After a six month gap in posting due to catching Covid and then an operation followed by old man's lethargy, I return. This poem was written in three stints: Oct - Nov 2016, Dec - Jan 2017 and after a gap occasioned by "life" May 2019. The entire thing was then revised in January 2023. It struck me that returning to the poem in May 2019 I did not manage the same intensity and, perhaps, the thought was cruder. Hence, for no other reason, I have separated out the final part by a section break.
The poem is written in rhyming couplets of alternating alexandrines and pentameters - the old Greek elegiac metre. I have used it previously for more personal poems: "Washington Square Revisited", here, and "A Dream", here. It was also meant to have masculine line endings throughout but feminine endings slipped through, embarrassingly early, in lines 21/22, so, in a weird attempt at symmetry, I allowed one couplet in the second part to have feminine endings - lines 191/192. The poem is 226 lines in length.
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Despite the larch tree’s glitter in the summer sun
The standfast colour of the world is dun,
Yes, even in the tropics where the light is fat
The heavy dust and leathern leaves are matt.
On well-groomed beaches or expensive skiing slopes
Where belles wear little or their beaux’ fur copes,
Unnoticed at the root of all that has a gleam
A shadow tempers, dulling gloss to cream;
For all that glitters in the dancing hard-drilled light
Is metaphor for man’s deflecting rite,
That rubric of insouciant self-accorded praise
Confecting lard-thick flesh and cocksure ways
To sacraments of money, health, good looks and youth,
Matter-impounded and the prime of truth,
So that success, flip happiness and game show fun
Define the essence of a life well won.
Ignored but present like the soot which darks the fire
Death drabs this partying and chokes the lyre;
For merest quizzing of the dawn-cold world which squats
In misted twilight east of Eden’s plots
Bodes forth the grindstones of existence turned by beings
Embodied in their huntings, trappings, fleeings,
The creatures gnawing blood-drenched meat from screaming prey –
Perhaps the haloed lion, keen to slay,
The sneaking fox which tears apart a new-born calf,
Or scooping bear which chews a fish in half;
As well the rock-and-water littoral where towns
Are roasted when volcanoes rent their gowns,
And storms with howling basalt waves a building high
Capsize a ship and drown each deckhand’s cry;
Inland, the deserts parch; a camel’s ribs are stripped
By famishing hyenas, gobbet-lipped;
In cities of the plain a high-speed train derails
And abdomens and skulls are crushed like pails.
O Calvary of creatures! All organic things
Despoil in death; nor that which flies nor clings
Remains, engrounded but ignored by dust and stones;
For inorganic being weeps no moans
However much it shapeshifts for its nature stays
Untouched, and that which never dies nor greys
Can ache no thought for hapless trees or wind-thrown scrub,
For wasps, for sharks, bacterium or grub,
And self-harm man – all suds which daily writhe and die,
Dung to the earth and apple of no eye.
And so the world is dun because it’s death-embraced,
And man the thinking molecule, shock-faced,
Must thread the matrices, the mesh of things in time,
Like Theseus aghast in bloody grime,
Tasting the consequence of carbon’s helter growth,
Body-moulding and dying, blank in both.
Hence, blatantly at sunrise when the light enfoils
The purple hills with gold and steams the moils,
Again at sunset as the coal-thick sea of night
Engulfs all conning sense of width or height,
The measure which gives meaning to these own-lawed states
Is human death, and whether at the gates
In rich-robed judgement or entailed in flint-strewn fields
Man takes from death whatever hope he wields.
His value, consciously and fully lived in will,
Impassibly corralled by death’s blank sill,
Must stretch its legs and fill its lungs in daily view
Of time’s encircling cloudbank with its hue
Of leaden depth, unsearchable and like a noose
Which in its bounding, boding as the deuce,
Creates man’s meaning by obliging him to live
Aware of self’s demise in death’s dank sieve.
Friday, 3 February 2023
Monday, 15 August 2022
Hawthorn Blossom
The first part is iambic with half-rhymes. In the second part, the lines alternate between trochaic and iambic tetrameters; and there are half-rhymes in the second and fourth etc lines.
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i.
Bouquets, Easter bouquets, full-bodied, frothing;
Or deep-drift snow, bundled on tumbling fells.
Late April sun: the hawthorn trees amass
Themselves in blossom, jogged by wind-coughs roughing
Their branch-piled opulence. What pictured grace!
