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

Four Nots, Six Notes

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

Symphonies

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

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)