griboyed-

ov – poet, playwright (“Woe from Wit”), minor

Composer, wounded duellist, and lastly late

Ambassador to the perfidious Persian court.  His fate-

Filled exit was “instant and beautiful” – none finer,

Pushkin wrote.  But their posthumous meeting was fake,

Just another “what if?” artists make.

(11.1.26) v 1.01

Happy Christmas

How I hate the trashy, tinselled, messed-up
Art-bereft display of total tat,
Putatively soul-warming, but actually a dressed-up
Pile of blatant commercialism, one that
Yields no joy or enduring happiness – indeed, 
Creates an unassuageable longing, fake
Heartache for hollow toys, only to feed
Remorse at wasted hard-earned dosh, to make
Iller the earth, heaping a rubbishy tomb,
Seeding the seas with a dust of microplastic
To blossom and scathe, in and beyond the womb,
Meting out a less of life: fantastic!
All this I scorn; and yet I love such time
Spent familial with you – despite this rhyme.

(18.12.25) v 1.0

The Third Eye

Whose is the calm, invisible hand that points,
Directs and controls the machine that frames us and detect-
s how I totter on stumpy pins with pudgy joints,
Some sudden instinct of losses to come reflect-
ed in my boxy, chubby face?  Who is behind
The engendering camera, secretly cradling my im-
age, as a man with a fine mane of hair kind-
ly assuages the cub’s fear that is obvious to him, 
His form and stamp, mirroring mine, wedge-
d squarely against the rocks?  Years later,
Despite quotidian negligence, the photo is still leg-
ible, and the simple truth embodied in its gaze yet greater.
For always, watching and waiting lovingly, there is another,
Selfless presence, a third eye: my mother.

(17.4.1999)

Missing And Meeting Jesus

I first met Jesus in the Scottish highlands.
I was sitting in my car, admiring the sheep-dotted moor,
When this bearded man-boy appeared.  In his hands
A sheaf of grubby paper; around his body a poor
Grimy raincoat.  He was shod with gym-shoes.
He wished to draw my portrait; I replied shirt-
ily.  Later, on the road, he thumbed a lift.  I refus-
ed, avoiding him for the second time.  Transfigured with hurt,
He turned up his hands and threw back his head.  Year-
s passed: another encounter, on the posh express-
Train to Vienna.  No picture, he was disguised with the biggest rump
I ever wedged against.  But as he re-appear-
ed from the bog, trouser-soiled and with a bloody finger, I guess-
ed at once, and humbly gave a plaster to this paschal lump.

(4.3.1999)

Defining Chandeliers

Those who have never stood under a real
Chandelier can hardly understand;
My own doleful, benighted state was reveal-
ed the moment I encountered one first-hand.
As I entered the near-perfect seven-metre
Cube of our living-room-to-be, I was gob-
Smacked by the spider-and-a-half of crystal teeter-
ing improbably above us.  Not by the vague cob-
Webs built out of the lamps’ self-cast
Shadows, which clung to the walls high up under
The rafters; in fact, it was only when I looked past
The superficial that I was filled with substantial wonder
— At how this confection gave out not just light,
But the whole space’s length, width and height.

(13.12.1998)

The Day I Connected

In the early hours, at the turning of the year (9
3 - 94), when all the tess-
ellated pieces of then high-technology had fin-
ally clicked into place — though I squirm now to confess
These were only a modest Windows 3.1, 
Tattam’s stack (as shareware — good on yer, Pete),
A complimentary Demon account, hellish but fun
(God bless the little devils), and, to complete
My toolset, the first graphical browser Mosa-
ic — I was jiggering around, and it happened.  Bits blurr-
ed across the Net, and a spinning globe proved
That at last I had joined — logged on to the NCSA
At the UIUC, with its mighty, mythical Ur-
URL.  That night, for me, the earth moved.