Thorned though, like life, by shards beneath their swells.
ii.
Brazen, puerile, urchins cheeking
Though poised to dash, this hawthorn blossom,
Clout by April’s winds, is fragile
Like street boys thin and hunger-lissom.
Begging hands, five-fingered petals,
Accost, cupped palms whited for alms;
Bees will trample, nectar-dizzy,
Grappling the cressy stamens’ combs,
Meting pollen onto stigmas’
Lank finger, bobbed with a fecund head,
Poised to fuse. Like waifs it stews
A scent, half gutter-smirch, half plied
Muskings of the young on heat,
Lewdly accoutred by the leaves’
Phthisic veilings, panders to
The season’s fruiting. Cluttered troves!
Ramp with spring’s few-moment tinture:
Skin-white, quease-green, lips’ fleshy mauve,
Sulphur yellow, pale as gruel:
This blossom orphans’-lust, to live.
====================
© April 2019
----------
i.
Bouquets, Easter bouquets, full-bodied, frothing;
Or deep-drift snow, bundled on tumbling fells.
Late April sun: the hawthorn trees amass
Themselves in blossom, jogged by wind-coughs roughing
Their branch-piled opulence. What pictured grace!
Thorned though, like life, by shards beneath their swells.
ii.
Brazen, puerile, urchins cheeking
Though poised to dash, this hawthorn blossom,
Clout by April’s winds, is fragile
Like street boys thin and hunger-lissom.
Begging hands, five-fingered petals,
Accost, cupped palms whited for alms;
Bees will trample, nectar-dizzy,
Grappling the cressy stamens’ combs,
Meting pollen onto stigmas’
Lank finger, bobbed with a fecund head,
Poised to fuse. Like waifs it stews
A scent, half gutter-smirch, half plied
Muskings of the young on heat,
Lewdly accoutred by the leaves’
Phthisic veilings, panders to
The season’s fruiting. Cluttered troves!
Ramp with spring’s few-moment tinture:
Skin-white, quease-green, lips’ fleshy mauve,
Sulphur yellow, pale as gruel:
This blossom orphans’-lust, to live.
====================
© April 2019
At Seventy
I wrote this morsel on a single rhyme six months before the great event. Presumably I was looking forward to it. What a mistake!
--------
We all to the grave must dash,
Whip, pizzle and lash,
Some fraught with cash,
Some having made a hash,
Some who in business were brash,
Some who simply went smash.
Some gone bald with a ’tash
Who feared to propose then crash,
Those who never had a pash –
They tried but turned it all to ash:
Ah, passion’s lovely tinkling plash!
(What are wrists for but to slash?)
Some there were who loved to clash,
Some there were who couldna fash,
And some who in a murderous flash
Did something very rash.
There’s some who scribbled balderdash,
And those content to rehash,
Some whose work was a toppling stash
But never much more than trash.
There’s some (ah, grief) who forced Pandora’s cache,
Fracturing the world with a livid gash.
All done, some will wear an angel’s sash
At the Father’s blissful Zion bash,
But many will howl and gnash,
Drowned in the devil’s gall-and-splash.
====================
© April 2019
--------
We all to the grave must dash,
Whip, pizzle and lash,
Some fraught with cash,
Some having made a hash,
Some who in business were brash,
Some who simply went smash.
Some gone bald with a ’tash
Who feared to propose then crash,
Those who never had a pash –
They tried but turned it all to ash:
Ah, passion’s lovely tinkling plash!
(What are wrists for but to slash?)
Some there were who loved to clash,
Some there were who couldna fash,
And some who in a murderous flash
Did something very rash.
There’s some who scribbled balderdash,
And those content to rehash,
Some whose work was a toppling stash
But never much more than trash.
There’s some (ah, grief) who forced Pandora’s cache,
Fracturing the world with a livid gash.
All done, some will wear an angel’s sash
At the Father’s blissful Zion bash,
But many will howl and gnash,
Drowned in the devil’s gall-and-splash.
====================
© April 2019
Wren
A draggled wren upon the path
Cried, “When?
January freezes and months must pass
Till Spring shoot bud again.
“All day I creep through hedge and grass
For grubs and ticks in ken,
Goaded by hunger I shout and fuss
When startled by tramping men.
“And I’ll brashly sing to catch a lass
And get with clutch that hen –
Squabbling chicks of voice and pith,
Toughened for life en plein.
