Potential thickens the air
As much as pollutants in water vapour
Choking us all in humility
As another war is fought
Out of sight
Unknown to our media eyes
The bodies mount and maggots spew
Into the night eating dreams
Of a tomorrow that may now
Never be
Having discovered the concept of Pi poems from @iBecket I’m being all excited about writing a really long one!
Pi poems or piems are where you make each line of the poem as long as the digits in the mathematical constant pi. This is mention in text books etc… simple as a way to memorise pi.
But the poems themselves have become a specific style of poetry – an art form onto themselves. Now pi is still being worked out by the maths bodes (or at least by their computers!) and is thought to be a never ending number with no recursion or repeats in it ie not a number like 0.232323232323232323 but one where the digits can’t really be predicted like that so 1.3984759202843.
Part of the joy of the pi poem is that it can be as long or as short as you want it because it depends purely on how many digits you want to include!
I have now been working on this concept for a couple of years 🙂
I think it shall take me long yet to get what I want!
And it is not the only constant I wish to represent in this way!
There was a tower
within the tower
fractal within
Models without
Nested ideas
Realities bloom
Stars seen
Astronomy folly
Lonely on the hill
Waiting
Pregnant with itself
Do you
Paint, drawn, write
Explore?
There was a tower
within a tower
Modelled in the tower
and so on and on
Outside a sheep bleats
And the lightning conductor
Corrodes
Numbers and stitch
Craft and design
Inovations rule
Old and new
The tower
within the tower
Is a little worse for wear
So is the viewer
And the within is without
Fractal nature
Learning at school
Will the tower
within the tower
Grow some day?
Creating
New Follies
Old follies
Seemed like
A good idea
The Tower
There are never really
bad ideas
Just different to the plan
A universe
Not bounded
Though it often seems
That way
A tower within
And one
One without
The Winter Depths (First published on Blue Monster)
The cold freezes the air to solid form, coating the branches of the trees, starting from the smallest twig which become heavy under the white crystals. The night draws on and the day seems murky and insincere and then sometimes to have happened not at all.
The winter is a depth into which most modern people do not delve, but as the ice inches its way onto the roads and into the water pipes, even the most sheltered cannot but notice the icy pall that covers the land.
Shivering on the way to work, shivering within the home, heating insufficient and the shops running out of radiators. The darkness of white covers the ground, rendering all sterile and forlorn.
The Landscape is fetid
Pastules rise from the ground
Pulsing with sickly green
I avoid them
Skipping on stockinged feet
Stripy and saggy
Toe elongate
A large witches hat
Looms as a cathedral
On the horizon before me
Purple velvet
The pile deep and luxuriant
The tip a spire
Reaching to a sky of pink transparency
A silver staircase twists its way up
I follow it
Dress skirts flapping with each step
At the top I stand on the tip
Balanced precariously and look
To the tangerine skyline
Where six white sales glide
Above yellow sulphur waves
Each the cresents of moons
Waiting for me
I fall and fly
Peak forgotten
I fly to them
But they are transient features
Fading before I can reach them
Leaving me fatigued above the tubulance
I fall an Icarras of this strange world
I fall and the waves reach up
Cradling me
I awake to a world – far stranger
And much more disturbing.
It wondered why the others stayed so far away
Why it was always it and itself and no-one else
Sitting at right angles to all the others
Their tentacles wafting and touching and dancing
Whilst it sat alone in the cold currents
Filled with the dregs they had left from feastings
And the shit they had shed and detritus from above
It wept for it’s solitude, did the lonely anemone?
What had it done wrong? Did it look wrong?
Eventually it’s gaze of sense turned to beyond
Out of the water and wall it tethered itself too
And there was a lens, a single eye
Staring and sharing and sad, an ache of the one
Alone and small in a tank to be peered at
Behind the lens were two eyes and brine jewels
Dripped, the anemone knew the empty ache
That recognition made the ache slow and dull
And as they parted creatures from different domains
Each knew the other and that they were not the only one
language:
an incomplete
version of mind reading
leading to great innovation
communal thinking
or big blundering miss understandings
across generations and peoples
Golden wings
Tipped with adamantian blades
Swift or lingering
It maybe death
Brought upon these wings
Sad eyes and splendour lips
Seek you
Betrayer
Self lamentor
Hunter of untruth
Your blade will splatter
Metallic wings
That you called into existence
Pulled from the ethos of ego
All they want is to swim in the dark sky
But you drew them to the light
Your own burning demise
Their hands are blunt claws
And they will use your heart
To sustain their’s
Stained in pain
They are beautiful
Dark stranded waves
Rushing the shore
Pummeling the within… without
Scouring with painful abrasion
On and on
Little bits of grit
Wearing you down
A fragment of life at a time
Things to which I cling
Stuff which I need
Too many lights
In the night
At Christmas
As colours drenched the home
Because when you have no reason for hope
Hope is all you have
These things to which I cling
Too much stodge
Cheap but at a cost
I’ve paid for it so I’ll eat it
And it’ll get me through
Along with late nights of games
And shouting at each other
For monotonies blanket
Means only extremes can be felt
Such things to which I cling
Not virtues nor vice
But survival for so long
That their absence hurts and
renders a panic
Things to which I cling
Instant coffee and multi buys
Tat and clutter
A net a web of safety
snared, entrapped – enshrined
imbibed
Do not judge
What you do not know
How junk TV
And binge console play
dim the hunger
And white lightning is cheaper
than ingredients for a sandwich
And the temptation
Not to stress – to not think
To laugh too hard
And pretend you are not a worn thing
By the daily grind
Like you don’t know the fear
Of industrial kills
Or the fact they never pay
And jobs where you don’t work late
or through your lunch
Are a dream of the aspired
Things to which I cling…
One day….
It wont be me…
And then – it’s the ingrained tendency
The coping mechanisms that lingers
Leaving a stain
Echos of strain
That left scars
And knotts
In me…
What of me?
I cling.