(12.12.1998)

In Grodno

Five o’clock in the morning.  First they took
My offending, visa-less passport, then they came
For me.  Hauled out, politely but in a manner that brook-
ed no discussion, I abandoned my Polish couchette shame-
facedly, as if already admitting to crook-
dom before the People and the comrades who in their name
Guarded the ultimate frontiers.  Perhaps I shook
As I left the Vilnius sleeper (though I blame
The cold spring air), and gave a vague look
At the concrete block which made up the place’s fame.
A city that, found in any book,
Would be deemed too unlikely, so starkly the same,
So bleak.  Except for a square of amber light
Where a man stood obliviously, and shaved away the night.

(18.7.1998)

Amazed In Mantua

The Ducal Palace.  Past countless halls filled
With broken busts, cold friezes, ghost-
s of frescoes on pitted plaster, inanimate chilled
Hearths and gorgeous, ragged tapestries, through foxy
Galleries, long and lost, snaking across flag-
s of hardest Carrara - and not forgetting the most
Odd picture I have ever beheld: a crag-,
gy isle, and round it a labyrinth cast craz-
ily into the sea - up a stepped, helical part, 
A ramp for Gonzaga steeds, there in that boxy
Camera is a staggering sight: the steady gaze
Of a petrified Mantegna, trapped in a fiction, in a fact,
Of his own making, the Artist married with Art
- As if that Gorgon called Genius had caught him in the act.

(5.2.1998)

The Passage Of Isotropy

Physics assumes – more or less has to – that its great
And holy laws remain the same wherever
You go; and this, therefore, is the unstate-
d idea that informs all our lives (though never
Propounded as such).  But I have discovered a land,
Beyond an unsuspected frontier, where the rules
Are much different.  Now, the cup I once held in my hand
So firmly, squirms and evades the grasp; stools
And tables that yesterday stood so obedient have start-
ed to inch slyly forward, nudging me cheek-
ily; while previously rock-solid walls secretly part
To swallow up the very things I seek.
From this, I deduce a lemma of my own invention:
Isotropy breaks down for the fourth dimension.

(28.1.1998)

The Tragedy Of...

Since it brings ill-luck to name it, let’s
Say I am like the monarch of the Scottish Play:
No matter how fair (or foul) it gets,
I pace out my life from day to day,
Happily revelling in each present and motley delight.
I should be weaponed up on my battlements, scan-
ning for the wood that will come, the great might
That may prevail.  Yet I’d be more than a man
Had I the mettle and valour enough to see
Off the ultimate army – a fearsome, ancient en-
emy that affords us neither hope nor mercy – composed of three
Hateful witches called How, Where and When.
In the end, I can only wait, an impotent Macbeth
(Whoops, I said it), to be toppled by that varlet Death.

(17.8.1997)

Surabaya Johnny

Surabaya airport, Java.  The date
Doesn’t matter.  I first noticed the man
As he puckered and sucked his smouldering Havana with a great
To-do, sat back and proceeded to fan
Himself with an battered old copy of the thoughts of The Great
Helmsman.  He wore a linen suit and tan
Shoes, had hair en brosse and a face whose state
Flickered between weariness and wiliness.  But this is a sham.
What I saw was an Asian woman, aglow
With love as she dropped water with undiminish-
ed patience into the eyes of her stone-still child.  (And so,
- Ta-da! - the sonnet’s obligatory couplet to finish:)
In the light of that mother for whom her son was so bonny,
What am I, but some Surabaya Johnny?

(17.8.1997)

Herd And Scene

Did Herr Foreign Minister Wolfgang Schüssel really
Call the Bundesbank’s boss a “right old sow”?
The leading Austrian weekly magazine spent nearly
Ten pages going royally (and imperially) to tow
-n on the subject, as it weighed this, and pondered that,
In an orgy of Viennese navel-gazing.  Whether you
Know about the bores in question is simply a matt
-er of herd: ours (oh!) or theirs (who?).
This is yesterday’s News, nothing less
Than history – itself just grubby local tittle-
tattle where meaning is farrowed only later, when the mess
Has cut its cord to the past, and been cleaned up a little;
Then base “Did you hear?”s and “Did you see?”s
Become, behind the scenes, pigging Thucydides.

(17.8.1997)