“Brute cat, cold crow and sidling kith
All prowl my hedge and fen,
I’ll face them in a scolding huff,
A three-inch bawling wren!”
====================
© March 2019
Cried, “When?
January freezes and months must pass
Till Spring shoot bud again.
“All day I creep through hedge and grass
For grubs and ticks in ken,
Goaded by hunger I shout and fuss
When startled by tramping men.
“And I’ll brashly sing to catch a lass
And get with clutch that hen –
Squabbling chicks of voice and pith,
Toughened for life en plein.
“Brute cat, cold crow and sidling kith
All prowl my hedge and fen,
I’ll face them in a scolding huff,
A three-inch bawling wren!”
====================
© March 2019
Monday, 1 August 2022
The Comet I and II
The two parts of this poem were each meant to be 96 lines but I muddled the line count of Part II and it came out at 100 lines.
There was a lot of media interest in 2014 when NASA succeeded in putting a lander on the snappily-named comet 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The pictures the lander sent back before ‘dying’ struck me as extraordinary in showing that the physical forces at work on its landscape were precisely the same as those on earth. This led me to think and ‘The Comet’ was the result.
The poem is in blank verse, the first four lines of each part rhyme ABAB and this is repeated at the end of the part; alternate lines rhyme thereafter.
The psalm quotes at the beginning of each part are from Ps 18 v 1 and 7 (Douay-Rheims); Rough Tor (Part I lines 42 and 48) is pronounced “Rowtor”; Fred West (Part II line 27) was a particularly disgusting serial murderer.
-----------------
The Comet I
The heavens show forth the glory of God,
And the firmament declareth the work of His hands.
The Philae lander bounced from rock to clod
And grounded in a rough-toothed cleft with sands;
Crippled, it still caught images and fed
Them to the probe Rosetta standing off
The comet Sixty-Seven P which sped
In orbit, Sun to Jupiter, a sole
And frozen journeyer these millioned years.
Rosetta pulsed those images to earth,
And all at Probe Control high-fived with cheers;
At last, fire-breathing man, at great remove,
Had placed a foot on débris, solipsist
But earthlike, petrel of the solar winds.
And those tough handlers like the psalmodist
Could only sing then silence into awe
As Philae’s camera scanned the comet’s tracts,
Those cliffs, those screes, those boulder-squatted shelves,
All monochrome, though sunlit – bodied facts,
Bereft of growth, but otherwise like home!
Indeed, not luscious like the raw moraines
Of Alp or Himalaya, ever pocked
With grass or thrill-green moss – their small domains
Cowered from riotous winds or grasping ice;
Rather, the badlands, hinterlands, where eye
Might trek the strict horizons, dust to tufa
And void of plant, and feel inscapably
En-homed, despite all lack, for always present
Is natural form – those landscape starks and slopes,
The mouldings by excision and deposit,
Which, ur-familiar, become as tropes,
Beknown by instinct, us, and us of them.
Think, then, of Sixty-Seven P Churyúmov-
Gerásiménko: its drifts of dust and rubble
Clinched hard by ice, cracking to trench and cove,
Much cliffed and ledged, fractured in plates and shards;
Rotation, solar winds, bestitching patterns
Which whiplashed yards each comet day through slag,
And scattered boulder-drifts like drunken slatterns;
Those flats and inclines, caves and rugged ground,
Acquainted forms made spick in negative,
As if one stood on Bodmin’s Rough Tor, caught
In twilight on a pure-skyed day, alive
To every contour of its rock-thrown flank:
All, all, evince a sort of trustingness
So that what’s seen enlivens human ease.
And that must be: the forces, great or less,
Which fissured Rough Tor and Sixty-Seven P
Are one and same – expansion and compaction,
Full-flowed or torqued – on Bodmin, on the comet
Or any space-time point that’s under traction.
Their consequence in structure, mass and shape,
Be it in granules or the spin-flung whorl
Of deep-space galaxies, is intimate
To us, although their violence might appal.
And inheld by those forms which replicate
The switchback plein and clutter of the earth
We’d grow at one with all their one-toned strangeness.
And the firmament declareth the work of His hands.
The Philae lander bounced from rock to clod
And grounded in a rough-toothed cleft with sands;
Crippled, it still caught images and fed
Them to the probe Rosetta standing off
The comet Sixty-Seven P which sped
In orbit, Sun to Jupiter, a sole
And frozen journeyer these millioned years.
