The very big and the very small

Scale, perspective and stretching a metaphor until it begs for mercy...

The (ir)relevance of walking the Planck

Yeah, maybe I am just a speck
and so are you,
among billions of others, similar,
pop, pop, pop – that’s three more just now –
outnumbered by even tinier,
yet more indistinguishable, ones,
a mitotic swarm
living on what’s probably
also just one
of innumerable
spheroidal spinning grains,
orbiting in the infinite-yet-bounded
universal vastness;
who knows how many
in this single wispy arm alone,
galactically sweeping ‘round
its great event-horizoned core,
the whole spiral
(let’s jump up a magnitude or four)
a distant twinkle
when viewed, so remotely, from any far corner
of our local cluster,
and so on up to Lady Virgo’s
maybe-just-about-significant
great space-time-raminating super-cluster,
out to the far, far and afar
edge of our own little light-cone –
beyond that?
well, heaven
(and maybe Hawking or Penrose)
knows, but –
don’t start with that ‘Many Worlds’ interpretation;
it won’t wash –
there still ain’t another particle,
however quantum-mechanically small and entangled,
Pauli-exclusioned, superstrung-out,
or Heisenberg-uncertain
in the vacuum-energetic foam,
that’s quite like me
or, by extension,
with our so-symmetric
strangeness and charm,
quite like you.

If we treated humans like we treat animals

Soylent Red

Merchant Ivory poachers
shoot Emma Thompson on set,
hunt down
Helena Bonham-Carter,
even sweet Winslet
for their perfect teeth,
roots ripped out for ornament,
(Austen adaptations are depopulated overnight)
cut off sex-symbols’ horns,
grind them down
into Shanghai aphrodisiacs,
while in Chelsea,
prize yummy-mummies
are plugged into
serried ranks of udder suction-cups –
never mind the pus,
just pump up the antibiotics,
stalls more cramped than
Wimbledon strawberry queues
or Fat Duck reservation lists.

Down side-streets,
the obese who cannot flee
are caught
and shackled for unanaesthetised liposuction –
oils and fatty acids,
heads vacuumed for human spermaceti,
vomited ambergris,
all essential ingredients
in soap, candles,
microwave meals –
any of low quality
or over-quota
are left to die
in the gutter
with the guts.

Post-war,
those deemed cowards, different or dissenting
are tasered,
hung upside-down
to writhe, groans ignored
as the throat-cutter comes –
contents drain into troughs.
Next door,
embryos
(wanted or unwanted, no-one asks)
are sorted by size,
stamped and dated,
boxed in 6s, 12s, even 24s
as spare baby boys
are minced en masse for happy meals,
just like the Somme
or Stalingrad.

The fur-farm
would give even
Josef Mengele nightmares.

Beyond the Winter Olympics

I guess you'll have seen news about Russia's recent homophobic law-making. Here's my response.

Rainbows over the Volga

See Putin,
topless and bareback
on a riverbank stallion,
or fording a river, AK-47 too-lovingly carressed,
a shoo-in as
May and June in the latest
calendar of post-Soviet homoerotica,
big men,
small trunks,
breaking ice,
nude wrestling in the snow
before retreating to bath-houses,
I mean, really,
all-male bath-houses.
And will there be
polonium-tipped eyebrow pencils
for those who look too closely
at bulging Bolshoi tights?
At Nureyev,
Tchaikovsky
and Ivan the Terrible
or so I’m told?
What of Stalin’s ‘tache?
(just add a leather biker-cap)
as generals stand erect
to watch with pride
the phallic missiles on parade,
how fabulous,
everyone loves a parade,
and the Hermitage,
a homage
to the history of interior design,
boys-only camping in the woods,
over-compensation
by means of bears and beards and forestry
while the ladies admire
each others’ lovely sable muffs,
silky borzois and salukis –
it’s all just so
second-half-of-Sergei.

Created in Putin Gay Dress-up - fabulous!

This is how it starts

'Austerity' - used by our current crop of particularly nasty politicians to justify their harmful ideology

Only following orders

ATOS assessor rubber-stamps another
triple-bypass case ‘fit for work’ –
sends them off to die
but ticks a box on
this week’s target-sheet –
who cares?
They probably don’t vote Tory anyway.

Benefits administrator
could turn a blind eye
to trivial claim-form imperfections
or the odd slop
of supposedly tell-tale emulsion
but does not –
homelessness beckons,
children hunger at school,
all for less in a week
than a politician’s breakfast bill
and the futile feeling
of a job done by the book.

Police Constable
could refuse to take
that homeless person’s bedding,
driving them out of sight
to freeze
and scab over
where the rich won’t have
their rose-quartz eyes
polluted by the poor,
but prefers to tug a helmeted forelock,
hold onto that maybe-promotion,
tenuous pension,
peer-acceptance,
while knowing it is wrong.

This is how it starts.

Digital wampum

Inspired by some of the works in Offending Frequencies (Poetry Review 102:4 Winter 2012), especially the photographic responses by Yemisi Blake to new poems by Elmi Ali and Jo Brandon, I produced the following:

The hanging piece is entitled 'Digital wampum' and uses plastic components from VHS cassettes (a defining technology for someone who was a teenager in the 1980s) to depict key dates in my life, the black and white arrangement encoding them in binary. The words indicate the events these dates relate to.