Rosetta pulsed those images to earth,
And all at Probe Control high-fived with cheers;
At last, fire-breathing man, at great remove,
Had placed a foot on débris, solipsist
But earthlike, petrel of the solar winds.
And those tough handlers like the psalmodist
Could only sing then silence into awe
As Philae’s camera scanned the comet’s tracts,
Those cliffs, those screes, those boulder-squatted shelves,
All monochrome, though sunlit – bodied facts,
Bereft of growth, but otherwise like home!
Indeed, not luscious like the raw moraines
Of Alp or Himalaya, ever pocked
With grass or thrill-green moss – their small domains
Cowered from riotous winds or grasping ice;
Rather, the badlands, hinterlands, where eye
Might trek the strict horizons, dust to tufa
And void of plant, and feel inscapably
En-homed, despite all lack, for always present
Is natural form – those landscape starks and slopes,
The mouldings by excision and deposit,
Which, ur-familiar, become as tropes,
Beknown by instinct, us, and us of them.
Think, then, of Sixty-Seven P Churyúmov-
Gerásiménko: its drifts of dust and rubble
Clinched hard by ice, cracking to trench and cove,
Much cliffed and ledged, fractured in plates and shards;
Rotation, solar winds, bestitching patterns
Which whiplashed yards each comet day through slag,
And scattered boulder-drifts like drunken slatterns;
Those flats and inclines, caves and rugged ground,
Acquainted forms made spick in negative,
As if one stood on Bodmin’s Rough Tor, caught
In twilight on a pure-skyed day, alive
To every contour of its rock-thrown flank:
All, all, evince a sort of trustingness
So that what’s seen enlivens human ease.
And that must be: the forces, great or less,
Which fissured Rough Tor and Sixty-Seven P
Are one and same – expansion and compaction,
Full-flowed or torqued – on Bodmin, on the comet
Or any space-time point that’s under traction.
Their consequence in structure, mass and shape,
Be it in granules or the spin-flung whorl
Of deep-space galaxies, is intimate
To us, although their violence might appal.
And inheld by those forms which replicate
The switchback plein and clutter of the earth
We’d grow at one with all their one-toned strangeness.
Friday, 1 July 2022
Thoughts Whilst Watching
This 43 stanza poem in syllabics is written in my version of Asclepiadean metre, third mode. The syllable count is 12, 12, 7, 8 with no elisions. There are caesuras in the first two lines usually between the 4th and 9th syllables and there is end rhyme, always masculine, in lines three and four. A handful of lines are irregular by an extra syllable.
An early morning broadcast by Michael Symmons Roberts in June 2017 alerted me to the fact that apparently a magpie with a distinctive mark would recognise itself in a mirror and try to scratch the mark off.
Notes: stanza 28 – the Parousia is the Presence of Christ in the Advent and/or the Second Coming; stanza 36 – the Eagle nebula is in the process of creating many new stars; stanza 37 – when I wrote this poem in autumn 2018 the conflict between Russia and Ukraine in the Donbass region, which includes Donetsk, appeared to have died down; now in 2022 it is back with a vengeance; Fowey is pronounced by all good Cornish folk as Foy, a single syllable.
-----------------------
How wonderful is what’s real! A magpie stickered
With a coloured spot when shown itself full frontal
In a glass will take alarm
And scratch that talisman or charm;
It’s proof that that hot bundle – feathers, hunger, beak –
Intent on daily getting and soliptical
To a fault, can recognise
Itself – that bulk, those purposed eyes;
Indeed, can birth a concept in its head’s humid
Warmth, not eatable, not tuppable, therefore for
Most creatures irrelevant
Be they slinking or corybant.
Hence, the paupered blue tit, preening on a window’s
Ledge, attacks itself if the sun’s move discovers
A changeling in the cold glass,
Clueless at sight of its own arse.
And yet, alack, self-knowing’s no cognomen for
What’s pacific in that push and pull, called Nature,
Where “me first” and “safety first”
Govern all, from breeding to thirst.
Consider the crow, which also knows itself when
Challenged: crafty as Ulysses it bundles stones
Into an ostrich-neck flute,
Raising the water in that shute
Till it grabs the floating bon (some unstomached sop
To us); but if on hunger-hunt, its gleam eye pins
A starling’s nest beneath eaves,
Or a fledgling grounded in leaves,
Intelligence turns proxy to the fraught killer,
Sizing thrust and angle to seize the unguard eggs,
Trapping the fledgling en-rood,
Flesh-stripping it, living, in blood.
No, nous and slaughter, double-sinewed, prowl the streets
And dales: think of old Tawny, granddad-shaggy, wise,
Dozing on his ash tree perch
Yet scalpel-final in the search
For rats and rabbits who frenzy in his claws’ clutch.
And if owls, what of men? – the sapient, ramrod-tall,
That brain-on-legs bestruts the world’s plains and cleaves seas
Like some Iliad hero seeking gloire and plunder;
Intelligence, grown self-aware,
Farms life and death and will not share.
Settled, his burghs then swell to obesity,
Fatting on meat which stockmen must ceaselessly kill;
Men by men also are slain,
Primordial passions lunge again:
Perhaps the snitch, dagging home in dark alleys his
Oily blade, or the jilted caressing the throat
He once grazed on, night and night,
Now twisting her scarf tighter, tight;
And, always, wars and rumours of wars, bestial tides
Which slaughter in ravin, flinging up ground, thrusting
Down cities till all are crazed –
Like storm waves leaving Chaos dazed.
An early morning broadcast by Michael Symmons Roberts in June 2017 alerted me to the fact that apparently a magpie with a distinctive mark would recognise itself in a mirror and try to scratch the mark off.
Notes: stanza 28 – the Parousia is the Presence of Christ in the Advent and/or the Second Coming; stanza 36 – the Eagle nebula is in the process of creating many new stars; stanza 37 – when I wrote this poem in autumn 2018 the conflict between Russia and Ukraine in the Donbass region, which includes Donetsk, appeared to have died down; now in 2022 it is back with a vengeance; Fowey is pronounced by all good Cornish folk as Foy, a single syllable.
-----------------------
How wonderful is what’s real! A magpie stickered
With a coloured spot when shown itself full frontal
In a glass will take alarm
And scratch that talisman or charm;
It’s proof that that hot bundle – feathers, hunger, beak –
Intent on daily getting and soliptical
To a fault, can recognise
Itself – that bulk, those purposed eyes;
Indeed, can birth a concept in its head’s humid
Warmth, not eatable, not tuppable, therefore for
Most creatures irrelevant
Be they slinking or corybant.
Hence, the paupered blue tit, preening on a window’s
Ledge, attacks itself if the sun’s move discovers
A changeling in the cold glass,
Clueless at sight of its own arse.
And yet, alack, self-knowing’s no cognomen for
What’s pacific in that push and pull, called Nature,
Where “me first” and “safety first”
Govern all, from breeding to thirst.
Consider the crow, which also knows itself when
Challenged: crafty as Ulysses it bundles stones
Into an ostrich-neck flute,
Raising the water in that shute
Till it grabs the floating bon (some unstomached sop
To us); but if on hunger-hunt, its gleam eye pins
A starling’s nest beneath eaves,
Or a fledgling grounded in leaves,
Intelligence turns proxy to the fraught killer,
Sizing thrust and angle to seize the unguard eggs,
Trapping the fledgling en-rood,
Flesh-stripping it, living, in blood.
No, nous and slaughter, double-sinewed, prowl the streets
And dales: think of old Tawny, granddad-shaggy, wise,
Dozing on his ash tree perch
Yet scalpel-final in the search
For rats and rabbits who frenzy in his claws’ clutch.
And if owls, what of men? – the sapient, ramrod-tall,
Knowing in knowing, but odd,
China-shop bulls, part satyr, part god.
Yes, knowing that the stuck carcass, butchered, creates
Belly-rich stew, more toothsome than some dusty nuts
Or beans tilled in a tribe’s slick
Of cleared ground, husbanded by stick.
That steamy broth of protein, loosed by fire and stir,
The gristle further mashed by the tribe’s tough molars,
Force feeds the gluttonous brain,
And soon Abel is killed by Cain.
China-shop bulls, part satyr, part god.
Yes, knowing that the stuck carcass, butchered, creates
Belly-rich stew, more toothsome than some dusty nuts
Or beans tilled in a tribe’s slick
Of cleared ground, husbanded by stick.
That steamy broth of protein, loosed by fire and stir,
The gristle further mashed by the tribe’s tough molars,
Force feeds the gluttonous brain,
And soon Abel is killed by Cain.
That brain-on-legs bestruts the world’s plains and cleaves seas
Like some Iliad hero seeking gloire and plunder;
Intelligence, grown self-aware,
Farms life and death and will not share.
Settled, his burghs then swell to obesity,
Fatting on meat which stockmen must ceaselessly kill;
Men by men also are slain,
Primordial passions lunge again:
Perhaps the snitch, dagging home in dark alleys his
Oily blade, or the jilted caressing the throat
He once grazed on, night and night,
Now twisting her scarf tighter, tight;
And, always, wars and rumours of wars, bestial tides
Which slaughter in ravin, flinging up ground, thrusting
Down cities till all are crazed –
Like storm waves leaving Chaos dazed.
Monday, 30 May 2022
Information, Knowledge, Wisdom
Information, line 19: "federated happenstance" i.e. a community with a settled code of belief and value, such as Christianity provided in the West before being overthrown subsequent to the 1960s.
Knowledge, line 22: weather maps - an annoyance of mine. Previously, newspapers et al published weather forecasts complete with isobars etc. Then, to be 'user-friendly' they abandoned the isobars and used silly pictograms of sun and rain etc instead, effectively dumbing down the reader/viewer who could not now analyse the forecast for himself.
Note: There is little new under the sun. Shortly after writing this poem I reread T. S. Eliot's 'Choruses from The Rock', written in 1934, and was surprised to find in the first chorus: "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?/ Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" - which rather adumbrates my own poem in reverse.
---------------------
1. Information
What purpose thumb-jerk scrolling as the train
Embattles over points, its office horde
Sweat-weary on their day-end haul to suburbs
Mute under purple skies? The byte-fed skein
Of information, shrilled with panic verbs,
Enwebs the gorging mind, agog but bored:
There’s texting, surfing, tweeting, sampling feeds
Whilst breasting mayhem on pitched tablet games,
Neck-cricked to earphoned hip-hop all the while.
Through flaring windows starlings bate their needs
Flocked in the fields, prodding a dead-seed dung pile
Like fingers stabbing icons; flashed in the flames
Of twilight they lurch like cartoon combatants
Made infant by ungratified desires:
Likewise, their sapped observers blurting by,
By finger-interest provoke their wants
Of leisure, news and sport, which mob the eye,
Led by emoticons to grins or ires.
Where once a federated happenstance
Gave scope and limit to the throb of facts,
Now dressed-down integers 'embrace their space'
Cravingly unfulfilled by scroll and glance.
For these have never sat before the mace,
Distincting grounded truths from claims and acts;
Worlded in information like a fog,
Only a cleft which swords the torqueing mass
Can gift a vision of the land’s outstretch,
Spying a path to homesteads in the smog;
For facts themselves in mindless pitch and fetch
Are lump as Caliban not bright as glass,
Untooled to context which alone yields light.
So, sunk in surfeit, these loafish feeders bloat,
Suborned by data like the unfree free,
And when that train shrieks to the platform’s bight
It groans the slave song of autonomy,
Void data throttling what it should denote.
---------------------
1. Information
What purpose thumb-jerk scrolling as the train
Embattles over points, its office horde
Sweat-weary on their day-end haul to suburbs
Mute under purple skies? The byte-fed skein
Of information, shrilled with panic verbs,
Enwebs the gorging mind, agog but bored:
There’s texting, surfing, tweeting, sampling feeds
Whilst breasting mayhem on pitched tablet games,
Neck-cricked to earphoned hip-hop all the while.
Through flaring windows starlings bate their needs
Flocked in the fields, prodding a dead-seed dung pile
Like fingers stabbing icons; flashed in the flames
Of twilight they lurch like cartoon combatants
Made infant by ungratified desires:
Likewise, their sapped observers blurting by,
By finger-interest provoke their wants
Of leisure, news and sport, which mob the eye,
Led by emoticons to grins or ires.
Where once a federated happenstance
Gave scope and limit to the throb of facts,
Now dressed-down integers 'embrace their space'
Cravingly unfulfilled by scroll and glance.
For these have never sat before the mace,
Distincting grounded truths from claims and acts;
Worlded in information like a fog,
Only a cleft which swords the torqueing mass
Can gift a vision of the land’s outstretch,
Spying a path to homesteads in the smog;
For facts themselves in mindless pitch and fetch
Are lump as Caliban not bright as glass,
Untooled to context which alone yields light.
So, sunk in surfeit, these loafish feeders bloat,
Suborned by data like the unfree free,
And when that train shrieks to the platform’s bight
It groans the slave song of autonomy,
Void data throttling what it should denote.
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